Vanessa Lillie Virtual Event
Join BoB for a virtual event with author Vanessa Lillie. She'll be in conversation with debut author David Heska Wanbli Weiden.
This is a free event. The Zoom link will be posted in the Facebook event page (https://www.facebook.com/events/2762570730685472), as well as on BoB's main Facebook page.
Vanessa Lillie has fifteen years of marketing and communications experience and enjoys organizing book events and literary happenings in the Providence, Rhode Island area. Originally from Oklahoma, Vanessa calls Providence, Rhode Island home with her husband and sloth obsessed son.
Her debut thriller, Little Voices, was an Amazon bestseller and number one psychological thriller for all of September 2019. Little Voices received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal as well as must-read lists in Real Simple, Refinery29, Cosmopolitan UK, and Bookish. It was also named one of the best debut thrillers of 2019 by Bolo Books. The Providence Journal review said, “Aficionados of mystery, thriller and horror will savor this intricately plotted page-turner that builds to a stunning denouement.”
Lillie’s next thriller, FOR THE BEST, releases September 8, 2020, and it will also be set in Providence. When Jules Worthington-Smith’s wallet is found next to a dead man, she becomes the prime suspect in his murder. After struggling for years to build the perfect family and career, she’s dangerously close to losing everything.
Sure of her innocence, Jules is desperate to clear her name. But there’s one big problem: she was blackout drunk when the murder took place and can’t remember what happened.
Unsatisfied with the police’s handling of the case, Jules embarks on her own gin-fueled murder investigation. As she uncovers fresh clues, she starts a true-crime vlog that becomes a viral sensation, pushing her into the public eye. It’s not long before the ordeal forces Jules to confront her demons, including her turbulent childhood and excessive drinking.
The deeper Jules digs, the more dirt she uncovers about the murder and herself. Unexpected truths pile up until she’s buried so deep even finding the killer might not be enough to set her free.
David Heska Wanbli Weiden is an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is an alumnus of VONA, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and was a 2018 MacDowell Colony Fellow. Currently, he is a PEN/America Writing for Justice Fellow. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
WINTER COUNTS follows Virgil Wounded Horse, who lives on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He’s a tough-guy enforcer, the kind you call when the tribal council or US law enforcement won’t do anything. He’ll beat people up, shake them down, give them a warning—whatever you need. He’s also a recovering alcoholic who’s raising his nephew after his sister died years ago. The rez, as he calls it, has plenty of ills, but heroin isn’t one of them, so when he hears that someone is trying to bring it to the reservation and, more importantly, push it on his nephew, he takes it upon himself to find the drug dealer and make him
stop. He heads out on a journey, both geographic and emotional, accompanied by his ex-girlfriend, Marie, and learns that the drugs that keep showing up on the reservation have strange connections to the Native tribal council on which Marie’s father serves. Suddenly, this personal vendetta of his is overlapping with reservation-wide problems of political corruption and organized crime, as well as with the nagging issues of class and poverty. This toxic mess forces Virgil to answer what is perhaps an impossible question: What’s more important, his family or his tribe? Is there even a difference?
