With a popular comic strip, card line, and children's cartoon to her name, Lucy Brighton should be in a happy place. But the ache of a cold, lonely childhood lingers on. Even though she still lives in the New Jersey house where she grew up, Lucy has had little contact with her parents since they moved to Florida five years ago. Then Lucy receives a call that her parents have been killed in a car crash. While settling their affairs in Florida, Lucy begins to realize how little she really knew about their lives. She has no way to explain the mysterious safe in their bedroom, with its cache of fake passports, cash, and weapons. What secrets were the Brightons keeping? Were they even who they claimed to be? The answers will shatter everything she once believed about her parents - and about herself.
Fern Michaels is the pen name of Mary Ruth Kuczkir, who was born in Hastings, Pennsylvania on April 9, 1933, weighing only four and one-half pounds. Because of her small birth weight, Michaels' father nicknamed her "Dink," for "dinky little thing. Her family and friends still use the nickname. As a child, though, others referred to her as Ruth. Once she entered the business world, she became "Mary."
Michaels married, moved to New Jersey, and had five children. When the youngest entered school in 1973, her husband told her to get a job. Because she had no idea how to get a job, Michaels decided to try to write a book. Her husband was not very supportive of her efforts, and consequently they separated.
Although her first manuscript did not sell, the second did. Since then, Michaels has sold over sixty books, many of them New York Times bestsellers. She has been quoted as saying that she loves breathing life into her characters. She also loves writing books about women who prevail under difficult circumstances, which she feels reflect her struggle for success early in her career. For her efforts, she has been inducted into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame.
When she was a girl, Michaels' grandmother told her "when God is good to you, you have to give back". With this in mind, she founded the Fern Michaels Foundation, which grants four year scholarships for deserving students. In addition to that, she has also helped establish pre-school and day care programs with affordable rates for single mothers.
Michaels currently lives in Summerville, South Carolina, in a 300-year-old plantation house listed in the Historic Registry. She claims to share the house with a ghost named Mary Margaret (which had also been documented by the previous owners). Mary Margaret is said to leave messages on her computer.
*wikipedia
