Heidi Hackford has a PhD in American history and finds inspiration in her career at history museums, including Monticello, where she worked on the papers of Thomas Jefferson. She is fascinated by the unexpected twists and turns of the past and loves to incorporate them in her fiction. Her Puritan murder mystery On a Stony Place is available on Amazon Kindle and she blogs about how history turns up in everyday life in her newsletter “Living With History,” which lives at https://heidihackford.substack.com. Heidi lives in Half Moon Bay, California, with her husband, a fellow historian, and a very old cat.

What does it take to destroy the place you love most in the world? Though deeply ashamed of her slaveholding heritage, Temple Preston’s sense of duty and bittersweet memories tie her to Folly Park, her family’s crumbling ancestral plantation in Virginia. Now a cash-strapped tourist attraction, Folly Park was once the home of Confederate General Thomas Temple Smith, a southern war hero who died under mysterious circumstances. Temple is pursuing a plan to ensure the house museum’s future when her summer research assistant, a Black PhD student, uncovers a remarkable secret: the general’s wife gave birth to a biracial baby while he was away fighting in the Civil War. This discovery turns Temple’s quiet, insulated life upside down, and in the ensuing weeks more revelations about the past fuel the growing tension in Temple’s hometown as a Black activist and Temple’s own race-baiting brother square off in a local campaign for mayor. Faced with threats and betrayal, Temple discovers who she really is—and how much she’s willing to lose to tell the truth.

Folly Park explores how race, place, and history intertwine to shape our identities, and the power love and friendship have to help us find our better selves.