Author Sharon Potts tells of her experiences during the Sixties and how it influenced her thriller Someone Must Die.

About ‘Someone Must Die’

When her six-year-old nephew vanishes from a neighborhood carnival, Aubrey Lynd’s safe, snow-globe world fractures; it shatters when the FBI’s investigation raises questions about her own family that Aubrey can’t answer.

Aubrey picks apart the inconsistencies to expose the first of many lies: a ransom note — concealed from the FBI — with a terrifying and impossible ultimatum. Aubrey doesn’t know what to believe or whom to trust. The abduction is clearly personal — but why would someone play a high-stakes game with the life of a child? The more she presses for answers, the more Aubrey is convinced that her mother is hiding something.

Desperate to save her young nephew, Aubrey must face harsh truths and choose between loyalty to her family and doing the right thing. And she’d better hurry, because vengeance sets its own schedule, and time is running out.

How the Sixties inspired ‘Someone Must Die’ by Sharon Potts

I remember when everything changed. One day young women were wearing tailored dresses, nylon stockings and sensible heels. The next, we were braless and dressed in torn jeans that dragged along dirty sidewalks. And the guys — there’d been a time they actually wore sports jackets and ties on a date. They even shaved. Then, they didn’t.

It was as though there was a line separating ‘before’ and ‘after.’ That line was the summer of ‘69.

I had just graduated from high school and went to Europe with my parents. I remember watching TV in a hotel lobby in Hamburg and seeing the first man walk on the moon. For some reason, I’ve gotten it stuck in my head that the moonwalk upset the equilibrium in the universe and caused the paradigm to shift. When I got back home from Europe, everything had changed. My boyfriend, Barry, who’d returned from CCNY’s freshman weekend and let his hair grow, dropped me because I was apparently still in the ‘before’ category and he was now an ‘after.’

But it wasn’t just Barry. My friends acted differently, dressed differently, listened to different music. Everyone was talking about Woodstock — Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker.

And everyone smoked pot.

I remember my college campus. The hallways and stairwells outside the classrooms reeked. If you went to a party, someone was always passing around a joint. You never had to buy it! Then, of course, there were the Alice B. Toklas brownies.

But the clothes, the hair, the music, were superficial changes. Something was going on beneath the surface. Something called the Vietnam War.

I remember marching in Central Park, October 1969. The Moratorium to End the War. There were thousands of us. The energy was so positive, so optimistic. There was a sense of power and exhilaration that we were doing something to change the world. ‘Make Love Not War.’ ‘Bring our Boys Home.’ ‘Hell no, we won’t go!’

We actually believed we had the power.

Then came the realization that we didn’t.

The My Lai Massacre was a watershed for many of us. A giant cover-up of the murder of several hundred civilian Vietnamese, including women and children, by U.S. soldiers. Many of us, particularly on college campuses, tried to do something — to protest the war, the draft, what we considered a runaway government that needed to be stopped. But things went terribly wrong. At Kent State, a group of college kids protesting the war were mowed down by National Guardsmen. I remember how horrified and unsettled my friends and I were by the realization that none of us was safe, even on our own campuses.

Radical groups like Weatherman turned to violence and used bombs to make their point. But what was ‘radical’ back then? When you look closely into the members of Weatherman, they were mostly ordinary kids, a lot like me, from families a lot like mine. In one tragic incident, several members of Weatherman were killed when they accidentally blew up the Greenwich Village townhouse where they were assembling bombs.

It hit home. All of it — the frustration and anger, but also the exhilaration, and even the belief that we could actually change things. I had dressed for it, marched in it, smoked it. And I wanted to write about those days and those feelings in a way that would resonate today.

So I thought about the idea of how doing something for what appears to be the right reasons could go terribly wrong. So wrong that it would have devastating consequences for the next generation, and the next. And that became the premise for Someone Must Die.

From there I thought…What if a couple of idealistic students from the late Sixties had been involved with a college revolutionary group that turned bad? What kind of adults would they become? What kind of parents? And how would their guilt over the terrible things they had done affect their children?

Someone Must Die became the story of the daughter of two such people. Aubrey Lynd is getting her PhD in social psychology at Brown. She knows that her family is dysfunctional, but she doesn’t know why. Throughout her childhood, she learned that asking questions upset her parents, so she stopped asking, afraid she might rock the already shaky family boat.

Then, one day, the boat capsizes. Aubrey’s six-year-old nephew, Ethan, is kidnapped from a neighborhood carnival while under his grandmother’s watch. Aubrey flies to Miami to support her family, but she senses something going on beneath the surface. The FBI is asking questions that make no sense to her. When Aubrey’s mother receives a ransom note with an impossible ultimatum, Aubrey realizes that someone from her parents’ past is very likely behind Ethan’s abduction. But the more she digs into her parents’ well-hidden secrets, the more she realizes how little she knows about who they really are and what they’re capable of. When she finally learns the truth, Aubrey is forced to make an impossible choice.

Someone Must Die has a lot of me in it — my experiences and feelings as a college student, but also as a wife and mother. At its heart, it’s a story about family — and dysfunction. It’s about love — and resentment. It’s about trust — and the lack of it. But ultimately, Someone Must Die is about making impossible choices.

And occasionally, the right ones.

About the author

Sharon Potts is the award-winning, critically acclaimed author of four psychological thrillers, including In Their Blood — winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award and recipient of a starred review in Publishers Weekly. A former CPA, corporate executive, and entrepreneur, Sharon has served as treasurer of the national board of Mystery Writers of America, as well as president of that organization’s Florida chapter. She has also co-chaired SleuthFest, a national writers’ conference. Sharon lives in Miami Beach with her husband and a spirited Australian shepherd named Gidget.