Tradition. It’s how we celebrate the happy times. It’s how we get through the hard times.

Gustav Mahler told us—” Tradition is not the worship of ashes. It is the preservation of fire.”

Bella Sarver counts herself lucky to be surrounded and supported by all three components of tradition: Family. Friends. Community. What else really matters? Even so, life can still be less than perfect and family secrets can roil a community, especially when the end result is murder. So when a respected lawyer, a member of the local synagogue, is killed, his murder sends out ripples throughout Bella’s world – the local art league, the synagogue and overlapping families. Always families. Ancient tales take on new life in every generation, don’t they? Isn’t that why we still tell them? From generation to generation. Tradition.

Sometimes we tell our ancient stories through art, as Bella understands very well. It’s how she makes connections and figures out the truth.

The latest of my Bella Sarver series, A Death in Our Family, is nearly ready to be released. I’ve been playing around with it for more than two years now, after having a provocative email landed in my in-box, and it’s finally evolved into a coherent novel. As an artist, I love to experiment with different mediums, and I find collage particularly interesting. With bits and pieces of various types of papers and fiber and found objects, a collage artist, like a painter, can create meaningful and expressive works, and have a lot of fun doing it. Sort of like playing.

In a way, A Death in Our Family is like a collage, in that it takes pieces of Old Testament stories, and Jewish traditions, and community events and combines them all into a whole, a sort of patchwork. I enjoyed researching it and pulling the whole thing together, and I hope my readers enjoy diving into it.