I grew up in a family of readers, in a home littered with books. Not that we were great intellectuals; our tastes ran not to Austen and Woolf but to Christie, du Maurier, Stewart and Whitney.
And especially Christie. There was nothing we Foth girls liked better than a good Agatha. In fact, for the first 30 or 40 years of my life, becoming the next Agatha Christie was my goal in life. My oldest sister and I even gave it a try – she with more authentic results than I (although my manuscript, which turned into a medical thriller rather than a traditional mystery, did manage to win a contest, get published and sell a pathetic 150 copies).
But it has occurred to me that, in the end, I did pen a whodunit. Because Heaven Without Her presents and solves the greatest mysteries of all time: where did we come from, what are we doing here and where are we going?
Are there any more important questions we can ask in this life? Of course not, because how we answer them determines where we will spend eternity.
Heaven Without Her is far from the only book to tackle these questions; I’m sure there are many that do it far more efficiently and effectively. And if a seeker of truth were to ask me to recommend the best of them all, I’d say it would be wisest to cut to the chase and study the Bible.
Still, it makes me smile to realize that I achieved my childhood literary dream after all, and that my whodunit – complete with foreshadowing, red herrings, tension and denouement – demonstrates that there really is only one way that all the pieces of this puzzle fit together. And it starts at a narrow gate ...
And especially Christie. There was nothing we Foth girls liked better than a good Agatha. In fact, for the first 30 or 40 years of my life, becoming the next Agatha Christie was my goal in life. My oldest sister and I even gave it a try – she with more authentic results than I (although my manuscript, which turned into a medical thriller rather than a traditional mystery, did manage to win a contest, get published and sell a pathetic 150 copies).
But it has occurred to me that, in the end, I did pen a whodunit. Because Heaven Without Her presents and solves the greatest mysteries of all time: where did we come from, what are we doing here and where are we going?
Are there any more important questions we can ask in this life? Of course not, because how we answer them determines where we will spend eternity.
Heaven Without Her is far from the only book to tackle these questions; I’m sure there are many that do it far more efficiently and effectively. And if a seeker of truth were to ask me to recommend the best of them all, I’d say it would be wisest to cut to the chase and study the Bible.
Still, it makes me smile to realize that I achieved my childhood literary dream after all, and that my whodunit – complete with foreshadowing, red herrings, tension and denouement – demonstrates that there really is only one way that all the pieces of this puzzle fit together. And it starts at a narrow gate ...
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