Jess Montgomery's Historical Mysteries

This week, I’ve got a treat for you. Jess Montgomery joins us with a look at the second book in her historical Kinship Mystery Series. In the books, Kinship is a town in the Appalachia region of Ohio, and it has very unique law enforcement for the 1920s.

The Hollows will be released on Tuesday and I can’t wait to read it. Jess’s first book, The Widows, was fantastic. If you haven’t read it, Jess is offering one lucky Do Some Damage reader a free ebook of The Widows. Just leave a comment here, or on Jess's Facebook page, Do Some Damage's Facebook page, or on my own Facebook page--by the end of Wednesday, Jan. 15. She’ll draw the winner! –Claire Booth

By Jess Montgomery

In THE HOLLOWS, Sheriff Lily Ross is running for election as county sheriff in her own right in 1926. In real life, Ohio’s first female sheriff, who is the inspiration for my character Lily, became sheriff to fulfill her slain husband’s term. When she ran in her own right in 1926, she won by a landslide.

Of course, I’m not going to make the election quite so smooth for Sheriff Lily… (I won’t say here if she wins or not; you’ll have to read The Hollows to find out!)

In any case, Lily’s campaign is interrupted by a murder, an elderly woman dying near a train track in a remote part of the county. The woman is unidentified, and certain clues imply she is not from the area. But Lily is determined to investigate as thoroughly as possible.

As she does so, her friend Hildy Cooper is pulled into the case. Both women find their friendship tested during the investigation, and both must deal with past haunts and hurts—personal as well as in their hometown’s history—in the course of their sleuthing.

Hildy, a childhood friend of Lily’s, was a secondary character in my Kinship Mystery Series debut title, The Widows. In that novel, she served as a foil to Lily. Whereas Lily is brave, physically strong, and not afraid of confrontation, Hildy—who had been engaged to Lily’s older brother before he died in the Great War—has always been quiet, reticent, and (in modern parlance) a people pleaser.

While these attributes enabled her to offer great support and comfort to Lily in the first novel, I realized that I wanted to test Hildy in the second novel and bring her more to the forefront of the story. In The Hollows, Lily and Hildy are dual narrators. Some of Hildy’s decisions and actions in The Hollows would have surprised me when I was writing The Widows (had I known, of course, what was coming).

And that’s one of the aspects I love best about this pattern I’ve landed upon, if you will, for the Kinship Mystery Series. I anticipate that each novel will have dual narrators—Lily and another character we’ve met in past novels as a secondary or even minor character. In this way, I’m hoping to keep expanding the world of Kinship, with Lily at the center, and all the other characters interconnected with each other as well as with Lily. 

Jess Montgomery is the author of the Kinship Historical Mysteries. Under her given name, she is a newspaper columnist, focusing on the literary life, authors and events in her native Dayton, Ohio, for the Dayton Daily News, and is the former executive director of the Antioch Writers’ Workshop.

You can order The Hollows through IndieBound , Powell's, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Books-a-Million.

The Widows, by Jess Montgomery

I’m delighted to welcome Jess Montgomery to Do Some Damage. Jess and I met at the 2017 Bouchercon in Toronto, and it immediately felt like we’d been friends forever. Her novel, THE WIDOWS, hit stores on Tuesday. It’s set in southern Ohio in the 1920s and has two strong female main characters (one of them a trailblazing female sheriff), union organizing, coal miners…everything you could want in a historical fiction. It didn’t start out that way, though. Here’s Jess to talk about how a secondary character turned into something much more. - Claire Booth

By Jess Montgomery

THE WIDOWS is set in 1920s Appalachia, as two women investigate murder and fight for their community.

One of the women is Lily Ross, inspired by Ohio’s true first female sheriff in 1925—Maude Collins, who became sheriff after her husband was killed in the line of duty. There was no mystery around his death in real life—he was killed while stopping a man to serve him a warrant. Maude, who had worked as her husband’s jail matron and lived in the county-owned sheriff’s house, was asked to fill in for her husband. She then went on to win re-election as sheriff in her own right in 1926.

In THE WIDOWS, Lily doesn’t buy the story of her sheriff husband Daniel’s murder—that a prisoner he was transporting got the best of him and escaped. Even before accepting the role of sheriff, she begins digging for the truth.

Marvena Whitcomb is the other narrator in THE WIDOWS. At the novel’s start, Marvena is already a widow of a coal miner, a union organizer, a long-time friend of Daniel’s. Her older daughter is missing and she goes to find Daniel for help, not knowing he’s dead. At his house, shortly after his funeral, she meets Lily for the first time.

The women start out regarding each other with understandable wariness. Daniel has never told Lily about Marvena, so this childhood friend—who he had been helping since the death of Marvena’s husband—raises a lot of questions. What’s more, in addition to being a union organizer, Marvena is a moonshiner, scrabbling to make ends meet for herself and her two daughters. Lily is not quite sure what to make of Marvena.

Marvena, meanwhile, regards Lily as soft and spoiled—a woman with a respectable position, living in a fine house in Kinship, the county seat, with a high school education and protected by Daniel.

As the women work together and get to know each other, their views of one another deepen and thus change. Marvena realizes that Lily has a lot more depth and strength than she thought, while Lily comes to understand the tenderness underlying Marvena’s tough character. They grow from wary, to working together by necessity, to true friends. Only together can they solve the intertwined mysteries of Daniel’s murder and the missing daughter, and ultimately face the challenge of saving their community from a bloody battle between rebelling miners and the more well-armed hired guns of the coal company.

I knew from the beginning that THE WIDOWS is primarily Lily’s story. But as I wrote, and tried to crack the enigma of Daniel’s character, I realized he had this childhood friend, Marvena. She quickly grew from being a mere mention, to a minor character, to a secondary character, to a dual narrator along with Lily.

Part of that was practical—Marvena knows details that are key, that Lily can’t know. In addition, Lily is a grieving widow from the end of chapter one on. So, I wanted to provide a bit of relief to the reader, as well, and give Lily some time and space to transition from shock to determination to find out the truth.

But as I kept writing, I also realized I wanted to explore the friendship between these two—as well as the strictures that might otherwise keep them from being friends, and how they overcome that.

It’s ultimately their willingness to see each other as individuals, and to allow their friendship and trust to develop, that enables them to solve the mystery together.

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Jess Montgomery is the author of the Kinship Historical Mysteries. Under her given name, she wears several other literary hats: she is a newspaper columnist, focusing on the literary life, authors and events of her native Dayton, Ohio for the Dayton Daily News; Executive Director of the Antioch Writers’ Workshop at University of Dayton; and is an adjunct mentor in the Seton Hill University Low-Residency Writing Popular Fiction M.F.A. program. 

THE WIDOWS is available through IndieBound, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or order it from Aunt Agatha's Bookstore, where it is January's Book of the Month.