To preview Sinister Suggestions, please enjoy my BOOK TRAILER.

The answer to the “why” of the setting and time period chosen for my third novel Sinister Suggestions is found in Chapter Twelve of my first novel, Degrees of Obsession. This chapter contains the most autobiographical material found in any of my works of fiction. My alter ego, protagonist Dr. Charlie Pederson, describes herself and her best friend Marietta growing up in La Jolla, California in the Fifties:

Marietta and I were on the cusp, so to speak, graduating from high school in 1961. We entered puberty in 1955 along with a generation of kids who spent their formative years crouching in dirty hallways, sweaty fingers laced behind their well-scrubbed necks, waiting for the A-bomb. We graduated at the peak of the SAT scores. Our parents were afraid of Sputniks, and we were afraid of our parents. There were rumors about poodle skirts, but I never laid eyes on one. I felt out of kilter with my own generation. My mother insisted I wear sturdy brown oxfords instead of the saddle shoes and Capezios that graced the dainty feet of my peers.  Of course, irradiating my toes under the shoe store fluoroscope negated the health benefit of good arch support. Actually, looking at the bare bones in my feet was the closest I ever got to obscenity. My political consciousness peaked at having two parakeets named “Ike” and a German shepherd with the same patriotic appellation. My family was not big on original thought.

In Chapter Six, Charlie describes her and, thus, my transition to college at Stanford University in the fall of 1961:

There was a saying that went:  “Nine out of ten California girls are beautiful and the tenth one goes to Stanford.”  I went to Stanford. Now, don’t get me wrong.  I didn’t break mirrors, but there were thousands of drop-dead gorgeous women in California, even in high school.  I was tall and naturally blonde…well, almost.  That brief stint in modeling school had served me well.  I had outgrown my awkward pubescent years and could manage a graceful stride when I put my mind to it.  Any shortfall I had in the looks department had been well compensated in the brain department.  Those top grades paid off.  Twenty-two of my classmates also applied to Stanford, but none of the others was admitted.  The day my letter of acceptance came in the mail, I had more than a few envious friends.  My ego was quickly deflated, however, when I arrived on campus, just another clueless freshman set loose in a seething mass of upperclassmen. I struggled through the maze of registration, jostled by the milling masses at Memorial Auditorium.  I fretted as I watched the IBM cards, each printed with one class opening, disappear into the greedy hands of the students ahead of me in line.  I breathed a sigh of relief when the precious card for Chemistry for Chem Majors fell into my possession. My relief was short-lived, however.  After I collected the rest of my class cards, I realized that two required courses had been assigned to me on the same days at the same hour.  I stared in dismay at the placards overhead that forbade any changes to the pre-assigned sections of either Freshman English or Western Civ. 

In Sinister Suggestions, my alter ego morphs into a new character named Mattie Thorne, a frosh student at Stanford that fall of 1961. She is suffering from amnesia due to unknown trauma from her past or present. Her journey and that of her rescuers, a determined and rebellious group of student staffers working on the campus newspaper, The Stanford Daily (click for archival issue from September 25, 1961), is told in this first book in a series of four murder mysteries entitled The Stanford Daily Mysteries.

In addition, staying true to my goal of blending truth into fiction, I have taken social, political, and lifestyle stories from the pages of the Daily from that 1961-2 academic year, added my own memories from the same period of time, and combined them with the requisite murders demanded by the mystery genre. The world itself was caught between Camelot and catastrophe in 1961 and many of the societal and political issues of that day plague us in the present, such as nuclear threats and sexual violence on college campuses.

Evidence that we had moved past Fonzie and the Happy Days of the 1950s, is shown in this list of a few of the world events that occurred in 1961:

• UN General Assembly condemns apartheid in South Africa
• Berlin Wall is built, dividing East and West Germany
• American-backed Cuban exiles fail in an attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs
• Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo is assassinated
• Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completes the first orbit of Earth by a human

To preview Sinister Suggestions, please enjoy my BOOK TRAILER.