In honor of Election Day, I’m urging you to read my first novel — Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher. — which is free as an ebook, from today until Sunday.
I also encourage you to do whatever you can to influence the elections — knocking on doors, making phone calls, writing postcards, donating to candidates.
While three of my four novels feature an election, in Bones in the Wash the election is the primary story, and one thread through the story is the “fraud of voter fraud.”
A “page-turner with a conscience,” Bones in the Wash is a political thriller, family soap, and murder mystery set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico. Ambitious Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara is charged with doing “whatever it takes” to deliver the state’s five electoral votes for John McCain, and that means shutting down voter registration drives and accusing the Democrats of stealing the election, charges he knows are not true. Challenging him every step of the way is fierce, young Sierra León of the Democracy Project, who calls on him to listen to his better self and reject his party’s dirty tricks. Both protagonists, knee-deep in politics, face as many or more crises with their romantic relationships and fractured families.
I reread the book several years ago, which was thrilling — to enjoy my own book as if I were a reader — and I found myself rooting for both protagonists, even though they were working against each other.
What was also eye-opening was that even though the novel includes dirty tricks and unfounded allegations of “voter fraud,” Bones in the Wash seemed so innocent compared to today’s world. The seeds were there — the voter suppression efforts — but I didn’t expect they would grow into something so malignant.
Of course, attempts to disenfranchise voters are not new. Before 1964, when the 24th Amendment was passed and later that year, when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, in large swaths of the South, Black Americans had to pay a poll tax in order to enter the voting booth or had to pass a literacy test.
I was reminded of this last month when I read the news about the Supreme Court’s ruling that sided with the Trump administration, allowing it to move forward with its plan to use a centralized database to verify voters’ citizenship and immigration status, another example of a “solution” to an almost non-existent problem.
Over and over again, the claim that non-citizens are voting have been found to not be credible, but the accusations have only gotten louder.
Fortunately, current law prevents registered voters from being removed from the rolls with less than 90 days before a federal election, so the ruling should have no impact on the midterms. But who knows what other dirty tricks might be unleashed.
Years ago, I remember talking with one reader of Bones, from Canada, who loved the book, but said the voter suppression tactics and dirty tricks didn’t seem realistic. I assured him that, though they were fictionalized, all the tactics and tricks in the novel were based on real and recent events, though not necessarily all in New Mexico. If he read the book today, he would not consider it unrealistic.
When I was writing Bones, I suffered from the delusion that as allegations of voter fraud were exposed as lies to justify disenfranchising voting that the false narratives would fall apart. The opposite has happened. These days, politicians even say the silent part out loud — “we don’t want ‘xxxx people’ to vote.” I underestimated the power of the big lie.
Here’s what some readers have said about Bones in the Wash.
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