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Writing Crime

Q&A: Jeannette de Beauvoir, The Lethal Legacy
By Kathryn Gandek-Tighe
Posted: 2020-10-29T03:19:00Z
Jeannette de Beauvoir newest mystery involves a little known piece of history, the presence of the Underground Railroad going through Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod.

What was the a-ha moment that made you write this story?


Last year I was on a panel that discussed research, and one of the other panelists, who’s on the local historical commission, talked about discovering that the Underground Railroad went through Provincetown. That’s totally counterintuitive, since we’re at the tip of Cape Cod… until she explained that fleeing slaves were taken out on fishing boats into the Atlantic, where they met up with fishing boats out of Nova Scotia. I could immediately think of a way to use that history in a present-day mystery, and it’s the backbone of The Lethal Legacy.

Who is your favorite character, and why?


Oddly enough, the recurring character of Mirela, an artist and close friend to my protagonist, became more important to me in this book. She’s facing the unknown, having in the last book adopted her sister’s unwanted baby and now figuring out how to be a mother, and in an important scene in the book she really becomes quite fierce, something I hadn’t imagined in her before.

Is there a setting in your book that you would like to visit?


Most of my settings are places I already know well, but this time was different: I wrote quite a lot about Halifax in this book, and a heritage site that honors the community of former slaves that settled there and was subsequently destroyed. I did as much online research as I could, but now that all’s said and done, I’d like to visit Halifax, and in fact explore the Nova Scotia coastline in general.

What meal and drink do you think would pair well with your book?

Well, since it starts at a women’s community dinner, I’d say probably a buffet supper would work well—assuming that a dead body doesn’t turn up, as one does in the book! And definitely a fall cocktail to go with the buffet—maybe something more adventurous than the usual mulled wine, like a caramel apple martini? (It’s easy to make: apple cider, caramel vodka, and butterscotch schnapps. Be sure to rim the glass with caramel sauce!)

What is the hardest part of writing a book?


For me, it’s the plot holes. I always have an idea of where my stories are going, but that changes several times in the course of writing, as I take the characters and set them in the plot and then pretty much watch them tear it up and go somewhere else altogether. So my second draft is almost always a matter of playing whack-a-mole with plot holes they left me holding.

Jeannette de Beauvoir writes mysteries that take place at Land’s End and involve a wedding planner who never actually plans to get involved in murder.
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