The unsung heroes of our society are the ordinary women with neither style nor beauty who take up the slack every single day...

I wrote the final draft of Dark Lie in Chile, South America, with bronchitis. My husband took me there to visit his native country, but I spent the vacation mostly sitting up in bed writing Dark Lie on my laptop computer, coughing, and cocooned in my alpaca fleece hoodie because Chile was chilly. Uniformly. And for some inexplicable Chilean reason it was necessary for the windows always to be wide open so that it was cold indoors and out.

While I did not appreciate this local custom at the time, it might have been a fortunate circumstance that I was sick, because I was writing about a chronically ill protagonist. Dorrie White, the middle-aged woman who becomes the unlikely hero of Dark Lie, has a severe case of lupus.

To add another fortunate circumstance, one of my husband’s Chileno relatives happens to be married to a gringa like me, and she has lupus. It was from the Chilean connection and years of friendship with her that I had learned about lupus, and appreciated why its name is derived from the Latin word for wolf. Lupus ravages. I saw for myself its unpredictable flare-ups and fatigue, its red, rough skin rash, the effects of the steroids used to treat it, and the many ways in which it manages to lower a woman’s self-esteem and mess up her life.

In Dark Lie, Dorrie’s marriage remains childless because of her lupus, and she yearns for the baby she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager. She locates this child, Juliet, only to see a predatory male abduct her and drive away with her. And then Dorrie takes action.

For a long time now (ever since my stint as a mom and housewife), I have been convinced that the most frequent unsung heroes of our society are the ordinary women with neither style nor beauty who take up the slack every single day, doing what needs to be done no matter what it costs them. Dorrie is one of these. Her immediate, instinctive reaction to rescue Juliet leads her deeper and deeper into the dangerous shadows of her own past, exposing the lies that have sickened her own psyche.

My bronchitis eventually went away, of course. No big deal. But being held captive by sickness in a cold, foreign land seemed to give me some extra depth of insight. I realized that Dorrie’s lupus, while a practical problem, is also symbolic of predation in Dark Lie and in our lives. Everywhere women go they are stalked by a wolf pack of domestic violence, rape, abduction, even murder. Dorrie White confronts the same wolves that eat at many women, and that comprise part of our society’s “dark lie.”

Dark Lie by Nancy Springer, NAL, November 2012, $14.00

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Holiday Issue #127.