HARVEST OF SECRETS: A VISIT FROM ELLEN CROSBY

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RHYS BOWEN:  Ellen Crosby and I have been friends for quite a while and I was delighted to catch a short visit with her when she came to the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale on Saturday. Here we are with store owner Barbara Peters.

Of course she was there to talk about her new book, HARVEST OF SECRETS, the latest in her Virginia Wine Country mysteries. And now she'll share some secrets with us. Welcome, Ellen:

ELLEN CROSBY:  A wise person once told me that we are all entitled to a private life, but living a secret life will get you in trouble. When I heard that it was like an earworm without the music: every now and then something would happen that made it pop back into my head and refuse to go away. So I knew sooner or later that bit of wisdom would find its way into one of my books. Harvest of Secrets is a story of family secrets, the heartache and trouble they cause, and the consequences of revealing a secret that will destroy someone’s private life.

A couple of winters ago a friend and I spent the morning at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a field trip to view an exhibition we both wanted to see. As we were standing in front of one of the paintings, she casually mentioned that she had subscribed to one of the find-your-ancestors services without telling anyone and got more than she bargained for when she received her results: an older half-brother she never knew existed. Not only that, he had been looking for her for years. When the two of them finally connected, her “new” brother told her that although he had been given up for adoption at birth, he had been raised by loving parents who had given him a wonderful, happy life. But after his adoptive parents passed away he knew he needed to find out who his biological parents were and what their story was. Because it was his story, too. Through the same DNA testing service my friend used, he found his mother—my friend’s mother—but couldn’t learn anything about his father, nor the circumstances surrounding his biological parents’ relationship and his birth. And only one person in the world could answer those questions.


Their mother.


To this day my friend’s mother still does not know that her son and daughter have met and become close. “What do I do?” my friend asked me that day at the National Gallery. “When my mother gave up my brother for adoption sixty years ago she had every expectation that her secret would remain a secret for life. She signed papers she believed guaranteed her privacy when she gave him up forever. Do you think she would want to meet him now? Did she ever tell my father about him? Was she raped or was it a consensual relationship? Should my brother and I tell her about our relationship? And what about my sister?”


There are no easy answers to those questions; I’m not even sure there are right or wrong answers. But it was enough to start me thinking about what happens when we find out things we didn’t know about our parents or grandparents or long ago ancestors, and how we deal with that new knowledge. How it changes us and what we do going forward if we discover, say, we’re related to a serial killer or we’re not actually Jewish or Native American. Unlike medical DNA testing, I’ve heard these advertised-on-television services referred to as “recreational genetics” because for $99 anyone can find out who else is hanging on their family tree. Even in their family forest. And you might not always like the people you find on those branches. (And, yes, I spit in a vial and sent it off to some lab because it was book research. And no, no surprises).


In Harvest of Secrets, Lucie Montgomery discovers the skull of a young woman buried just outside the family cemetery where all of her ancestors have been laid to rest since the late 1700s. The skull dates from the Civil War and Lucie is certain the woman is related to her. When she learns the woman had been bludgeoned to death, Lucie figures there are two possibilities: either the woman was a relative . . . or the killer was.

Like my friend, Lucie had been curious to learn more about her family’s heritage and secretly sent off a DNA sample to be tested. Also like my friend, Lucie’s results revealed something shocking, a secret she never expected to uncover. And now she has to deal with knowledge no one expected her to have.


Just as the long-ago past comes back to haunt Lucie, so does the recent past when a neighboring vineyard hires Jean-Claude de Merignac, a winemaker from a wealthy aristocratic French family who happened to be Lucie’s first big crush when she was a teenager. Like everyone else, Jean-Claude has secrets that he believed were safely buried in France. But before long his past catches up with him and he’s found stabbed to death with a pair of pruning shears. Suspicion falls on an immigrant worker—an easy target—but Lucie’s Hispanic farm manager tells he’s innocent, warning that if she will not help prove that someone else is the killer, none of her field hands will show up in the next few days to pick grapes during harvest.


It’s now imperative for Lucie to find out who murdered Jean-Claude, and she also wants to know what happened to the woman buried outside her cemetery. Finally, she needs to come to terms with what she learned about her own family.


What she finds in each instance is messy, complicated, and nothing she was expecting. But as she says in Harvest of Secrets, “When I opened Pandora’s Box and explored my DNA and my family’s history, I couldn’t stuff what spilled out back inside.” What Lucie finally realizes—as I have while writing this book—is that even though we each might be entitled to our privacy, in this day and age of the Internet, cameras that watch us everywhere, smart home devices, recreational genetics, and social networking, privacy is something that is becoming ever more elusive.


And like losing your virginity, once it’s gone, you can’t have it back.

ELLEN CROSBY is the author of the Virginia wine country mysteries, including HARVEST OF SECRETS, featuring vineyard owner Lucie Montgomery, which will be released by Minotaur Books on November 6, 2018. Her books have been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and the Library of Virginia People’s Choice Award; THE RIESLING RETRIBUTION won the 2009 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best US Wine Literature Book. Crosby has also written two mysteries featuring international photojournalist Sophie Medina and MOSCOW NIGHTS, a standalone mystery. Previously she worked as a freelance reporter for The Washington Post, Moscow correspondent for ABC Radio News, and as an economist at the U.S. Senate. She is currently writing the 10th wine country mystery; learn more at http://www.ellencrosby.com.