It's happening now!
After a long, long, long road, The Guilty has finally been published, thanks to Betimes Books.
When I was a fledgling professional, I had two books to sell. One was a semi-romance in the vein of The Da Vinci Code, involving the quill Muhammad used to write the Qur’an. The other was The Guilty. My agent at the time wasn’t interested in the romance/thriller (though Harlequin was), but The Guilty enthralled her.
She sent that book everywhere, and everywhere we got rejected. Not brusquely, which I found encouraging, but sympathetically. They worried that they couldn’t adequately categorize a post-Nazi Germany gothic ghost story, and though they found the book fascinating, they wouldn’t buy it.
And twenty years passed. Twenty years. Long enough that I’d almost forgotten the book. But then Tanja Slijepcevic at Betimes approached me about publishing it, and I was on board—anything to finally get that book into people’s hands.
If you purchase The Guilty — and at such a reasonable price, why wouldn’t you? — You’ll see the passion I have for addressing the issues arising from the Shoah. This is not “history,” this is happening now, because there are still survivors telling their stories today, and when something is within living memory…
Some say we should forget and move on. We mustn’t do that. We need to remember how easily ordinary people slip into the roles of murderers if a charismatic leader is saying the people they’re killing are the enemy.