Libby Fischer Hellmann didn’t come to Chicago to write mysteries. When she wheeled her Corvair Monza off the Skyway, headed north, and hit Lake Shore Drive for the first time 30 years ago, the D.C. native had spent eight years in broadcast journalism on the east coast, including a stint with PBS’s McNeil/Lehrer Report. Burnout had led her to quit her last broadcast job, as a night desk editor with NBC News, and she’d come here to work for public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. But Hellmann thinks that the combination—a news background and a new perspective as an outsider in a strange city—laid the groundwork for her career in detective fiction.
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Her fifth novel, Easy Innocence, was published in April by Wisconsin-based Bleak House Books. It’s the first of a planned new series featuring private eye Georgia Davis, a character Hellmann spun off from her four-book Ellie Foreman series, which began in 2002 with An Eye for Murder. The books are mostly set in the northern suburbs, which she now calls home and considers “addictive”: Ellie, who just happens to keep stumbling across murder cases, is a documentary film producer living in Northbrook, and Georgia’s an excommunicated Evanston cop. The land of expansive green lawns and sparkling shopping malls is hardly the traditional setting for crime lit, but, Hellmann says, “evil knows no boundaries.”
The blog, Hellmann says, is “a way of talking about things that weren’t going into books.” It also gives the members a way to hone their “nonfiction sharps” and keep their names out there when a book isn’t forthcoming.
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