K. B. Vaughan

When my grandfather lost his job in 1930, the family sold everything they owned, bought a truck with the proceeds, and camped their way out west. What they held onto became the inspiration for the Matty Swift mysteries: a huge cache of memorabilia covering five generations of my “family of nobodies.”

For several years, I sifted through a trove of letters, documents, diaries, and photographs dating back to the 1860s, deciphering and cataloguing as I went. I saw myself as an ancestral detective, tracking down evidence in an extremely cold case, building a narrative out of shadowy glimpses of the past. Eventually the quest became an obsession. And then I started writing, transforming my discoveries into stories to share.

One startling family skeleton morphed into the first book in the series, Rattling the Bones.

I am enormously grateful for luxury of time to write—a passion of mine since childhood, when I would lug the family Underwood along on our camping trips and pound out purple prose. And also for the chance to do this on the coast of Maine, where I spend half the year in a small town not unlike Percy Harbor, the setting for the series.