MAP OF MY ESCAPE
by Cheryl L. Reed
June 10 - July 5, 2024 Virtual Book Tour
Synopsis:
The shooting of a homicide detective is captured on film by a mysterious figure from a second-floor window, implicating Riley Keane, an anti-gun activist and a school shooting survivor. Riley flees Chicago for a frozen island in Lake Superior. A race to find her ensues between her secret lover—Chicago politician Finn O’Farrell—a corrupt police lieutenant, and the mysterious cameraman who extorts Riley’s family and Finn. Finn’s entanglement with Riley and the extortionist threatens his ambitious political career.
On the island, Riley ingratiates herself into the close-knit community, but when she witnesses both an islander’s murder and another death in a suspicious boating accident, the local sheriff starts asking questions that begin to unravel her true identity. As the sheriff and the FBI are closing in on Riley, Finn faces media pressure to reveal his mysterious role in that long ago school shooting. If the facts come out, Finn may go to prison, but his biggest fear is that the truth will forever sever his relationship with Riley.
Praise for Map of My Escape:
"Atmospheric and gritty, Reed's tale of a woman on the run from her own shocking past will keep you rooting for her until the end. A dark thriller with a redemptive ending from a master of suspense."
~ Jamie Freveletti, International Bestselling author of Blood Run
"Taut, atmospheric and unputdownable. Reed knows how to keep you turning pages!"
~ Candice Fox, International Bestselling author of Crimson Lake, now an ABC series Troppo
"Bending genres of police drama and adventure thriller, The Map of My Escape is both original and breathlessly page-turning!"
~ Wendy Walker, International Bestselling author of Don't Look For Me
"Cheryl Reed's Map of My Escape is a character-driven thriller, a poignant opposites-attract love story, and a journey of self-discovery. As secrets unfold and twists abound, Reed keeps us on a razor's edge. An absolutely gripping read!"
~ John Copenhaver, award-wining author of The Savage Kind and Dodging and Burning
"Map of My Escape combines tragic events, engaging characters, and unique locations to give readers one hell of a ride."
~ Elena Taylor, author of All We Buried and the Eddie Shoes mysteries.
Book Details:
Genre: Mystery and Detective
Published by: Running Wild Press
Publication Date: June 18, 2024
Number of Pages: 402
ISBN: 9781960018175 (ISBN10: 19600018175)
Book Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads
Read an excerpt from Map of My Escape:
I had often wondered what it would be like to disappear. As a teenager, I read books like Famous Female Fugitives and pored over stories in my mother’s magazines about women who had committed crimes with their boyfriends and ran. They changed their names, plucked birthdates off gravestones of dead babies to obtain new Social Security cards, and created new lives. I was never curious about the men who disappeared. The FBI’s Most Wanted lists were full of men who’d eluded cops for years, only later to be discovered as the quiet loner next door. The women fugitives, though sparse in number, were seldom quiet. They married, raised kids, built careers. Sara Jane even joined the PTA, acted on stage, and made speeches before her state senate. They lived their new lives in public as if they were flaunting the authorities in plain sight. I admired their tenacity.
There had been times in my life when I desperately wanted to disappear, when I dreamed of slipping away from the present and starting over somewhere else under a new identity. The pull became stronger after forty-four of my classmates, including my brother, and five of our teachers were killed by a guy in combat boots re-enacting his favorite video game.
I remember that day vividly. We were all at an assembly in the gym. I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the bleachers—they were the old-fashioned, accordion kind that pull out from the wall. I was reading index cards, trying to memorize trigonometry theorems for a test. Principal Brown was at the podium talking, but it was all background noise until a loud crack resounded through the gym. The metal doors at the front of the gym—the only way in or out—opened and slammed shut. Everyone turned to look. Even Principal Brown stopped talking mid-sentence. Darren Wallack, a guy no one paid much attention to, was standing at the gym entrance dressed like a Ninja warrior, a gun and ammo strapped across his chest, a rifle in his hands. He looked almost comical, except it wasn’t Halloween.
Nancy Greene, a whisper of a girl with thick glasses and braces, let out a high-pitched squeal. She was his first victim. Then pandemonium struck. Everyone moved at once. People climbed over others, trying to get away. Some hunkered down, attempting to hide. The air smelled of desperation and fear. Everyone was screaming, panicking. The gun blasted, again and again, loud, sharp cracks, like a whip cutting the air.
I noticed a guy slide his feet in between the thin slats of the bleachers. Our eyes met. He hesitated, then offered me his hand. We climbed down the support scaffolding. A few others chose to hide beneath the bleachers, too. We spread out in clumps of two and three as if we were safer with space between us. The stranger and I crouched in the corner, peaking through the gaps of the bleachers watching as Darren fired continuously, swinging his rifle from left to right like some character he’d seen in a bad movie.
“He’s going to kill us,” I whispered. I couldn’t breathe.
I’d never met this guy next to me, but his eyes were kind, reassuring. He was black. At our charter school, Blacks, Asians, Mexicans, and Whites didn’t mix.
“It’s going to be okay.” He patted my back. He seemed so calm.
Through the crack in the bleachers, we could see our classmates scrambling back and forth across the basketball court, shrieking terrified screams. Darren stalked them, firing a barrage of bullets until they slumped to the floor. I looked away. I couldn’t take it anymore.
Several rounds flew over our heads. “He’s coming toward us,” the guy said. “Get down.”
I lay on my stomach on the cold floor, the stranger next to me, convinced we were about to die. I thought about my family, my mother and father, and my older brother, who had just started college. And for a quick moment, I mourned for them. Then I thought about my younger brother, Ross. He was out there somewhere. I tried to remember where he was sitting. When was the last time I saw him?
“What is your name?” I whispered.
“What does it matter?”
“Because I don’t want my last minutes on earth to be spent with a complete stranger.”
“I’m Reece,” he said. “You’re Riley.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Everyone knows who you are.” He reached over and draped his arm across my back, his upper body forming a protective shield.
Darren’s boots stomped above our heads. Kids screamed, scuttled to get away. The gunfire sounded like firecrackers. I plugged my ears with my fingers. I couldn’t bear to hear it anymore. If Darren came down under the bleachers, we were dead. There was nowhere to run. It was the most horrifying fifteen minutes of my life.
Then the footsteps stopped.
We didn’t know if we could come out. We heard hard footfalls, police hollering as they hunted down Darren. It seemed like we were huddled down there for hours. When the police announced it was over, we walked out from under the bleachers like horror movie zombies.
That’s when we saw them.
Bodies were sprawled on the bleachers. They covered the gym floor, piled in some places. I recognized many of their faces, kids I saw in literature class or passed in the hallway. I stepped around them, my sneakers sticky with blood, looking for friends, anyone I knew. Then I recognized his mousey brown hair. His face looked serene as if he were taking a nap. He was wearing his new White Sox jacket with black sleeves and white on the torso. Our parents had given it to him for his birthday two weeks earlier. He only took it off to go to bed. Now the white part was ruby red. And my brother was never going to wake up.
For years afterwards, I dreamed about disappearing. Just up and walking out of my life—what was left of it. I hadn’t thought about my fugitive fascination in a long time. Of course, now it’s much harder to evade police in a digital age when a person’s every movement can be tracked. But I didn’t consider any of that the day I ran after shooting Reece.
Running is the natural reaction—even if you do not know where you are running to. The adrenaline and animalistic self-preservation kick in, leaving your brain a scrambled mess while your body takes over.
I drove in a daze, focused on the yellow line that I hoped would lead to a better future. Running from the cops is challenging for a normal person. But when you’re an activist and your mug shot is floating on police and FBI computers, vanishing is a lot harder. We are all electronic files, avatars moving from screen to screen, followed by one entity after another.
I had to jump off those screens. That meant no electronics of any kind—no phones, no GPS, no computers. If I wanted to escape, I had to do it old school, like the women in the Famous Female Fugitives.
***
Excerpt from Map of My Escape by Cheryl Reed. Copyright 2024 by Cheryl Reed. Reproduced with permission from Cheryl Reed. All rights reserved.
Guest Post:
Today, I'm delighted to welcome to the blog the author of our featured book, Cheryl L. Reed, for a special Guest Post!
Why Authors Love Fans
By Cheryl L. Reed
When I meet someone for the first time and they learn I’m an
author, I can see a flash of awe or disbelief on their face. And it’s usually
one or the other. Either they imagine I’m one of those writers portrayed in the
movies who spends her days tapping away without disruption and has standing-room-only
author events or they act as if I just pushed print on my computer and
called myself an author.
Because of those looks, I rarely ever tell strangers what I
do. My usual answer is: I’m a writer and at the moment I’m working for —.
That’s because most authors juggle other jobs while trying to eke out time to
write and perfect their craft. It feels pretentious and a bit untrue to convey
that you only write books for a living, especially when the median
book sales for authors is $2,000 — not enough to live on.
That’s why dedicated readers and fans play such an
increasing important role in the lives of authors. You are part of the circle
of publishing—and it’s not just because you pay for books.
I don’t deny that some authors are highly motivated to write
for money. But compared to the hours and days it takes to birth a book, most
authors receive little compensation for their efforts as the above statistic
bares out. For a great many authors—and I count myself among them—we write
because we have a story to tell, a message to get out to the world. And for
that chain of events to succeed, we need readers—people to receive what we are
writing.
As the number of readers declines – 46
percent of Americans didn’t even read one book last year—connecting with book
lovers is vital. One bright spot in all those dire reading statistics is that
mysteries is one of the top two genres readers prefer, the other being
histories. So, I think this is a perfect collision of two topics on Guatemala
Paula Loves to Read!
If you are reading this, you are no doubt a reader and
probably a mystery lover and maybe one of those smart-as-a whip readers who
consume more than 20 books a year. You are our rock stars. And I’m not just
saying that because you buy books and that puts *some money in the pocket of
authors. I’m saying this because for most authors you are the end game, the
reason we spend incredibly long hours alone, separated from our families and
their needs. We do this to connect with an invisible body of people, with the
whisper of a dream that what we write might influence or touch them in some
way.
You might think that as readers what you do in your
sparingly free time isn’t that important, but as the airlines say: we know you
have a choice. You could be like most Americans who watch more than three
hours of digital programming a day.
I do believe books can have a dramatic effect on people’s
lives, even if the story simply takes the reader to a place they’ve never been or
introduces them to a point of view they hadn’t considered. Drawing attention to
books you love is really a kind of literary proselytizing.
Which reminds me of one day when I was in prison—just
visiting. Once a week, I volunteered to teach creative writing to incarcerated
men at a maximum security prison. I taught in a room divided by a glass
partition to other classrooms. One day I saw the prison warden in the next room
with his hand on a prisoner’s head as a crowd of prisoners looked on.
“What is going on over there?” I asked, with a bit of shock
in my voice because I knew full well what was happening.
“Oh, the warden is
saving an inmate,” the men explained.
“As in saving his soul?” I was astonished that as a state
employee, the warden would be mixing religion with his state duties.
“Yeah,” the men said in unison and chuckled.
“Well, I’m here because I intend to save your souls through
literature.”
That got smiles and a few amens!
Upon the publication of my first book —a work of nonfiction
called Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns— I learned that I had a small
fan club. It was sort of exhilarating. They wrote me emails and came to my
readings. One even told me she wrote her dissertation on my book.
After the publication of my second book, Poison Girls,
a thriller based loosely on events that had happened in my own life, I was
awarded novel of the year by Chicago writers. Attendance at my readings were sparser
than they had been for my first book, but more than one person came up to me afterwards
and said I had portrayed Chicago right, and more than one journalist told me I depicted
the newsroom right. One of my former literature professors —who did not
normally read genre fiction —told me she’d stayed up all night to find out who
the killer was. I don’t remember most reviews of the book, but I do remember
those personal comments.
I’m not sure how my new novel, Map of My Escape, about
a female fugitive who flees to a frozen island and remakes herself to elude the
police, will be received. But I know that the most important judgment will be
from everyday readers.
So the next time you meet an author whose work you like or
whose reading you attend, don’t be shy. Come up and tell us what specifically
engaged you, and when you hear something you like at an author reading, feel
free to shout a few amens!
Author Bio:
Cheryl L. Reed is the author of the nonfiction book Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns and the novel Poison Girls, which won the Chicago Writers' Association Book of the Year. A former staff editor and reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and other publications, Reed's stories have won multiple awards, including Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. She has twice been awarded a U.S. Fulbright Scholar fellowship by the State Department, first in Ukraine and then in Central Asia. She splits her time between Washington, DC and her home near the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia.
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