Item: The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon
Author: Gina

The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon by Marcy McCreary | Spotlight, Guest Post, & Giveaway

Thank you to the author, publisher, & Lauren at iRead for providing me with the information for this tour.

Book Details

The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon by Marcy McCreary
Series: Detective Susan Ford #1
Published by CamCat Books on 09/07/2021
Genres: Fiction, Mystery
Format: Audiobook, eBook, Hardcover, Paperback
Pages: 375

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.

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Purchase Links for The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon

Amazon-OneLink for all countries BookShop/IndieBound

BookBub CamCat BN

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Guest Post from Marcy McCreary

Setting and Weather As Characters

In the Ford Family Mystery series novels, I regard the setting and the weather as characters. Meaning they have their own story arc, and are given personality traits and an evolving narrative. I also treat settings and weather as antagonists, working against the main protagonists, Detective Susan Ford and her father, retired detective Will Ford.

In the first novel in the series, The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon, the story is set in the Catskills region of New York, commonly referred to as the Borscht Belt because of the hotels and bungalow colonies catering to Jewish vacationers.

The resurrection of a 1970s cold case sets the action in motion, which was an interesting point in time for the area. By the 1970s, the hotels were starting to show signs of wear and tear. The heyday era of the 1950s and 1960s were starting to fade as the next generation of Jewish families sought alternatives to the Catskills hotels. The demise of the Catskills was attributed to what is referred to as “The Three As”: air-conditioning, assimilation, and airplanes. But it was way more complicated than that.

Atlantic City, a shiny new gambling mecca on the east coast, the fourth A, also had a hand in this area’s collapse. The appeal of the hotels and bungalow colonies waned as the Four As took hold, and, gambling, which was supposed to revive the area, got snared in political wrangling. In the mid eighties, the decline steepened and, as bookings dwindled, many of the hotels were unable to afford the cost of modernizing their properties. The sons and daughters of the elderly owners weren’t interested in taking over the reigns of these crumbling resorts.

By the mid-nineties, only a handful of hotels remained and most of the bungalow colonies were bought by Hasidic Jews, an extremely religious sect of Judaism. The gambling referendum finally did pass in 2013, and old properties are seeing new life these days as investment money flows in. Would the area ever become the mecca for Jewish families again? I doubt it.

The hope now is that casinos and spas and cultural attractions revitalize the area. I use this rise and fall of the Catskills area as the backdrop for that first novel and how it affected both the Ford family and the Roth Family, the fictional owners of one of the storied hotels.

In my second novel in the series, The Murder of Madison Garcia, the weather plays an integral part in the story. A humidity-laced heatwave grips the area just as the story opens, and doesn’t let go until the denouement. To make matters worse, I gave Detective Susan Ford a relentless summer cold. Both the weather and her illness add to her woes as she seeks to solve the case.

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I love to read books through my Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription.

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About Marcy McCreary

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.