Author's Message

The first line of The Viognier Vendetta is a quote from Ernest Hemingway: Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk because it will teach you to keep your mouth shut. Lucie Montgomery, who runs her family’s vineyard in the middle of Virginia’s bucolic horse and hunt country gets a phone call from an estranged friend proposing a reunion in Washington, D.C. during the cherry blossom festival. Lucie is troubled by the vague explanation for the out-of-the-blue call, but she’s had a few glasses of wine so she agrees to the meeting. When her friend disappears the next day, Lucie suspects a set up and it’s not long before she’s dragged into a deadly cat-and-mouse game being played in the corridors of power of the nation’s capital.

Though my books are set in Virginia, Lucie’s winery is located in a region that’s still considered part of the broad commuter swath that makes up metropolitan Washington, D.C. It’s a city I know well, having first fallen in love with it on a family trip over Thanksgiving when I was about ten years old. I’m not sure what triggered that long ago enchantment, but I have hazy memories of Arlington Cemetery at sunset, a breathtaking view from the top of the Washington Monument, the elegance of the Capitol dome on the skyline, and a really seedy apartment-hotel in Old Town Alexandria where I shared a bed with my younger brothers. In those days they called it “Potomac Fever” and I had a bad case.

I knew I would return there to attend university and I did—I got my B.A. in Political Science (what else?) and later my M.A. in International Relations. For eight years I worked on Capitol Hill as an economist at the U.S. Senate during a more innocent time when it really was “The People’s Capitol.” In those days you were free to roam throughout the corridors of the House and Senate office buildings, picnic on the east lawn under the enormous old trees and—with some restrictions—wander around the Capitol itself. On some days when the Senate was in session late, I used to slip out to the west balcony of the Capitol and sit on the balustrade watching the sunset over the mall. 

I met my husband in graduate school and we were married on the outskirts of the city at the historic Audubon House one Indian summer night just before Halloween. That evening it was so warm we moved all the tables and chairs for the reception out to the terrace and ate and drank and danced under a fat harvest moon. A year later, my oldest son was born at Georgetown University Hospital—and a few months after that, my husband’s job as a foreign correspondent took us to Europe.

Over the years—decades—Washington has been the place to which we always returned from Geneva, Moscow, London. Though I now live in suburban Virginia, I’m often in the city; my husband still works there. Don’t ask me why, but I get the same goose bumps I did as a kid each time I drive into town across one of the Potomac bridges when that iconic skyline of the monuments and the Capitol comes into view. 

Though the city has changed in the twenty-five years since I worked there—especially since 9/11 when it seems to have become a well-barricaded fortress—I knew it was inevitable that sooner or later I would find a way to weave the capital into Lucie’s story as well. For my research I went back to all the old places—the Capitol, the monuments, the Library of Congress, the Arboretum, the Botanic Gardens—on a real nostalgia tour. And, of course, since it takes place during cherry blossom season, I dragged my husband and youngest son out of bed very early one April morning to be at the Tidal Basin as the sun was coming up.

I hope you enjoy The Viognier Vendetta, but I’d really like to hear some of your stories and special memories about your own visits to Washington. (Based on the number of tourists we get, I’m sure almost all of you have been here at least once!) Drop me a line at my website at www.ellencrosby.com or write a note on the wall of my Facebook page at EllenCrosbyBooks.