VBT + #Giveaway: Behind the Bonehouse by Sally Wright @Sally_Wright5 @GoddessFish

Behind the Bonehouse

by Sally Wright

GENRE:  Mystery

BLURB:

It wasn’t until thirty years after the attacks, and the lies, and the intricately orchestrated death, that Jo Grant Munro could bring herself to describe it all in Behind The Bonehouse. Her work as an architect, and the broodmare farm she ran with her uncle, and her husband Alan’s entire future - all hung by a thread in 1964 in the complex Thoroughbred culture of bluegrass Kentucky, where rumor and gossip and the nightly news can destroy a person overnight, just like anywhere else. It was hatred in a self-obsessed soul, fermenting in an equine lab, boiling over and burning what it touched, that drove Jo and Alan to the edge of desperation while they fought through what they faced.

Excerpt:

Wednesday, July 3rd, 1963

It was five in the morning, and Alan Munro was alone, again, in the lab at Equine Pharmaceuticals. He’d just looked at the notes in the formulation notebook Carl Seeger, Equine’s lab director, had entered the day before, and he tossed a red lab crayon on his desk with a look of deep disgust. He rubbed his eyes with both hands, and leaned back in his chair—then pushed himself up and limped, slightly, less the longer he walked, to the research corner in the back of the plant.

He’d converted a fifty-four gallon drum into a mixing tank they could use to develop the proper methods for converting a beaker-size experimental batch of his new horse de-wormer paste into an intermediate batch, before they moved to a commercial size tank.

This latest mixture was way too thin, and the solids hadn’t properly dispersed in the methylcellulose, and as Alan read the batch sheet he muttered words he’d  almost never used since he’d come home from World War II. At 8:35 Alan walked into the main lab and asked Carl Seeger if he could speak to him for a minute.

Carl was weighing white powder on a double pan balance, and he didn’t look up before he’d slid the powder off one pan into a large glass beaker and replaced the brass weights from the other in their wooden rack. “I’m busy right now, Alan. I should be free in an hour or so.” He spoke calmly and quietly, his thin mouth tucked under a wispy mustache, his pale brown eyebrows pulled down in concentration, half-hiding his small hazel eyes.

“It’s important, Carl.

An Interview with Sally Wright

What inspired you to write Behind The Bonehouse?

Behind The Bonehouse is the second Jo Grant novel and the character of Jo Grant Munro - a woman architect and partner in a hands-on broodmare care business with her Uncle Toss in Versailles, Kentucky - looks back on the trauma of what happened in the mid-'60s from thirty years later because she knows she's not well, and needs to look at how it affected her and her husband (while she's here to do it), because she couldn't any earlier.

          I was interested in considering how it feels to be wrongly accused - which we all face sometime, in some way, minor or major. I fictionalized a business conspiracy that my father (an orphan, raised in an orphanage, who managed to become a chemist) faced in his small scientific business when it was just getting off the ground. I took the wrong that was done him, changed it to a very different business situation, and cranked it up to a much more horrific level, partly because I wanted readers to know something about a manufacturing business, which very few people do.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

When I was five or six I wrote bad westerns, and would have said I wanted to be a writer if anyone had asked. I wrote and performed songs in high school and college, then did biography articles for magazines while I worked my way through enough life that I had something to say. I started my first novel when my younger child was two.

What is the earliest age you remember reading your first book?

I was in the first grade, like most people, though my parents read me interesting books long before that that were supposedly for much older kids, and that gave me a real appreciation for what a book could be like and made me hunger to read on my own.

What genre of books do you enjoy reading?

I read biography, history, all kinds of fiction - mystery, thriller, historical novels and classic literary fiction like Austen, Tolstoy and Trollope.

What is your favorite book?

I can't pick just one. I can't. I love all kinds of books for all kinds of reasons. Pride And Prejudice, Anna Karennina, Mere Christianity, PD James' Original Sin, Sayers' The Nine Tailors - I could go on and on.

Who is your favorite author and why?

Again, I can't pick just one. C.S. Lewis for what I've learned from him and the breadth of his intellect and imagination; Dick Francis for his horse related mysteries; Daphne Du Maurier for Rebecca; Austen for Persuasion and much more; PD James' mysteries; Mary Stewart's Merlin books; Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon thrillers - there're so many authors I love.

If you could travel back in time, where and when would you go?

I feel sure I'd go to England or Scotland, but when is harder to say. I'd have to be able to choose my circumstances. I wouldn't want to be living as a serf, or go before the Magna Carta, or during one of the plague years. I'd want to be in the country, during a rare interval of peace, living in a beautiful house. (But then wouldn't we all?) I'd want to be able to read and write, and maybe be there when Samuel Johnson was alive, or when I could know Jane Austen. Being able to talk to both of them would make putting up with a lack of plumbing and central heating worth the inconvenience.

When writing a book does the writing come easily for you, or is it a difficult task?

It's both. Some things are easy. Sometimes the visuals, and the character details come easily in a momentary rush, but a lot of it's hard - which doesn't mean I don't love it. I do a whole lot of detailed research, which is both easy and hard depending. I'm definitely a perfectionist who revises compulsively in order to get it right.

Do you have any fuzzy friends? Like a dog or cat?

We've had dogs all our married life, and also a cat who was born here, but at the moment I have an eight-year-old boxer dog named Jake who's a real hit. He's super well behaved and smart as a whip. I rode horses for thirty years, but can't anymore, and part of the pleasure of writing the Jo Grant books in the Lexington horse industry in the early '60s is that I get to relive my life with horses and describe what it was like. They're all individuals, and getting to work with them and know them well is a great privilege.

What's your to-die-for favorite food?

Well, I like to cook, and we have a small vegetable garden in raised beds. Picking my own strawberries, slicing them with brown sugar and putting them on really good vanilla ice cream (cream, milk and vanilla without eggs to muddy the flavor) is probably my favorite thing. It's a small window of time, so I don't take it for granted.

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to be an author?

If you want to write and become rich and famous, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, and the chances of that happening are slim to none anyway. If you care way more about writing than whether you get published - if it's something you have to do whether an editor ever pays attention - then you may be a writer.

          Secondly, when you send you work out, and you're fortunate to get negative feedback from agents or editors, pay real attention. They may be right, they may not. But you need unvarnished input from the outside world.

AUTHOR BIO:

Edgar Alan Poe Award Finalist Sally Wright has studied rare books, falconry, early explorers, painting restoration, WWII Tech-Teams, the Venona Code, and much more, to write her university-archivist-ex-WWII-Ranger books about Ben Reese, who’s based on a real person.

Breeding Ground, Wright’s most recent novel, is the first in her new Jo Grant mystery series, which has to do with the horse industry in Lexington, Kentucky. Wright is now finishing the second Jo Grant novel.

Sally and her husband have two children, three young grandchildren, and a highly entertaining boxer dog, and live in the country in northwestern Ohio.

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