Dark Riddle by Deborah Madar

Welcome, Deborah Madar. Tell us about your book.

…It’s the elephant in the room…

Why write a novel about a school shooting?

On Valentine’s Day, 2018, just before dismissal, the sound of gunfire burst across the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. A very disturbed nineteen-year-old took seventeen innocent souls that day and changed the lives of the survivors forever.  In the weeks and months that followed, I watched, many times in tears, as these teens from Parkland, Florida, just miles from our winter getaway in Port Charlotte, picked up the torch for gun control, with its many thorny and problematic complexities. I taught high school English over the course of four decades, so I was already familiar with the determined strength that kids can wield.  However, these particular students are so fluent, so brave, and so wise that I am sure that they will lead us out, and very soon, vote us out of this miserable quagmire of gun violence into which we, as a nation, have sunk.

The author marching in support of the survivors of the Parkland school shooting.

The author marching in support of the survivors of the Parkland school shooting.

As a parent of two adult sons and a retired high school teacher, I am horrified by the notion that adolescents can so deceive the people who purport to know and love them the most. How many of my own students had worn the mask of normalcy while being torn apart by something they kept secret and hidden from their teachers, their peers? And their parents.

My second novel, Dark Riddle, does not attempt to get inside the head of the perpetrator or answer the question WHY? Nor is it an anti-gun diatribe. Instead, my novel is about a grieving mother’s discovery of the cold, dark world that her son faced alone.

The author of Salt, Nayyirah Waheed, said, “The thing you are most afraid to write, write that.”  The fact that a child’s true nature might be unknowable to his parents frankly scared the hell out of me.  The protagonist in Dark Riddle, Gina Clayton, was born from my terrified imagination. She is not a “bad mother”, but her life circumstances make it essential that she view her oldest son, Luke, as a good son, a good boy. And so she does. Until November 23, 2015, when like the Parkland horror, the unimaginable happens.

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Who is to blame…?

When a child goes “bad,” who, or what, is to blame? Until the day that sixteen-year-old Luke Clayton commits a heinous crime and then takes his own life, his mother never questions his serious nature and dependability. Luke leaves no explanation for his horrendous actions and no suicide note, but inside the dead teen’s jacket is a short story. His devastated mother and the author of that story become unlikely partners as they plumb the depths of Luke's shadowy journey from good son to evil murderer.

 This is a very interesting viewpoint. So many times society is quick to judge or persecute the parents of children involved in this horrific situations. But the mother in me (us) asks all those questions - what is going on in that parent(s) mind and heart right now? How much they didn’t know, how much they ache, too.

Purchase Dark Riddle online.

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Deborah loves and is inspired by book clubs. Here she discusses her first novel, Convergence, with the Big Girls’ Book Club.

Deborah loves and is inspired by book clubs. Here she discusses her first novel, Convergence, with the Big Girls’ Book Club.

Chautauqua Lake, where the author lives, inspired the fictitious lakeside towns in Dark Riddle.

Chautauqua Lake, where the author lives, inspired the fictitious lakeside towns in Dark Riddle.