I can’t wait for my readers to explore what’s in The Skeleton Box.
The Skeleton Box was inspired by a true story: the disappearance of a Roman Catholic nun from a parish on Michigan’s Leelenau Peninsula in the early 1900s.
Hundreds of people swept through local swamp and forest land looking in vain for young Sister Mary Janina. A few years later, a woman who had worked at the parish confessed to a priest in Milwaukee that she had murdered Sister Janina and buried her beneath the church.
I first read about the nun’s murder in a collection of true Michigan tales by the late Larry Wakefield, and later in Mardi Link’s splendid book, Isadore’s Secret. Certain images stuck with me and, as with the shoe tree in my previous novel, The Hanging Tree, I had to write about them. Still, The Skeleton Box tells a very different story than the real one that precipitated the longest murder trial in Michigan history.
When I wrote my first novel, Starvation Lake, I didn’t set out to write a trilogy. Heck, I threw away an entire book between the first and second ones. Yet, with The Skeleton Box, I think I’ve completed an accidental trilogy that revolves around the relationship between the protagonist, Gus Carpenter, and his mother, Bea. People who know me might say that in some ways it mirrors the relationship I had with my Mom. In retrospect, they might not be far off.