Excerpt, Guest Post, & #Giveaway: Part of the Solution by Elana Michelson
- Archaeolibrarian
- 10 hours ago
- 14 min read
Book Details:
Genre: Murder Mystery, Counter-Culture books
Published by: Torchflame Books
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Number of Pages: 294 pages, Paperback
ISBN: 9781611536041 (ISBN10: 1611536049) Paperback
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It's 1978, and Jennifer Morgan, a sassy New Yorker, has escaped to the counterculture village of Flanders, Massachusetts. Her peaceful life is disrupted when one of her customers at the Café Galadriel is found dead. Everyone is a suspect—including the gentle artisan woodworker, the Yeats-wannabe poet, the town's anti-war hero, the peace-loving Episcopalian minister, and the local organic farmer who can hold a grudge.
Concern for her community prompts Jennifer to investigate the murder with the sometimes-reluctant help of Ford McDermott, a young police officer. Little does she know that the solution lies in the hidden past.
Part of the Solution blends snappy dialogue, unconventional settings, and a classic oldies soundtrack, capturing the essence of a traditional whodunnit in the era of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.
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Chapter One
Jennifer surveyed the café with satisfied proprietary eyes. The freshmen at the two corner tables were an excellent sign. Having arrived in Williamstown the day before, having unpacked their carefully faded blue jeans and dispatched their carefully dry-eyed parents, having found their way to the registrar’s office and the bookstore with barely concealed terror, they had, no doubt, asked whomever they could find where, you know, it was happening. And they had been sent straight to Café Galadriel to nurse their bludgeoned intellects and wounded sexuality on Jennifer’s coffee for the next four years.
Around them, the unmatched wooden chairs and tables of the café held the usual Monday afternoon crowd. Brownley (Philosophy) and Krasner (Sociology) sat over a game of chess. The Western Massachusetts Women’s Anti-Violence Task Force occupied the round table in the center of the room. Samir Molchev, self-styled seeker of truth, was alone at a corner table reading Suzuki’s The Field of Zen. On the salmon walls, a pre-Raphaelite poster of the Lady of Shallot hung beside a poster of Che Guevara. It will be a great day, read the sign above Wendy’s bakery display case, when schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. A tattered sofa occupied one wall of the room, the coffee table in front of it piled with backgammon sets and old copies of Ramparts magazine. A Bob Marley tape played on the stereo.
It was the moment of the year when the café was moving into autumn, away from its summer tourist mode. Behind the cash register, Wendy was packing away the pitchers that had held iced tea and cold cider. Her summer uniform of paisley sun dresses had given way to long sleeves and flowing, ankle-length dresses. Short, with a rounded body and small face, Wendy’s size was belied by clothes that began at her shoulders and fell draping to the floor. Her curly, dark red hair followed the same line, rippling down her back and ending just above her waist. Jennifer, whose knowledge of poetry had outlasted work on her dissertation, would have occasion to wonder in the coming weeks if Wendy hadn’t modeled herself on the Tennyson heroine behind her on the wall.
Jennifer herself was at her usual spot, the table by the Vermont Castings wood stove that, in the winter months, would reduce heating bills while contributing to what she thought of as the café’s fake authenticity. She was dressed, as usual, in dungarees, Indian cotton, and the sandals she insisted on wearing until the snow fell, but her short summer haircut was growing out, and her thick brown hair was starting to take on its haphazard winter unruliness.
“I remember you guys,” Jennifer was saying. “You were all practicing to be Leon Trotsky, and you polished your rhetoric and your steely gaze on girls like me who were stuffing envelopes for the cause.”
Beside her, Zachery Lerner grimaced.
“We weren’t really that bad. We were just showing off for each other.”
“Well, you could have fooled me. But anyway, I think it’s amazing that Williams College actually hired you to teach the impressionable young.”
Zach’s reputation had preceded him, not only at Williams but among anyone who remembered the decade just past: Berkeley in the late sixties, a first book on working class resistance to the war, three years in Leavenworth for refusing induction. Jennifer had recognized him, both by reputation and by the studious features that reminded her of all the budding revolutionaries she had always figured she would marry. His curly hair, already a premature salt-and-pepper, circled a rounded face with deep-set brown eyes and broad features. The lumberjack clothes that covered his burly frame would clearly win no friends among the board of trustees. His face, under horn-rimmed glasses, was that of a Russian Jewish revolutionary, which, at several generations removed, he was.
The front door of the café opened with a loud kick. Annie McGantry, Flanders’ organic farmer and herbalist, wedged the door with her shoulder and pulled a trolley topped by a large, covered barrel through the doorway and into the room. She spotted Jennifer and made her way to the table. She eased the barrel off the trolley, made sure that both the trolley and the barrel were standing safely upright, and threw herself into an empty chair.
“Goddamn. Can you believe I ran out of barrels?” she greeted them. “You should see the Kirby cukes this year—it’s like they don’t want to quit. I tell them, ‘Come on, how many pickles do we need? I need to finish canning the tomatoes, so stop putting out, you little sluts, and save some energy for next year.’ I’ve already brought four barrels to the co-op. I can’t start selling them for a week—they won’t be fit for eating. But at least they’re out of my hair. Anyway, here’s your barrel. I put them on your September bill.”
Jennifer groaned. “You brought them here when I can’t sell them for a week? Do you know how much we’ve got piled up in the kitchen already? Susan Broady delivered all the—”
“I promise you you’re not as crowded as the co-op is. I’m, like, buried. You know, I peed on the seeds before I planted them,” she reflected. “I think that’s why everything’s doing so well.”
Jennifer grimaced. “Don’t tell me what you put in the brine, okay?”
Zach regarded Annie with curiosity. Annie was pretty, with strong, if currently grimy features, and she looked to Zach’s urban eyes to be precisely the kind of unwashed earth mother he would have expected to find in the Berkshires. He glanced briefly at the blue jeans stuffed into Wellington boots, the small breasts and narrow hips, the muscled forearms and dirty fingernails. He found himself impressed by the uncompromising look in the light grey eyes.
“Annie manages the co-op.” Jennifer turned to Zach. “She has a back room filled with medicinal herbs, so watch out if you get a rash in her vicinity. Three hundred years ago, she would have been burned as a witch.”
“So,” Zach indicated the pickles. “Tell me what you put in the brine. I love pickles. Or is it a secret old family recipe?”
“My family? Shit. My mother’s only old family recipe was for spoon bread.”
“Well, my grandmother bought pickles in barrels on the Lower East Side. So, what’s in the brine?”
“Salt, of course. Pickling spices. Apple cider vinegar.”
“My bubbe would have been horrified at pickles made with apple cider vinegar. She would have put them in the same category as whole wheat bagels.”
Annie eyed him, suspecting that he was only half teasing her and not entirely clear about what was wrong with whole wheat bagels. Still, she liked his solidity, and she had always been partial to curly hair. He looked utterly unmovable. Annie took it as a challenge.
“She never tried my pickles, then,” Annie drawled. Her voice took on a Southern mountain twang that did not seem quite in keeping with the ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE TOO bumper sticker on her pick-up truck. But it had, Jennifer knew, been her mother tongue. Annie was the offspring of a hard-drinking truck farmer and a deaconess in the Bethel Baptist Church, her small soul the preferred battle ground of her parents’ adversarial marriage. In the end, her father had won. Annie had scraped the mud of Mount Haven, Arkansas, off her first pair of Birkenstocks, hitchhiked to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, and sworn she would never set foot in a church again.
“Honey, you come over one night, and I’ll teach you the art of making pickles, Annie-style. Hell, you can harvest the rest of the damned cucumbers while you’re at it. I could use the help, and you,” she regarded the intellectual paleness of his skin, “could use some time in the great outdoors.”
There was movement at the corner table. Samir Molchev rose from his chair and placed his book in a cloth satchel embossed with Indian appliqué. Jennifer watched him come toward them, his tall body graceful in jeans and a long, white, collarless shirt.
There really was such a thing, Jennifer decided, as being too good-looking for your own good. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. It was as if Samir knew that his body was perfect: broad, graceful shoulders, a soft swirl of hair just visible through his open collar. Soft black hair fell to his shoulders, framing pronounced cheekbones and black, slightly slanted Tartan eyes. All he needed, she thought, was a gold leaf halo and scarlet robes, and the resemblance to a Byzantine icon would be complete.
Beside her, Annie stiffened. “It’s late,” she announced. “I have to get back.” Annie rose, strode across the room and into the café kitchen, and returned with a ladle and an empty mason jar. She raised the lip on the barrel, extracted half a dozen pickles with her fingers, and placed them in the jar. She ladled brine over them, screwed the top onto the jar, and set the jar in front of Zach on the table. “Here you are. A sample. Let it sit for a week before you open it.”
Samir came up behind her. “Peace, all.” He raised his hands in greeting and eyed Zach with curiosity.
Annie ignored him. Zach reached out a hand.
“I’m Zach Lerner. Good to meet you.”
“Zachary Lerner?” Samir asked slowly. The black eyes blinked.
“Yes, that Zachary Lerner,” Jennifer put in. “Williams has stolen him away from Berkeley.”
“And you should hear the Eisenhower Professor of American Democracy on the subject,” Zach smiled. “‘Just what we need, another draft dodger on the faculty!’”
Samir regarded Zach in silence.
Annie stirred impatiently. “Jen, I gotta go. Where should I put the barrel?”
Samir pulled his eyes away from Zach. “Let me get that into the kitchen for you.”
Annie narrowed her eyes. “Don’t bother.”
“Peace, sister. I’m just trying to help you.”
“I’m not your sister, and I don’t need your help.”
“Just leave it, Annie,” Jennifer said hurriedly. “I’ll get someone to help me with it later.”
Annie turned back to Jennifer as if the exchange with Samir had never happened. “Thanks,” she drawled. “I’ve got chickens wanting their dinner.” She nodded to Zach. “Remember, don’t eat those pickles for a week.”
The three of them watched her has she grabbed onto the trolley and wheeled it purposefully out the door. None of them had any reason to suspect that forty-eight hours later one of them would be dead.
Murder Mysteries and 19th Century Novels
It's hard to find the nerve to write a novel when you’ve studied literature in graduate school. A lot of us do it, of course – professors of English writing novels are a well-worn cliché. But when you’ve spent all those years reading the world’s best writing, marveling at exquisite sentences that have haunted readers across the years, putting pen to paper (or, more likely, fingers to keyboard) requires a combination of humility and arrogance that is hard to come by. I solved that by deciding to write `genre fiction,’ in this case a murder mystery, because you can tell yourself that such fiction comes with lower expectations. You just need to think up a crime or two, identify the clues, drop them into the narrative, and do your best to keep the revelation (Aha!) somewhere between disappointingly obvious and infuriatingly unfair. If you’ve come up with relatable characters and an entertaining story, well, that just might be good enough.
Like my heroine, though, I am steeped in the 19th-century novel. I made Jennifer a once-and-future graduate student in part to give myself an excuse to hang out with the books I most love. To the annoyance of some (my sister is one of them), Jennifer is always spouting literature. She quotes “Paradise Lost” to one character. She argues poetry with another. She has Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan quotes plastered to the inside of her head. Most of all, she sees her world from the point of view of the great nineteenth-century women writers, Jane Austen and the Brontës, at times, but importantly, George Eliot.
In retrospect, I am very aware of how much Part of the Solution was influenced by 19th-century fiction. I meant to write my mystery as a period piece set in the late 1970s. I meant to write a comedy of manners poking loving but pointed fun at the foibles of us Boomers back in the day. Part of the Solution is all of those things. But I realize now that, like many Victorian novels, my story is also what is called a Bildungsroman, which Merriam-Webster defines as “a novel that deals with the formative years of the main character and, in particular, with the character's psychological development and moral education.” Jennifer is not the same person at the end of the story than she was in the beginning. She has been tempered by both love and fear, and she has had to make a moral decision that both educates and haunts her.
At twenty-eight, Jennifer is older than most heroes and heroines of 19th-century novels written in English. (Anne Elliot, Jane Austen’s oldest heroine, was also twenty-eight and was considered practically geriatric!) And the ending is more bittersweet than is typical. The world is older, too. The novel is set at the very tail end of the counterculture, two years before the election of Ronald Reagan, in the twilight of one particular dream of how the world might be changed. Part of the Solution, in its way, is a story of the end of innocence, or at least of one person’s innocence. And it’s the story of the moment in which a still-young person settles into a particular kind of selfhood and becomes who they are always going to be.
I had a very good time writing Part of the Solution, and I hope it shows. I got to be twenty-eight again, to develop a crush on an inappropriate love object, to get the giggles and stoned munchies on marijuana (well, I still do some of that), and to quote Bob Dylan lines to my heart’s content. But I also got to write a Bildungsroman of sorts, albeit a sometimes-somber one. I don’t think I realized that while I was writing, but it pleases me now.
Speaking of the Bildungsroman, by the way, nobody I know has caught the literary reference in the last line of the novel. It’s from one of the greatest of Victorian novels. If you get it, oh lovers of 19th-century fiction, please write and tell me.
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About the book:
1 - There is a lot of music playing in the background in the novel. Why did you think that was important?
They say that taste and smell are the senses that affect us most deeply because they are the most primal ones, part of the reptilian brain. I think that hearing can be equally powerful, specifically hearing the music that meant the most to us as we came of age.
When I decided to write about the counterculture, I knew that I needed a soundtrack playing in the background.I knew that the music would connect readers of my generation to their own memories of those days. And I wanted younger readers to get a flavor of how central music was to the ongoing life of the sixties and seventies.
In effect, the music is a character in the novel. There are many moments which the songs in the background wind through the characters’ feelings and thoughts. At key moments, they even talk back to the music, so that the lyrics are embedded in the story as part of the dialogue.
2 - Why did you set the story in the late 70s rather than earlier in the counterculture?
I meant the novel in part as a period piece, a comedy of manners that pokes loving fun at some of the foibles of the counterculture. But the world in which the novel takes place is changing. The war in Vietnam is over. They heyday of the Civil Rights movement is over. We’re two years away from the election of Ronald Reagan. Both the characters and the world are – and feel -- a little bit older than in the days of Woodstock and Haight Ashbury.
My characters are floating through life in some ways, but they aren’t kids anymore. Some of them deeply committed to real, grown-up jobs in which their idealism is being translated into serious work in the world. Others of them – Jennifer and Ford especially – are confronted with decisions that will determine who they are going to be for the rest of their lives. I think those moments, in which you do something that you can’t ever undo, are fascinating and important. That’s one of the things that the book is about.
About me:
3 - If you could be a character in any book, what book would it be?
Morgan Le Fey, definitely. Morgan is King Arthur’s half-sister, a priestess of the Mother Goddess, and the ruler of the mystical Isle of Avalon. She has magical powers, and she fights to keep magic alive even as Camelot is destroyed and the knights of the Round Table are scattered to the winds. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley is by far the best modern rendition of Morgan, but I love the older, medieval versions best. There are Arthurian romances in which the old Celtic mythic traditions keep coming through a supposedly Christian story, and Morgan Le Fey represents that.
In Part of the Solution, the main character’s last name is Morgan. I didn’t make the connection consciously for a long time. But Jennifer, like Morgan, is trying to keep magic alive and preserve her community as the world is changing.
4 - If you could live your life over again, what would you do for a living?
I always thought that I’d love to own a bar in a dissipated port of call. There would be a dusty street right outside the door and a beach on the other side of the street. During the day, I’d sit at a corner table and write books. At night, I’d drink local wine and play poker with the patrons.
I’ve travelled a lot, mostly in the summer because I lived by the academic calendar. Every year, at the end of August, I’d be standing at the gate at the airport waiting to board the plane, and I’d think: “Walk away. Go do something else. Go open that bar.” It’s too late now. All the interesting writers and artists I figured would be my patrons are probably dead of alcoholism by now, and the people my age who are flocking to those places now have bad backs and a Netflix addiction. So Jennifer and her Café Galadriel is as close as I’ve ever come.
Elana Michelson is a New York City native who has encamped with her wife Penny to the Hudson Valley, where she writes, reads, gardens, and volunteers with local social justice organizations. After thirty-five years as a professor, she has put down a beloved career of academic writing (and student papers) in favor of writing murder mysteries. She earned a PhD in English from Columbia University, but gained her knowledge of the life and times of Part of the Solution from, well, having been there.
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Great guest post! Thanks so much for sharing!