Easy Innocence by Libby Fischer Hellmann

Not that she’s above a little writerly head-knocking. Her daughter was starting high school at the time, and the thought of how far a kid might go to get the “material goods that are badges of acceptance” provoked her “to pick up the carpet and see what’s underneath.” The mystery genre is a wonderful way to address social issues, she notes-often better than “knocking someone over the head” with an op-ed piece. Hellmann says the novel grew out of fear. In Hellmann’s version a girl is killed, a mentally defective man is rousted for the crime, and Georgia Davis is set on the trail of what really happened. The land of expansive green lawns and sparkling shopping malls is hardly the traditional setting for crime lit, but, Hellmann says, “evil knows no boundaries.”Įasy Innocence takes as a springboard the infamous 2003 “powder-puff” hazing incident at Glenbrook North High School, which sent five junior girls to the emergency room and made fodder for weeks of TV newscasts. The books are mostly set in the northern suburbs, which she now calls home and considers “addictive”: Ellie, who just happens to keep stumbling across murder cases, is a documentary film producer living in Northbrook, and Georgia’s an excommunicated Evanston cop. It’s the first of a planned new series featuring private eye Georgia Davis, a character Hellmann spun off from her four-book Ellie Foreman series, which began in 2002 with An Eye for Murder. Her fifth novel, Easy Innocence, was published in April by Wisconsin-based Bleak House Books. But Hellmann thinks that the combination-a news background and a new perspective as an outsider in a strange city-laid the groundwork for her career in detective fiction. Burnout had led her to quit her last broadcast job, as a night desk editor with NBC News, and she’d come here to work for public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. native had spent eight years in broadcast journalism on the east coast, including a stint with PBS’s McNeil/Lehrer Report.

When she wheeled her Corvair Monza off the Skyway, headed north, and hit Lake Shore Drive for the first time 30 years ago, the D.C. Libby Fischer Hellmann didn’t come to Chicago to write mysteries. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.

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Easy Innocence by Libby Fischer Hellmann