Guest Post: The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon

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Title: The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon
Author: Marcy McCreary
Genre: Mystery
Where to find it: Goodreads, BookBub, Amazon

Synopsis:

In a family like that, you won’t need enemies.

In the waning days of the Catskills hotel era, Stanley and Rachel Roth, the owners of the Cuttman Hotel, were practically dynasty—third generation proprietors of a sprawling resort with a grand reputation. The glamorous and gregarious matriarch, Rachel. The cunning and successful businessman, Stan. Four beautiful children. A perfect family deserving of respect and loyalty. Or so it seemed.

Fast forward forty years. The Roths have lost their clout. When skeletal remains are found on the side of the road, the disappearance of Trudy Solomon, a coffee shop waitress at the Cuttman in 1978, is reopened. Each member of the Roth family holds a clue to the case, but getting them to admit what they know will force Detective Susan Ford to face a family she’d hoped never to see again.

About the Author of The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon

Marcy McCreary worked for several years as a marketing and sales executive at various magazine publishing companies and content marketing agencies before turning to fiction writing. She is the author of The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon (CamCat Books). With two daughters and two step-daughters living in four different cities (Brooklyn, Nashville, Madison, Seattle), she spends a lot of time on airplanes crisscrossing the country. She lives in the beautiful coastal towns of Hull, MA and Nantucket, MA with her husband and black lab.

Connect with the Author:
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Guest Post From Marcy McCreary

Inspiration and Backstory

Many readers ask what inspired my story—why that setting, how did you come up with that plot, and why create a father-daughter pairing? The idea for the setting came to me quickly. I spent my summers (1965-1982) in the Catskills resort area. My dad was the Activities Director and tummler (a yiddish word that translates loosely to mean an employee, usually male, who is responsible for entertaining guests throughout the day and acting as master of ceremonies at the nightclub shows at night) at the Hotel Brickman in South Fallsburg, NY.

I knew I wanted to write a story in this location, but the question became . . . what story/what era . . . A coming of age? A romance? A memoir? Then, in 2017, I came across an article about a woman (a waitress at the Concord Hotel) who mysteriously disappeared from the area in the mid-70s and was found forty years later in an Alzheimer’s facility (in Massachusetts) through the fluke of a social security number search by a detective. She was unable to tell the detective what had happened to her in the intervening years. That was my eureka moment. I was intrigued by the idea of fictionalizing this woman’s story—filling in the forty-year gap between disappearing and being found.

The idea of the father-daughter team, where the father was the original detective and the daughter who is a detective, was probably inspired by my father’s presence at the hotel during my coming-of-age years. I loved the idea of that familial dynamic, especially because I wanted to set the story in both past and present and explore how Susan’s coming-of-age woes might affect how she approached this case. The year Trudy disappeared—1978—was a terrible year for Susan. Her parents got divorced, her grandfather died, her best friend dropped her. So pairing them on this case allowed me to dig deep into their relationship and have them both uncover things they didn’t know about each other. But they are coming at this case with different motivations. Will finally thinks there’s a chance to solve a case he couldn’t crack forty years ago. Susan is not exactly thrilled with reliving this time of her life, and is pretty reluctant at first, but she is intrigued with the idea of giving a woman—who can’t recall her own life—her story back to her.