Join us for a Local Author Program focused on two exciting fiction novels.
The Trap by Andrea Steele
American Alana Eastwood’s grandfather, and her only living relative, has taken ill at his home in Germany. Alana travels to be by his side, and while staying at his country cottage, she finds an unopened letter postmarked 1945. The letter thrusts her into one of the most notable unsolved mysteries from postwar Germany. Soon people begin turning up dead and the local police are ill equipped to grasp the entire chain of events the letter has put into play. It takes private investigators Sigmund and Andrew Griegg to connect the police inquiry to neo-Nazis, Mossad and a secret hidden in “the trap” for so many years. It’s Alana, however, who hold the link that breaks the chain and solves the mystery.
Andrea Steele was born in England and lived in Canada as a child before her family immigrated to the United States. An accountant by profession, Andrea was an officer in two insurance related businesses during her corporate career. As a life-long equestrian, she teamed with horse trainer, Mark Russell, to write Lessons in Lightness: The Art of Educating the Horse. In 2008, Andrea formed a video production company to create college level DVDs and online learning experience for equestrians worldwide. Her series, Advanced Equine Studies, received the Best Educational Program award at New York City’s EQUUS Film Festival in 20105 and 2016. Andrea resides on a horse farm in rural Connecticut with her husband, horses and dogs.
Stone Skimmers by Jennifer Wisner Kelly
Stone Skimmers opens in pristine, affluent Old Stonington, Connecticut, where a peculiar fifteen-year-old girl swims for hours each day across the town reservoir, lost to her own obsessions. The popular crowd spies from shore, mocking her strangeness, cozy in their camaraderie, until one betrays the group by befriending the outsider. The remaining six stories follow this splintered clique into adulthoods rife with isolation and loss, exploring the lives of those who stayed in the sheltered world of their childhoods and the challenges faced by those who chose to leave.
Jennifer Wisner Kelly grew up in Connecticut, where most of the stories in Stone Skimmers are set. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Greensboro Review, Massachusetts Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal. She is a graduate of Harvard, University of Chicago Law School, and Warren Wilson College's MFA program. She now lives in Concord, Massachusetts and practices law at a domestic violence advocacy nonprofit. Stone Skimmers is her debut book.