BooksChatter: ✉ Bone White: Mundy’s Landing [3]

Today author Wendy Corsi Staub takes over our blog to tell us about her latest novel, Bone White (28 March 2017, William Morrow, 373 pages), a Suspense Thriller, book three in the Mundy’s Landing series.

“…Staub still manages to surprise with the breadth of her creative ambitions. In Bone White, she seamlessly melds history with contemporary sensibilities, fleshing out the narrative while also maintaining its potency. She also achieves an ambient sense of time and place, using the strength of her setting as the common thread that unites these books…. Staub offers a twist ending that will undoubtedly rank among her finest and most memorable. While fans have long endeavored to unmask her villains before their intended reveal, this particular denouement is a unique addition to the repertoire—and it may just fool even the most discerning of readers… Cunningly orchestrated, Bone White once again proves why Wendy Corsi Staub’s name remains at the very forefront of domestic psychological suspense.” ~ Criminal Element

|| Synopsis || Teaser: KCR Preview || The Series || Author Guest Post || About the Author || Giveaway & Tour Stops ||

Behind Bone White and Mundy's Landing

The premise for BONE WHITE was triggered by an article I read in Smithsonian magazine about the seventeenth century “starving time” at Jamestown Colony in Virginia. Archaeologists had found the skeleton of a young English girl indicated that she’d been clumsily butchered to get at her flesh. This confirmed speculation that the colonists had resorted to survivalist cannibalism.

There was no evidence of murder, but my mind immediately went to the dark place: could it have been?

Mundy’s Landing was born.

My fictional village was settled on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, about midway between what are now New York City and Albany. In the winter of 1666, not long after the English had taken control of “New Netherland” from the Dutch, a group of English settlers slowly succumbed to starvation because their supply ship couldn’t reach them, blocked by the frozen river, and they were surrounded by hostile natives.

When the ice melted, rescuers discovered just five colonists alive: James and Elizabeth Mundy and their three young children. They had survived by eating the remains of those who had already died, but horrified Puritan newcomers accused them of murder. The couple was swiftly tried, convicted, and executed at a public hanging in front of their children. Orphaned in a foreign land, the resourceful Mundy children eventually grew up to redeem the family name. Subsequent generations were so heroic that when the village was founded, it was named for them.

BONE WHITE is the latest title in my Mundy’s Landing trilogy that began in 2015 with BLOOD RED and continued last summer with BLUE MOON. Each can be read as a standalone.

In BLOOD RED (HarperCollins, October, 2015), Rowan Mundy, local wife and mom, is being stalked by someone who’s taunting her with her darkest secret—and the stalker can’t possibly be the one person in the world who knows it. In this book, we meet the cast of characters and get to know about the village lore and not just one, but two unsolved mysteries.

BLUE MOON (Harper, August, 2016) delves into the 1916 Sleeping Beauty Murders a century after a serial killer left eerie crimes unsolved. The local historical society has offered an invitation and reward to armchair detectives from around the world, summoning them to try their hand at unmasking the long-dead killer. Thanks to the media, it has evolved into a spectacle known as “Mundpalooza,” drawing not just would-be detectives, the press, ghoulish curiosity seekers, but also a copycat killer who has solved the crimes and is about to reenact them.

BONE WHITE picks up where BLUE MOON leaves off, after the Sleeping Beauties case—past and present—has been resolved. California schoolteacher Emerson Mundy has just lost her father and discovered a mysterious centuries-old letter among his belongings, leading her to trace her roots to Mundy’s Landing.

Longing for family and a sense that she belongs somewhere, she arrives in her ancestral hometown. There, she meets long-lost family as well as elderly village historian Ora Abrams, the mastermind behind Mundypalooza. Ora possesses the disembodied skull of a young girl, long-hidden in the Mundy’s Landing Historical Society archives. Unearthed by archaeologists on the 1666 settlement site, it bears evidence of cannibalism and blunt force trauma.

Could Emerson’s doomed ancestors, long presumed to have been unfairly executed, have been murderers after all? Ora has hired Savannah Ivers, a young forensic anthropologist to unlock the secrets in the skull. Also on the scene: former NYPD missing persons detective (and reader favorite from BLOOD RED, BLUE MOON, and a previous title THE BLACK WIDOW) Sullivan Leary, relocated to bucolic Mundy’s Landing, soon joined by her former partner Detective Stockton Barnes, running from his own demons.

A dead body turns up dangling from a noose outside Emerson’s window at the Dapplebrook Inn, with a cryptic hangman game on a slip of paper in its pocket, only one letter of four filled in. The key to the puzzle—and stopping the killer before three more victims are claimed-- lies in Emerson’s centuries-old letter that concludes ominously: We shall never tell…

I always work hard to stay one step ahead of my brilliant readers, and this time, I attempted to pull off the mother of all twists. Was it a success? I hope you’ll read it and let me know!

Wendy Corsi Staub