From Madison to Lake Superior and the fictional town of Cherryview, the plot of Chicago-based author Charlie Donlea’s newest book “Guess Again” pops up across Wisconsin.
The novel is a thriller focused on a missing person’s case gone cold.
“I grew up going to small lake communities in Wisconsin. I still have family that lives up in Door County,” Donlea told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “I wanted a close-knit community where this girl disappeared from, and as I got into the story, I decided that a small lake community in Wisconsin was going to be perfect for the setting.”
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As Donlea puts it, the story is “The Silence of the Lambs” meets “Cruel Summer.”
A former detective, Ethan Hall had a 100 percent case solve rate before he left the industry to become an emergency room doctor. But his former partner comes out of the woodwork one day, asking Hall to help him solve one last case.
“As soon as (Hall) starts investigating, he finds help from an inmate at a maximum security prison — who happens to be the serial killer who killed his father,” Donlea said.
And as the title promises, the story is made to keep you guessing. Donlea discussed more about his inspiration for the book and what led to his writing career in his interview with “Wisconsin Today.”
The following was edited for clarity and brevity.
Rob Ferrett: We’ve got the fictional community of Cherryview. We’ve got scenes in Madison, Milwaukee, Boscobel for the prison, and Nekoosa comes up. You’re in the Bad River Band territory up by Lake Superior. How did you take some of your experiences around the state and work them into this setting?
Charlie Donlea: I knew that I needed a small town for this book. As I was writing, I kept going back to my childhood and now, as we bring our kids up to Nekoosa and Rome and Lake Sherwood, I tried to figure out if that would work for the story. The more I got into it, I realized that I wanted to create a fictional town. So I created a town called Cherryview, Wisconsin. But Cherryview is a collection of all of these places — from Nekoosa to Elkhorn.
But once I created Cherryview, I put it right near Madison, and then everything else fell into place. The more I was writing it, the more I realized I just don’t have to leave the state of Wisconsin. This is going to be a perfect setting for it.
RF: There’s a scene where the protagonist is speaking to someone who’s behind bars and is going for a parole hearing. And I’m thinking, “parole hearing? We got rid of that in Wisconsin!” But then you point out he was sentenced before the “truth in sentencing” law came into effect. What kind of research makes you get those little details right?
CD: I have a friend who was an attorney in Wisconsin … so he’s helped me with a couple of my books. There was one book where I wrote a great, big, long courtroom scene before I realized I really didn’t know what the heck I was doing writing a courtroom scene. So I let him read it, and he confirmed that I had no idea what I was doing. And he helped. He helped me out a lot with that. So I’ve leaned on him when I have questions about anything to do with the law.
RF: What got you interested in writing thrillers?
CD: I have a different story than most writers. I hated reading as a kid. I had a total aversion to it. It wasn’t until I was a junior in college that I picked up John Grisham’s book “The Firm,” for reasons that I still don’t totally remember. I picked it up, I fell in love with the suspense and the characters. It was the first novel that I had ever read in my 20 or 21 years of life. And irrationally, I turned the last page and told myself that I was going to write a story like that someday.
I don’t know how it happened. If I was thinking of it logically or rationally, I would have told myself, “You have no business writing a book. You have no background with writing. You’ve never taken a creative writing course in your life, and it’s never going to work.”
But to be a writer, you have to be a little bit of a dreamer. If you only pay attention to the stats and how hard it is to break in, find an agent, an editor and an audience, it’s too daunting. So I’m glad that I didn’t know any of that when I got started.
RF: Did you start appreciating reading more, too?
CD: 100 percent. I have become an avid reader since then. It was one of those epiphany moments where I realized what I had been missing all my life. There’s this avenue of entertainment that I didn’t really know about. I read all of these thriller authors, and I just loved the genre, and that’s when I knew I was going to write thrillers.
I just had to run out of excuses before I sat down to try my hand at my first manuscript.
