Guest Post (and a Giveaway!): Patricia Raybon & Double the Lies

I’m so honored to have Patricia Raybon back on the blog today to chat about her new historical mystery, Double the Lies! Her words just go right to my heart – whether in her articles, her books, or her acceptance speech for the 2022 Christy Award for First Novel – and I have a feeling today’s post will do the same ♥

DOUBLE THE LIES by Patricia Raybon
SERIES: Annalee Spain Mysteries #2
GENRE: Inspirational Historical Mystery
PUBLISHER: Tyndale House
RELEASE DATE: February 7, 2023
PAGES: 402

In the second installment of Patricia Raybon’s critically acclaimed mystery series, amateur detective Annalee Spain races the clock to solve the murder of a handsome young pilot before she is framed for the crime—and before his dashing twin falls head over heels for her, tempting her promised heart.

On a cold spring night in 1924, Annalee Spain offers her new fancy lace handkerchief—a gift from her pastor boyfriend Jack Blake—to a young woman crying in a Denver public library. But later that night, when police find the handkerchief next to the body of the young woman’s murdered husband, Annalee becomes the number one suspect, and her panic doubles when she learns that Jack has gone missing.

With just days to solve the murder before the city’s Klan-run police frame her for the crime, Annalee finds herself hunting for clues in the Colorado mountain town of Estes Park. She questions the victim’s wife and her uncle, a wealthy Denver banker, at their mountain lodge, desperate for leads. Instead, she finds a household full of suspects and even more burning questions. Who keeps threatening her, why can’t she find Jack, and will a dangerous flirtation be her undoing? Her answers plumb the depths of the human heart, including her own, exploring long-buried secrets, family lies, even city politics—all of which could cost the young detective her fledgling love . . . and perhaps even her life.

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When Love Crosses the Color Line

by Patricia Raybon, author of Double the Lies

My dad said no. A hard no. This was back in the sixties—when love for a high school girl was already a complicated, challenging, terrifying mess of mystery. Thus, it was exciting. Love? The potential of it made your head swim.

So there I was—the only Black girl in my high school’s junior class—listening to an awfully cute white boy ask me out on a date. I heard his question and then had to figure out what to do about it. This was a time when crossing the color line didn’t only seem exhilarating; it was dangerous. Before that day, however, I’d been struggling with questions about where I even fit.

My family lived in Colorado. (I still do.) Two years earlier, my hardworking father had picked my family up from our beloved but crumbling inner-city neighborhood and moved us to the suburbs. Worse, out to the sticks.

That’s what I called it. Our suburban neighborhood was miles away, emotionally and physically, from everything I knew. Black people (like me). Black music. Black church. Black neighbors. Black friends. Black boys.

I was sixteen years old. I’d spent a lifetime, during those Jim Crow times, struggling to believe my parents, pastors, teachers, and friends when they said I was good, smart, and beautiful. The world said otherwise. To be a Black girl in those years—when signs on restaurants, buses, and businesses in the South still shouted WHITES ONLY—was to do mental arithmetic every morning just to get out of bed and believe you mattered.

At my inner-city school, I had mastered that calculus—getting great grades, earning awards, getting picked for special projects, sailing along in the cocoon of a community that gave me all I needed. Hope and affirmation. Then at fourteen, a too-cute-for-my-own-good Black schoolboy kissed me on the lips after a school dance, and after I melted, I kissed him back. This was danger with a capital D. Looking back, I now figure my dad saw the signs of young love bubbling up around our household and neighborhood, and he moved our family away pronto.

Next thing I knew, I was sitting in that mostly white high school feeling like an outcast. And boys? Surely they wouldn’t be interested in me. Maybe that’s what Daddy assumed. I certainly did.

But love is a funny thing. When it’s an interracial attraction—and you’re living in the sixties—it seemed downright scandalous. Churches had led some of the strongest fights against interracial romance, many calling it unbiblical, ungodly, and using an ugly word, miscegenation, to further tarnish such relationships.

Of course, in a novel, such a battle offers great tension. So to my surprise, interracial romance raised its dangerous head in my newest “history mystery,” Double the Lies. I hadn’t planned that plot twist. But as readers and authors know, when some twists show up, you best follow them. So I unspooled that thread, learning first that, in the 1920s of my novel, all but seven of the then forty-eight states in the US had passed “racial integrity” or anti-miscegenation laws. Thirty of those states—including Colorado—enforced them. Get caught in an interracial romance and a person could land in jail or worse. Nobody yet knows exactly how many Black men were lynched for allegedly crossing the color line with a white woman.

Is this taboo talk? Things too dicey for Christian people to discuss or mention?

Or shouldn’t we know that Emmett Till wasn’t even a man. He was a fourteen-year-old boy when he was accused in the summer of 1955 of talking fresh to a white woman in a general store in Money, Mississippi. She recused her story many years later, saying Emmett hadn’t spoken out of turn or dishonored her. But decades had passed and that didn’t save him. Instead, four days after she first accused him, Emmett’s brutalized body was found—tortured, a bullet in his head, one eye gouged out, with a weight around his neck—in the muddy waters of the Tallahatchie River.

Maybe my dad was thinking of such things when I waltzed home one day to ask if I could go out on a date with a white boy—a classmate.

The look on my dad’s face was one of shock, anguish, disbelief, sadness, fear, horror. All those shadows crossed his face before my Mississippi-born father searched my eyes and simply said no.

I knew not to argue. Some folks are one-word people. That was my dad. No meant exactly that. No discussion. No explanation. No bargaining.

His turndown would color, literally, every other potential interracial romantic encounter I’d ever have. My dad apparently saw the potential problems of such dynamics and he didn’t want that for his baby girl. My longtime marriage to my African American husband hasn’t been without its problems. Every marriage has them.

But my dad didn’t want me to fight my way through the racial tensions of a nation that still, all these years later, hasn’t figured them all out.

God, of course, has other ideas. Thus, when my younger daughter brought home the man she wanted to marry, was he Black? Nope, he was biracial—his dad is white, his mom Latina. He looks white, however. Their children do, too. So I still ended up with an interracial family anyway. My son-in-law is also simply the best. My late dad—God bless his soul—would surely love him, too.

These days, many decades since I was in high school, interracial romance seems commonplace. Many have forgotten the famed Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision which, in 1967, struck down all “racial integrity” or anti-miscegenation laws still in effect, at that point in sixteen states.

Love won. But it always does. In any color, love remains a beautiful mystery. I’m one lovestruck novelist who is glad.

A writer of faith by day and mystery by night, Patricia Raybon is a Christy Award-winning Colorado author, essayist, and novelist who writes daring and exciting novels and books at the intersection of faith and race.

After a notable career in newspaper journalism and journalism education, Patricia turned to fiction with release of a 1920s mystery series about a prim, poor but clever Black theologian —a fan of Sherlock Holmes– who solves murder and crime in Colorado’s dangerous Klan era. The series’ acclaimed debut, “All That Is Secret: An Annalee Spain Mystery,” won the 2022 Christy Award for First Novel and was a Parade Magazine Fall 2021 “Mysteries We Love” selection, a Masterpiece on PBS “Best Mystery Books of 2021” pick “As Recommended by Bestselling Authors,” and Stephen Curry’s March 2022 personal choice for his Literati Book Club.

For a deep dive into Patricia’s compelling world of faith and fiction, connect with her daring and insightful books—and receive a free download of her “Busy Person’s Guide to Hearing God” — at patriciaraybon.com

Tyndale House is offering a print copy of Double the Lies by Patricia Raybon to one of my readers! (US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.) This giveaway is subject to Reading Is My SuperPower’s giveaway policies which can be found here. Enter via the Rafflecopter form below.

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What about you? What makes you want to read Double the Lies by Patricia Raybon?