Spotlight New Release "Pieces of Blue" by Liz Flaherty
Please make welcome to the Tavern, the lovely and talented Liz Flaherty! We're celebrating her new release, Pieces of Blue. Grab a glass of bubbly or apple cider and let's hear what Liz has to say about her new book...
Thanks, Mary, for welcoming me to the Tavern. Although I’m not a very heavy drinker, I will say having a new release in a new sub-genre from a new publisher—while it’s both fun and exciting—makes a really big strawberry margarita sound good. Slushy, please, with a salted rim.
Pieces of Blue was an adventure from the beginning, when I had the first line.
The adventure being that the first line was all I had.
I was at a what now stage in my writing career. I didn’t want to throw in the towel, but I wasn’t getting anywhere in the industry I loved, either. Everything had changed faster than I could begin to keep up with it, I couldn’t write fast anymore, my memory was…a mess.
However, I could…and can…still whine with the best of them.
And there was this line that sat at the top of a blank page for a long time.
Trilby died.
After a few months, I typed Chapter 1 above that line. Made the page look better. Didn’t make me feel all that much better, but appearances do help.
I had some rejections, a few books that weren’t selling well, my writing life was just kind of…meh. We all have times like that, right?
But then I typed a few more lines…and then a few more pages…and somehow in there, the story of Maggie Wallace North and Pieces of Blue became a labor of love.
I hope you love it, too.
Life comes in shades of blue...
Self-imposed loner, Maggie North, has worked for bestselling author Trilby Winterroad her entire adult life, starting as simply his assistant and ending up as his ghost writer. Through ups and downs--including a divorce from an abusive husband--he has been the one person on whom she could always rely. So when Trilby dies suddenly, Maggie finds herself adrift, not sure what she’ll do or where she belongs in the world any longer. And the confusion continues when she discovers he’s not only left her his beloved dachshund, Chloe, but a house she knew nothing about, on a lake she’s never heard of.
It only takes one visit for Maggie to fall in love with both the house and the small lakeside community. The longer she’s there, the safer she feels and the more her life begins to expand...as do her feelings toward her friend and Trilby’s attorney, Sam Eldridge
But is she really safe? Or are the glistening pieces of her new life about to shatter as an old danger returns?
Sneak preview of Pieces of Blue ~
“…It’s a happy place.”
It was. I could feel that every day I spent in it. Maybe that’s part of what feels too powerful to me. Although I was happy with Tim, that was the only time I had been that I remembered. Not that I’d been unhappy, other than during the midlife traumatic mistake that was Greg Mathis, but life was just what it was.
“Let’s go.” Sam’s voice interrupted my self-involved reverie.
I blinked at him. “Go where?”
“Go walking in the snow. It’s stopped and the stars are even out. You have boots here, don’t you? I have some in my car.”
Until coming to the lake, I’d never walked at night—at least as an adult—unless I was walking to something. However, in my days here…or maybe I should say nights here…it was becoming a habit.
As I tugged on the new white puffer jacket I’d been unable to resist on Dragonfly’s sale rack, I was stopped short by the realization that I’d dreaded darkness my entire life, and suddenly I was embracing it. What gives, Maggie North?
Sam, his peacoat already buttoned, plucked the red cashmere scarf that had been Claire and Trilby’s gift to me the Christmas before last off the counter and wrapped it around my neck, slowing with his hands on my shoulders and meeting my eyes.
“Warm enough?” His voice, always so smooth, sounded a little rough.
I was rather delighted with that roughness. “Yes.”
We left Chloe sleeping and stepped out into the cold. Unlike the last time, this snow hadn’t been wind-driven, so it was easy walking once we reached Enoch Trace. Jake and Emily were already out with their snowplows, and Sam and I weren’t the only people taking advantage of the starlit night. We exchanged waves and calls of greeting with others, our voices muffled and ringing at the same time as they bounced off the water.
“I think I’ll stay here for a few more weeks.” We’d walked all the way around the lake, our conversation desultory. When my foot had slipped on a piece of ice, Sam had caught my hand and held it the rest of the way.
I wished we weren’t wearing gloves—I’d have enjoyed the touch of his skin on mine. But I was being ridiculous. I was fifty-two and I’d left that kind of longing far behind me. Hadn’t I?
“Really?”
I frowned at him. “Was that amusement I heard in your voice?”
“Might have been.” He let go of my hand and put his arm around my shoulders as we began the trudge up the now-plowed driveway of the Burl. “Because I’m glad. I think this is a great place for you to find what’s missing.”
“Trilby’s what’s missing.” Sadness, for the first time since I’d come here, became a suffocating cloak. I had to concentrate on breathing.
“I know. But he’s not. He made sure you had this house, didn’t he? That computer in the office wasn’t my mother’s. That room wasn’t even an office. Although I hate the way he died—everyone who loved him hates it—he took care of us before he did it just the way he did when he was living.”
“You, too?” I took off my coat and boots in the mudroom, hanging onto his arm rather than sit on the bench to remove the boots.
“Me, too. That’s why the guitar is in there with the piano. That’s why Harp’s fishing shack belongs to me now. Trilby bought if from Harp’s family to leave to me so I’d always have the lake.” He held up his hands, palms out. “Please don’t send me there to spend the night. It hasn’t been opened since last summer.”
I laughed. He was right. Trilby is still with us in spirit, guiding us in the ways he thinks we should go. The thing with that is, even though his machinations often led to much eyerolling and pleas to “just leave it alone,” he was usually right.
“So,” said Sam, when we were sitting in front of the fire with our stockinged feet on a hassock in front of both our chairs, “what are you going to do for the next couple of weeks?”
“Explore. Get going on the last Mayhem book. Maybe figure out where I’m going. In life, I mean.” I sipped from the hot chocolate Sam had prepared for us while I lit the fire. “It occurs to me that so far, my life isn’t very relevant. I haven’t done much with it.”
It would have been nice if he’d offered up an instant argument, but he didn’t. Instead he asked a question I didn’t have even an inkling of an answer to. “What kind of relevancy are you looking for?”
Available from these online retailers ~
Meet the Author
Liz Flaherty has spent the past several years enjoying not working a day job, making terrible crafts, and writing stories in which the people aren’t young, brilliant, or even beautiful. She’s decided (and has to re-decide most every day) that the definition of success is having a good time. Along with her husband of lo, these many years, kids, grands, friends, and the occasional cat, she’s doing just that. You can reach her at lizkflaherty@gmail.com or find her anywhere on https://linktr.ee/LizFlaherty. She’d love to hear from you.
