Ten MIllion People Missing in US Each Year

Kathy-Diane Leveille is available as a media guest/expert

Missing persons, crime, are national obsession—and entertainment

CNN's Nancy Grace devotes most of her nightly one-hour show to cases of missing children like Caylee Anthony. Popular TV showWithout a Trace, about an FBI missing persons unit, ran for the last seven seasons.Nothing entices the public interest like a disappearance, a theme strongly threaded through Kathy-Diane Leveille's shocking novelLet the Shadows Fall Behind You.

In real-life cases like the Caylee Anthony murder, the public are genuinely horrified by her death, but at the same time we undeniably tune-in by the millions.

Nothing provides more of a challenge to the sleuth or historian than the unexplained disappearance of a celebrity—Jimmy Hoffa has been missing since 1975, yet tips continue to trickle in to the FBI and books are still being written claiming to solve the mystery of the vanished teamsters leader's fate.

Disappearances Are Popular in News, Fiction and Film

Disappearance has been a constant theme in literature and folklore for centuries. In Celtic lands, children and newlyweds could be snatched away by fairies and elves. Mermaids, Sirens and other water sprites have lured men to their deaths in cultures around the world. Cross a witch in medieval Europe and you might spend the rest of your days as a frog, lost to your family and loved ones. There are many recorded paranormal occurrences, where individuals disappear before the eyes of witnesses, as if into another dimension. People who couldn't find Bermuda on the map have heard of the "Bermuda Triangle." Alien abductions are always good for ratings on a TV talk show. And there are the forced disappearances of political dissenters and trouble makers in circumstances like Argentina's "dirty war."

Nightmares and Shadows

Disappearance, like child abandonment and monsters, is the stuff of nightmare and fairy tale, and it's a major theme in Kathy-Diane Leveille's enigmatic and layered new novelLet the Shadows Fall behind You. A woman's eccentric lover leaves their cabin in the woods to attend a conference in the city and vanishes without a trace. Later a body is found in the area, but it is not his. For a woman whose own father, and then her mother, disappeared when she was a child, the loss of yet another loved one is almost too much to bear. Grieving at being left behind again, she forces herself, with help from loyal friends, to face the past she has tried so hard to erase until she understands her losses, and her strength.

Kathy-Diane Leveille's writing has been called eloquent, passionate and sensual. With her keen observation of human complexities and relationships, she creates characters of great psychological truth. She writes with an artist's eye in describing nature and setting.

From Let the Shadows Fall behind You

Brannagh Maloney had lived with disappearances all her life. They were as familiar to her as the changing of the Fundy tides. People who disappeared left cast-off shadows of themselves,

murky tremblings that slunk out of corners on drizzly autumn afternoons. They lurked offstage, silent or sighing or reaching out to run a finger across her arm. They were the curtains fluttering in the window on a breezeless morning, the musty scent that arose

when opening an abandoned cellar door.

When Brannagh was three years old, her father, Ben, a shy man, not given to volunteering his thoughts, hopped a Russian freighter.

“When will you return to the mainland?” Pamela, Brannagh’s mother, had asked as she squinted into a hand-held compact.

He shrugged his broad shoulders and laid one hand on Brannagh’s head.

“Depends.”

Brannagh remembered the stillness that surrounded her mother when he did not return, the way that sunlight springing from behind a parted curtain made her flinch. Eighteen months later, at eight-thirty on a Wednesday morning, Brannagh’s mother packed a weather-beaten portmanteau and slipped out the door without a glimpse back. When Brannagh began to have nightmares, Aunt Thelma bundled her up in a quilt and recited an invented fairytale. After her mother’s tragic death, Brannagh became determined to leave and find heher own happy ending.

Reviews

"Let the Shadows Fall Behind You is a haunting story of disappearance and loss and, ultimately, of redemption. Weaving together a world of family loyalties and family lies, of broken bonds and of those that endure, it combines the nuance of poetry with all the suspense of a thriller." Nino Ricci, authorThe Origin of Species, winner Governor General's Award

"Let the Shadows Fall Behind You is a taut psychological thriller with more than enough mystery and rich characterization to keep us mesmerized."A Readers Respite(review)

About the Book

Let the Shadows Fall Behind You

Kathy-Diane Leveille (Author)

Filled with quirky, heartwarming characters, this novel is a late coming-of-age story shaped by the eternal redeeming power of female friendship. Brannagh Maloney returns to her hometown for a reunion of old friends, carrying the burden of thinking she has lost her lover, Nikolai Mirsky. Once there, she finds it hard to ignore old family secrets, and decides to visit the house where she was raised and treated cruelly by her grandfather. Brannagh forces the old man to tell her what happened to her mother, and the shocking truth finally sets her free as she understands why her grandfather had acted so harshly. When Nikolai turns up unexpectedly, Brannagh's life takes another turn as her mysterious past deepens.

Kathy-Diane Leveille is an author and former broadcast journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

288 pages, Cloth, 5.5 x 8.5
Kunati Books
$22.95 (CAN $25.95)
9781601641670(1601641672)

Contact: publisher@kunati.com