“Gripping, frightening, maddening, heart wrenching. This book is all that and more,” raves a four-star review of THOUGHTS & PRAYERS, a novel penned by four area writers under the pseudonym Lee Anne Post.
Set for publication in October 2021 by Milford House, an imprint of Sunbury Press, THOUGHTS & PRAYERS follows Lily Jeong, the unwitting accomplice in a school shooting who’ll say anything to evade detection as the devastated community, craving justice, hunts for her.
Tara Bell of Charles Town, Catherine Baldau and Ginny Fite of Harpers Ferry, and K.P. Robbins of Dumfries, Virginia, who’d been meeting in a writing group for four years, decided to collaborate on a novel about a school shooting in early 2018. Just as they were developing the plot and characters, the Parkland, Florida, massacre took place.
“Our story is fictional, but the courage of the Parkland survivors motivated us as we worked our way through a year of drafts and revisions and another of queries.”
“We purposefully did not name the city or state in which our story takes place,” said Robbins, “because such shootings can take place anywhere. Our story is fictional, but the courage of the Parkland survivors motivated us as we worked our way through a year of drafts and revisions and another of queries.”
In THOUGHTS & PRAYERS, straight-A student Lily Jeong sneaks her manipulative boyfriend into Rockwell High, believing he’ll get revenge for her recent public humiliation. But he breaks his promise that no one will get hurt, and minutes later, fourteen people are dead.
Told in the voices of eight characters—the students and the adults around them who struggle to piece together their wrecked lives in the aftermath of a mass shooting—the novel is dedicated to all the survivors.
Stories by these award-winning authors have appeared in numerous journals, including Shepherd University’s Anthology of Appalachian Writers. Individually, they have published nine novels. They have worked as reporters and editors, in politics and philanthropy, in advertising and educational institutions.
THOUGHTS & PRAYERS is available for pre-order from Amazon and will be available for pre-order in early August from Sunbury Press.