The first book in my Counterfeit Lady Series, CITY OF LIES, comes on on Nov. 7!
Have you ever hidden your real self in order to get along or get ahead? What if your life depended on it?
My heroine, Elizabeth Miles, has made her living pretending to be someone else. As a con artist, she cheats wealthy but greedy men, but this time she got caught, and Oscar Thornton is determined to get his revenge.
This was the original premise of City of Lies, but I needed more. I needed an interesting way for Elizabeth to escape Thornton when she runs out of a hotel and down a city street. Where could she go and who would protect her?
Because writers do a lot of research for their books, they often learn things they can’t use in a particular book, so they store it away for possible use later. I’d read a lot about the early 20th Century, and I knew that in 1917, women had demonstrated outside the White House every day (every day!) for Women’s Suffrage. By November, President Wilson was pretty annoyed. He started having them arrested in an effort to scare them off, but it wasn’t working. He just made them mad, so more women than ever were demonstrating.
What if Elizabeth joined a group of women demonstrating for Women’s Suffrage to escape Thornton, but she chose the wrong day to do it? Instead of sending them to jail overnight this time, the judge sentences them to three months in a workhouse. Elizabeth must continue to be a counterfeit lady, enduring abuse and a hunger strike while pretending to believe in their cause.
Then a funny thing happens. She begins to like and respect the other women, and they begin to like and respect her, too. She can imagine a new kind of life, except that Oscar Thornton still wants to kill her and he knows exactly where she is. How can she save herself without revealing her true identity to her new friends and losing everything she has gained? Even worse, how can she trick her new, very honest friends into helping her run a con on Thornton that will finally save her life?
Like women of every age, Elizabeth wears a mask to help her safely navigate her world.
Every woman understands the need to pretend in order to get by and get ahead. When this story takes place, society was changing and women were fighting to be taken seriously, to be valued, and to have a seat at the table. A hundred years later, women are still fighting for the very same things. Elizabeth lived in exciting times, and so do we. I’m looking forward to exploring her adventures in a time that eerily mirrors our own.