Guest post and Giveaway: Summer in the South by Cathy Holton

Today it is my extreme pleasure to welcome Cathy Holton to Pudgy Penguin Perusals. Cathy's new book, Summer in the South, was a big hit with me. A 5* rating means I just couldn't put the book down. Check out my review. Sounds like a good summer read? Most definitely! After Cathy's post, be sure to enter the drawing for one copy of the book. See details below.

How did the idea for Summer in the South originate? 

by Cathy Holton

     Twenty-five years ago I went with a friend to visit her Great-Aunt Fanny in Franklin, Tennessee.  Fanny lived in an imposing house filled with treasures; a large sterling silver collection, oil portraits of dead ancestors, a framed letter from Thomas Jefferson to Fanny’s great-great-great-grandfather.  I was immediately entranced by Randal’s illustrious family history and their quietly understated, old-money wealth.

            Fanny was a lovely woman, intelligent and funny and filled with a buoyant spirit.  There were photographs of her and her deceased husband everywhere; standing in front of a sea plane, crouching beside a water buffalo, having cocktails in a Paris café.  On the second day of our visit, we went with Fanny to the cemetery to visit the dead.  Watching as she knelt to put flowers on a grave set apart from the others, I asked Randal, “Who’s buried there?”

            “Her husband.”

            “The one in all the photographs?”

“No, that’s the second husband.  The one over there is her first husband, Charlie.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died.  We don’t speak of him.”

            I couldn’t get anything else out of her.  Nothing inspires a writer’s imagination like curiosity, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Fanny and her first husband, whom she had obviously loved very much.  And I couldn’t stop wondering what had happened between Fanny and Charlie that would keep her family from mentioning his name sixty years later.

            Twenty-five years later, I wrote Summer in the South, the story of a Chicago writer trying to escape her troubled past who finds love, redemption, and a sixty-year-old murder mystery in a small Southern town.

            Did the love story between Fanny and Charlie happen as I imagined it?  Are the things that happened to Ava there in that old house in Woodburn real?

            The answers to both questions, I suppose, lie clearly in the realm of fiction.

Cathy, thank you so much for visiting with us today.

Thanks to Cathy's generosity, I have one copy of Summer in the South to give away to one of my followers. Open to US and Canada. Deadline to enter is July 1st. Since this is a followers (old or new) only giveaway the 3 bonus entries this month will be for blogging about or tweeting about the giveaway. Be sure to include your e mail address in the comment box. Please, please, please do not leave three comments that you tweeted. One box is sufficient.