No matter what you think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, it is a spectacular tribute to the ageless power and grandeur of myths—these ancient stories that continue to fascinate us. They’re so rich we don’t just retell them—we reinterpret them for the modern world.

If you follow the geography of Greek myths, you see that the Mediterranean is a map of warnings. I’ve been traveling that landscape all year—on the page, in my mind and imagination—flying like Icarus near the sun, sailing like Odysseus between rocks and whirlpools, descending like Persephone into the deep dark. A year of following my characters across the Mediterranean has taught me that every great myth has three things: a place, a warning, and a crossroads.

Many myths are set in specific places.

In the novel I’m writing now, every port my characters land in has a myth already waiting at the dock. For example, Matala, Crete. It was a hippie paradise and still bears a sign:

Welcome to Matala

Today is life

Tomorrow never comes

But this city was carved into ancient cliffs, with rock-cut tombs and caves that lead down to a crescent beach on the Libyan Sea where Zeus, disguised as a bull, captured Europa, a Phoenician princess, and seduced her in one of the caves. From that union came Minos, the Minotaur, the Labyrinth—a whole bloodline of story out of one cave, but they are anchored in this curve of sand, and nowhere else. When you walk along that stretch of beach, you can understand the power and mystery of how it must have appeared thousands of years ago, almost as if you were at the edge of the known world. The warning may have been: Don’t trust gods, even (or especially) when they’re disguised as animals.

Matala

But every country has its myths—and warnings.

My novel, Zigzag Girl, has its share of myths set in Atlantic City and the New Jersey Pine Barrens—a million acres of wilderness and ghosts, and of course, the Jersey Devil. The story goes like this: in 1735, a woman named Mother Leeds discovered she was pregnant with her thirteenth child. When the time came, the exhausted woman cried out: “Let it be the Devil, then!”

The baby was born human. But he instantly transformed into a creature with horns, wings, hooves, and a tail. A grotesque monster, he still prowls the Barrens in search of people to terrify and attack. The warnings are: Don’t go alone into the deep Pine Barrens at night, and definitely, Don’t mock or challenge the Devil.

The night I visited the Jersey Devil’s graveyard, where it’s said that he hides and sleeps for fifty years and then rises again to terrorize, the air crackled with blue motes, the ground hissed sharp and snake-tongued. What haunted me most: the Devil was BORN HUMAN. It’s a tale of transformation—from human to monster. And that day, in the place where the Devil slept, the dark heart of the murderer in ZIGZAG GIRL burst into life, and I knew what I needed to write.

Jersey Devil, Daniel Eskridge

Each myth is a crossroads

The Jersey Devil’s crossroads was the moment of transformation: from human to devil. Myths are filled with moments so powerful they last forever: like Persephone running from Demeter and following Hades into the Underworld. Demeter may have been the world’s greatest mother, but sometimes a daughter can’t bear the sound of her mother’s voice. Maybe it hurts too much, twanging an inner chord that aches. It suffocates her, and she needs to breathe. Persephone ate four pomegranate seeds while she was underground. Was she tricked? Or did she eat those four seeds deliberately—buying herself four months a year in the one place her mother’s voice couldn’t reach? The one place she could hear the sound of her own voice.

She became Queen of the Underworld—her story endlessly fascinates. Myths pit humans against gods, and though the deck is stacked, and humans rarely win, they put up a valiant fight. That may be what inspires us to return to myths again and again—in search of what it means to be human in a dangerous world.

Here is a prompt that I hope encourages you to create your own myth:

1) Start with a favorite myth.

2) Reimagine it. Come at it from the point of view of another character, perhaps someone on the sidelines. Let them recount what really happened. It can differ from the official version.

3) Find the crossroads: the turning point. The moment of choice or surrender. For example, write your version of Persephone’s four pomegranate seeds: Was she tricked by Hades? Or was it a deliberate choice?

……

News…

The first time I saw this wild and magical film, I Know Where I’m Going, I knew that one day I needed to go to Scotland. And now, it’s happening! I’m going to Bloody Scotland in Stirling, where I’ll have the opportunity to be part of Crime in the Spotlight. I’ll read from ZIGZAG GIRL at an event with thriller authors, Greg Hurwitz and Robert Bryndza. If you havew any Edinburgh tips, please let me know!

It’s been a busy summer with Zigzag Girl— bookstore events, MFA workshops, and book clubs (in person and on Zoom). There’s a Reader’s Discussion Guide on my website. If you’re interested in inviting me to your book group, please contact me. I love to talk magic, murder, and mystery!

In September I’ll go to Scotland, and in October to Calgary to attend Bouchercon, where I’ll moderate a panel on the power of place: rural vs urban settings in crime fiction. I’m sure we’ll talk about the myths each place holds. I’ll also be signing copies of their new anthology, in which I have a story: “Murder at the Border Café.” If any of you will be there, please let me know!

A few things I really enjoyed this past month: these Apple series: Widow’s Bay, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, and Sugar... the mystery novel, Heather, by Caitlin Mullen, also set in the Pine Barrens... the Tarot Card exhibit at the Morgan Library in NYC—evocative and inspiring, brought back memories of the year I gave Tarot readings for a living! I may write about that in a future newsletter.

Meanwhile I’ll leave you with a card I deeply love because it symbolizes new beginnings, pure potential, and a leap of faith into the unknown... and as the film, I Know Where I’m Going, shows us: sometimes it’s best not to know where we’re going, sometimes we all need to be a bit foolish...

I wish you all a happy August. See you in September!

Ruth

Twelve years ago I raked salt in Cadiz, learned stencil graffiti in Berlin, danced salsa in a Havana nightclub, studied percussion at a samba school in Rio, and communed with a goddess in Kildare and an orisha in Bahia.

That was one voyage, my third Semester at Sea experience. I climbed down the gangway of the MV Explorer for the last time and set foot on land in the USA after four months away. During that time I taught students and traveled to 14 countries, a whirl of impressions and experiences that still dizzies, enchants and excites me. During my first voyage we sailed across the Pacific Ocean, and during the second, we sailed the Mediterranean—which inspired the novel I’m working on now.

I tasted new foods, listened to live music of all kinds, danced my heart out, and talked to people with every language in my power—words, gestures, smiles.

I travel to connect—to connect with gods, myths and people through food, music and history. Even more, to find the myths, foods, songs and stories that connect us rather than divide us.

To that end, I’ve compiled a list of 9 travel guidelines, a Tao of Travel inspired by the great traveler, Paul Theroux. I hope they inspire you to create your own list ... and to take off on a trip yourself. Happy Voyages in 2026!

And if you're not traveling this summer, these tips work just as well at home. Take a field trip in your own city or neighborhood—visit the street market, get lost in a part of town you've never explored, sit on a bench and watch. See it with the eyes of a traveler. You'll be surprised what you find.

1. Walk alone. Get lost.

Walk or take a bus or subway with no destination, and then gradually wind your way back to where you began. Linger. Take your time. Once I did this in Rome and stumbled into the Forum and felt I’d traveled thousands of years into the past.

Lisbon is another great walking city—you turn a corner and have no idea where you’ll find yourself. A narrow, shabby street in which every building is covered with graffiti opens onto a vast sunny marble square lined with columns and cafés. A set of impossibly steep stone steps leads to an ancient cathedral. Winding cobbled streets, tiled Moorish archways, shadowy stone corridors and courtyards bump against weighty stone castles and fortresses. Laundry hangs from balconies—a pair of harem pants swaying in front of a doorway beckons me into a shop where I learn they belong to the upstairs neighbor. Over another shop, a man sits on his balcony, plays his guitar and sings. I realize that I love cities with balconies—they merge the inside and the outside, and invite the passerby into the street drama.

2. Eat.

What locals eat. Whenever possible. Some of the greatest meals I’ve had were when I followed people to cafés and restaurants or asked for recommendations. One of the best falafel sandwiches I had was in Paris in the Marais district. I just followed the crowd and waited in line and then sat on a bench at the park and ate my sandwich like everyone else.

3. The empty shelves and the full ones.

Browse a street market or supermarket. My first stop in every country: street market, souk or souq, grocery store. You can learn so much from the items that are (or are not) stocked. The empty shelves in St. Petersburg and Havana, the enticing windows and bursting produce in Barcelona and Naples ... the local specialties. Buying a fresh rope of Cevizli Sucuk—walnuts threaded on a string, dipped in sweet grape molasses, and hardened for a sweet, gummy texture—and eating it with others in a square in Istanbul.... Not a market, but on a cold, rainy day in Dublin, I ducked into a whiskey shop, where the proprietor took one look at me and poured a shot of Scotch and watched me drink it. “Not Jameson?” I asked. “Naah, I gave you the good stuff, lass.”

4. Write it down.

Keep a travel journal. You will never have a second chance to have a first impression of a place. Write it down while the sensory details are fresh in your mind. Here’s a brief entry from St. Petersburg:

Nevsky Prospect, and my favorite shop so far—okay, the only shop I’ve entered besides a souvenir shop so efficient and prepared for swarms of global tourists it’s frightening. This is the store we all dreamed of as children—a confectioner’s shop with large glass windows in which mechanical figures dance. Enter from a cold, gray day into fragrant warmth and soft music … and the sight of exquisite pastries, extravagant chocolates, and desserts in an Old World atmosphere. I can imagine princesses dropping in for hot chocolate and marzipan fruit. We were given 10 minutes inside, and I had to be cruelly pulled away.

Note: We returned to Nevsky Prospect at night, where a long-haired electric guitarist played “Beat It,” while a pony-tailed artist sketched him, people smiled, a couple kissed, and the candy store beckoned and twinkled. Two friends and I raced across the street like desert voyagers toward a mirage. In a race against time, our minutes of freedom ticking before we had to return to the ship, we ordered cappuccinos and a dark chocolate éclair topped with a colorful marzipan figure of an Art Nouveau woman. She melted on our tongues.

5. Be a tourist.

Do something touristy, at least once. Go to a traditional fado concert in Lisbon, attend a flamenco show in Seville, take a guided tour through a museum or city you’re curious about. Let people show you highlights of their culture and history. In Havana I toured historic Hotel Nacional with Estela, the diminutive guide who was eighteen during the Cuban Missile Crisis. She showed me notorious Room 214—where Frank Sinatra stayed and used the secret entrance to Meyer Lansky’s room—and the underground bunker where posters displayed photos of Fidel Castro with Khrushchev. “This is my Fidel,” sighed Estela. “I wish they showed these pictures of him all over town, not the ones when he got older.”

6. Follow the ghost.

In Old Havana, I walked into the room in the pink Hotel Ambos Mundos, where Hemingway lived ($3/night during low season, $5 high season) and wrote. And drank and lived hard. Peering over his typewriter (under glass), I pictured him writing terse, taut sentences, tossing adjectives and adverbs out the window like small wriggling fish. Around the corner at La Bodeguita del Medio, a cozy neighborhood bar that serves up mojitos, cigars, and hot music, I toasted him with a mojito, and then followed his shadow down the pedestrian street of Obispo, lined with cafes, shops, churro stands, and musicians, to the swirling neon sign of El Floridita, the delightfully retro bar known for its daiquiris. I sat next to his smiling bronze bust—on his favorite stool, his back to the wall—and over a daiquiri named for him, I asked what he thought of this country of old men who remained forever young. He didn’t answer, maybe because behind us, trapped in his own black and white myth, Fidel eavesdropped.

7. Gracias! Danke! Obrigada! Efcharistó!

Pre-voyage: learn basic phrases for each new country. Read a bit of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by noted authors of the country. Listen to its music. I entered Rio through samba, and with every step I heard the sounds of a tradition so rich and powerful the roots spread across the Atlantic Ocean from the coasts of Africa to Brazil, and then ricocheted back to Europe and the States, where it influenced generations of musicians … and one teen girl who sat in a movie theater, watching the classic film by Claude Lelouch, A Man and a Woman, for the third time—not just for the love story, but for the song Pierre Barouh sings to Anouk Aimée as he climbs stairs behind her swaying hips as she turns back to smile at him. He sings the words of “Samba Saravah,” by Brazilian songwriter Vinicius de Moraes, an ode to samba’s African roots and the female heart of its rhythm: she came from Bahia, centuries of dancing and sorrow.

8. Put down your phone and pen.

I know, I know, but you need to look up and see directly with your eyes, too. Sit for an hour on a bench or at a café and watch people. Listen to them. Absorb their rhythm. This is the hardest rule on the list for me. I’m a writer. My instinct is to narrate everything. But some moments refuse to be transcribed. They only exist if you’re inside them.

9. I hope you remember me too.

When we travel, we take home impressions, souvenirs, memories. But what do we leave behind? Did we connect with anyone who will remember us? Traveling gives us the chance to leave a part of ourselves everywhere we go, not only to be touched by others, but also to touch other lives.

And if you need a book for the plane or beach, please consider carrying Zigzag Girl with you! She’s great company!

See you in August!

Ruth

Hear me out.

When a magician shakes out a silk scarf and a dove rises from it, we glimpse the grace and flutter of wings in the ripples of the silk before the bird ever appears. The idea of the bird was always there in the scarf. It only took the magician to show us how to see it. Transformation, it turns out, is often another word for revelation.

Art is the lie that lets us see the deeper truth—and by art, I mean both magic and fiction.

Start with Cinderella. There are more than three hundred versions of her story told around the world, which tells you something on its own: we keep needing this one. My favorites are the versions where the Prince sees her before any transformation at all—a girl in rags, her face streaked with ash—and sees her anyway. Sees the nobility the ashes were hiding. It takes the gaze of love, which is its own kind of magic, to look through the cinders to the truth underneath. No one makes Cinderella a princess. The magic only removes the ash. She was royal all along—like the bird, already there in the silk.

Houdini comes at the same secret from the opposite side. He was born Ehrich Weiss, a rabbi’s son, in his own kind of rags: poor, unschooled, barely over five feet. He did not wait for a fairy godmother. He removed the ashes himself. He took his name from the great French conjuror Robert-Houdin, adding an i, as if to say like him, only more—and then spent his life becoming worthy of it. He let police and Scotland Yard lock him in their cells and chain him inside their boxes, and he walked out of every one. “My brain is the key that sets me free,” he said. Not his hands. Not a hidden pick. His mind. The freedom was already in him before the lock ever closed.

Houdini gave me Elvis Jones, the elusive, charismatic magician at the heart of my novel Zigzag Girl. Elvis performs an illusion with a seagull—“trained, not tamed”—that stuns even Lucy Moon, a magician herself, raised in a family of magicians. His act with the bird sets Lucy’s imagination free, and I hope it sets ours free too. Watching alongside her, we see the bird in the theater, and the man in the bird, and then, the bird in the man.

And we stand with the crowd at the East River on a July day in 1912, as a short, powerfully built man is handcuffed, leg-ironed, and nailed into a heavy packing crate weighted with two hundred pounds of lead, so it will sink fast. Police watch. Reporters watch. The crate goes over the side and down. Hold that moment of dread, because it is also the plainest truth we know: the odds are impossible, the box is locked, the water is closing over our heads.

And then—less than two minutes later—a head breaks the surface. The man himself, free, alive, rises from the dark water, the locked chest still on the river bottom. Our hearts stop. How? And then the cheers come, because the answer matters less than the fact of it: he beat it. And if he can, maybe we can too. We are stronger than we think. As Elvis tells his audience: “When Houdini broke free from prison cells and chains, he showed us no lock can hold us down.”

But not every illusion tells the truth, and Houdini knew it better than anyone. He spent his last years hunting the spirit mediums—the séance artists who took the grieving by the hand and promised to reach the dead—and exposing their tricks one by one. A medium’s table and a magician’s stage look alike in the dark. The difference is that the magician says this is wonder, and you know it isn’t real, while the medium says this is real, and charges you for the lie. The fairy tale knows this fraud too—it’s the stepsisters cramming their feet into the glass slipper, faking a transformation to hide who they are. But the slipper fits only the girl who needs no forcing. Real magic reveals. The con conceals. Art lies to you so that you’ll see; the con lies so that you won’t.

So the girl in the ashes who was always a princess and the penniless boy who made himself the greatest magician in the world are the same story told twice—both about hope, and the nerve to fight for it. And both run on the same clock. The magic is never safe. Cinderella has until midnight; one stroke more and the gown is rags again, the truth shoved back under its disguise. Houdini has only the air in his lungs. Take the danger away and you take the meaning with it—a transformation that cannot fail reveals nothing. It’s the ticking clock and the held breath, the chance that this time the lock won’t give, that make us lean forward and care. We watch them suspended between trapped and free, and we recognize it, because it is the moment we live in too.

This is what magic and fiction do. They add nothing to the world that wasn’t already in it. They clear away what was hiding the truth and hand it back, so we can finally see it. The lie of the story—this never happened, there is no dove, the girl was only ever in rags—is the silk scarf. The truth it reveals is the bird rising from the folds. Everyone who has ever closed a book and thought yes, that’s exactly how it feels has watched the dove lift from the scarf, the princess rise from the ashes, the free man break the dark water.

The bird was always there. We only needed someone to show us how to see it.

Personal Notes & Updates

May was a beautiful blur—podcast interviews, readings, events, and ThrillerFest, where Zigzag Girl was a finalist for Best Standalone of the Year. It didn’t win, but to stand on that list at all was a genuine honor. Zigzag Girl was also a finalist for Best Mystery in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards—good company on both counts, and I’m grateful.

My short essay on magic and crime writing, “Sleight of Crime,” just went up in the International Thriller Writers’ journal, The Big Thrill: thebigthrill.org/2026/05/sleight-of-crime

June looks quieter, though things have a way of appearing out of thin air. I’ll be doing my first book club event for Zigzag Girl, and I can’t wait to talk with readers. If you’re in a book club and would like me to join—in person or virtually—just drop me a line. There’s a Book Club Discussion Guide on the Zigzag Girl page at ruthsetton.com to get you started. I’d happily talk magic, mystery, and Atlantic City all night.

And one favor, if you’ll indulge me. If Zigzag Girl found you and stayed with you, a few words left as a review on Amazon or Goodreads do more than I can easily explain—reviews are the trapdoor and the hidden wire of a book’s life, the unseen mechanism that lets strangers find their way to it. A line or two is its own small act of magic, and I’m grateful for every one.

Meanwhile, I’m building a Zigzag Girl playlist on Spotify, I have a teetering stack of books I keep promising to read, and there’s a new novel pulling at my sleeve.

Wishing you a happy, healthy June. And may you find the bird hiding in your own silk scarf.

Ruth

In magic, the prestige is the final act: the moment the trick resolves, the woman steps out of the box whole, the audience gasps. But to me, the best part of an illusion is the turn—that middle space where everything is in the air, where the impossible hasn’t landed yet, where you don’t know how it ends.

That’s where I am right now. Zigzag Girl is out in the world. Essays are live, podcasts have dropped, interviews are done. ThrillerFest is next week, and the ITW Award ceremony is just days away. Everything is mid-flight, spinning—and I’m trying to enjoy the turn. Not rush to the prestige. Not worry about what comes next. Just stand in the middle of the trick and feel it.

But isn’t this what life is? There’s always a next step, a next hurdle. We reach one point, and another appears. I make daily lists, crossing things off as I go—it gives me a small, satisfying sense of control. Maybe you know that feeling.

And yet, we’re told to be present. To stay in the moment. It’s not easy when your mind is already reaching for the next thing.

So what if we stayed in the between for a moment? Between the first act and the final act. What if we let ourselves be there—just for a beat? To look up, notice what’s around us, and feel the strangeness of not knowing how it all turns out.

I’m trying.

Years ago, I wrote a story about a fourteen-year-old girl. I called it “living in the between”:

In another second, everything is going to shift and change, but right now, I’m in the place I love most: the between. Before anything happens. On the threshold. At the point before you turn the last page and solve the mystery. Before the final kiss on the screen when the lovers clamp onto each other forever. Please let me stay here forever, safely tucked between past and future, in a present that never moves on.

Soon enough, everything will change. It always does. The world will return full force and demand our attention. But for this moment, we’re in that space where the ending hasn’t been written yet—and everything is still possible.

And here’s what I want to ask you—because this newsletter has always been a conversation, not a broadcast:

What’s your turn? What’s mid-air in your life right now—the project, the decision, the leap that hasn’t landed yet?

Hit reply and tell me. I’d love to know.

While I’m in the turn, here’s some of what’s been unfolding:

• On CrimeReads
  “That’s a Honey of an Anklet: Women, Noir, & the Art of Writing Dark”
  An essay that’s been a lifetime in the works:
  https://crimereads.com/noir-writing-women/

• On Writer Unboxed
  “What Noir Can Teach Any Writer”
  If you don’t yet know how much I love noir, this will make it clear:
  https://writerunboxed.com/2026/04/04/what-noir-can-teach-any-writer/

• On Andrea Bartz’s Substack
  “Being Sawed in Half Taught Me How to Write a Thriller”
  Not exactly fun to live through—but very fun to write.

• Podcast
  “The Long Road to Publishing” with Eva Langston
  We talk magic, screenwriting, and the winding path to publication.

• Interview on JMWW
  “Sleight of Hand” (with Curtis Smith)
  https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/sleight-of-hand-an-interview-with-ruth-knafo-setton-by-curtis-smith/

  ---

  And for locals—two upcoming events. I’d love to see you there:

• May 16, 1–3 PM
  Book signing at Barnes & Noble, Promenade Shops at Center Valley

• May 21, 6 PM
  Reading from Zigzag Girl at the Ice House, South Bethlehem

Have a wonderful May. I have a feeling we’ll connect again before the month is out—but in the meantime, enjoy the between… and stay in touch.

Ruth

This past month in Spain, I saw two ancient figures that stayed with me. The first was a small stone mother goddess at Madrid’s National Archaeological Museum. She sits, grinding maize on a metate while cradling a baby—the ultimate multi-tasker, thousands of years before the term existed. Some of these indigenous goddesses have sharp, fierce, protruding teeth, a stark reminder of their dual nature: they give life and they devour it, create and destroy in the same breath.

Walking among them, I felt a quiet awe. These powerful, solid women of earth and sky made me think of the Judean Pillar figurines being fashioned at almost the exact same time — around 800 BCE—in Jerusalem. Across distant continents, images of the female divine seemed to emerge simultaneously, as though humanity had awakened to the same deep, shared longing.

The second figure that haunted me from the same museum was the Lady of Elche. Her face is serenely beautiful, lips still faintly touched with red pigment, radiating the quiet authority of priestess, goddess, or queen. But when you walk behind her, you discover a large, smooth cavity hollowed into her back. In 2011, scientists confirmed what it once held: traces of cremated human bone ash, over 2,500 years old. She was a funerary urn. She literally carried the dead inside her body.

Later, in the town of Toledo, I wandered the narrow cobblestone streets of the ancient Jewish Quarter. No Jews remain there. But I felt the layers of history pressing close—ancestors, resilience, exile, and whispers from the past. I stood in the square where Jewish women once brought their challah to the community oven to bake for Shabbat.

In an old synagogue—now, a church known as the Synagogue of the White Virgin—I sat in the women’s section in the balcony and imagined a girl of fourteen, restless and curious, sitting there with her mother and grandmother. Later, I bent over and peered through wooden rafters that had once been the roof of the synagogue. I imagined the girl reaching up between the slats. I crouched and held out my hand. Our fingers touched. I felt a spark of light and heat. In that moment, the line between past and present felt remarkably thin.

As I walked through the Jewish Quarter, I kept imagining this girl. I walked above her, but I felt her presence beneath the stones, as if she were still walking there. I stopped in the square where the Inquisitors, wearing white-coned hats, publicly tortured and killed Jews. An aside: Whenever men decide they need to wear coned hats—from the Inquisition to the Ku Klux Klan—it’s never a good idea.

Some Jews managed to escape, among them, my ancestors. They sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar to the coast of Morocco, where many generations later, I was born.

As I write these words, it’s the eve of Passover — the holiday that commemorates the Exodus from slavery to freedom, a story so powerful that countless people throughout history have borrowed it as their own banner of hope when times are dark.

It’s also a perfect metaphor for the writer’s journey—circling in the desert for forty years before coming to the edge of the Promised Land, and even then, not knowing if you’ll be able to enter. Writing Zigzag Girl has been a long, winding journey, and its recent nomination for the International Thriller Writers Best Standalone Book of the Year is the culmination of many years of hard work and a dream that refused to die.

It’s out now in both print form and as an ebook, and I’m thrilled that it’s been getting wonderful reviews. Here’s what readers are saying—and every one of these makes the forty years in the desert worth it.

Much like a magic trick, ZigZag Girl intrigues, and confounds its audience before providing the grand reveal. A cleverly plotted mystery that is a magic trick in its own right. --LoveReading

Ruth Knafo Setton’s novel, Zig Zag Girl is a gorgeously written magical rollercoaster ride through the heart of Atlantic City. ---Zeeva Bukai, author of The World Between

WOW!!!! Just flipping WOW!!!! What an absolutely epic page turner!!! Well done to Ruth Knafo Setton on a mind blowing, action packed and addictive psychological read! --Kirsty Whitlock, reviewer

Zigzag Girl is the kind of mystery that makes you forget about your to‑do list until you hit the last page. – Gina Hott

Guyyyyyyys! You have to read this book! Seriously! I’ve been thinking about this book ever since I finished reading it. This was such a fun and unique read. It’s hard to find many thrillers these days that are truly unique - but I’ve found one. Not on my own of course, but good enough. I’m so happy this book found me. And now you need to find it too.... Setton’s writing feels like a breath of fresh air and I can see why this book has won awards.
Visceral, raw, and a bit unhinged, this is def one of my top reads of 2026. It has all the markers of what us readers love most: short chapters, a cast of incredible characters, and a plot that keeps you guessing. – Heather Brown

I’ve been active this past month—on podcasts, blogs, conferences, and events. If you want to know more about me and how I wrote Zigzag Girl, here are a few links:

Chuck Wendig’s blog: https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2026/03/04/ruth-knafo-setton-five-things-i-learned-writing-zigzag-girl/

The Magic Book podcast:

Partners in Crime Youtube interview:

Upcoming are more podcasts, interviews, and a panel at Thrillerfest in May.

And a bookstore launch at Book & Puppet in Easton PA on April 12 at 4 pm with sister authors Kate Brandes and Lee Upton: https://bookandpuppet.com/events/4863720260412/

……………….

At recent events, people have asked how they can help get the word out. A book like mine, published by a small press in the UK, needs all the publicity it can get. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful tool. If you haven’t picked it up yet, I’d love for you to read it. And if you enjoy it—which I hope you will!—please leave a 4 or 5 star rating—and if you can, a book review as well—on Amazon... Goodreads... or any site where you bought the book. You can’t imagine how much it helps!

You can also invite me to your book club or local library or bookstore. There’s so much I can share about the book—from my years of studying magic to my love of Atlantic City history to the act of writing itself.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know.

Thank you, my friends. Spring is finally here, and with it, birds singing, trees flowering, and hope blossoming. I hope to see you somewhere down the road—on the boardwalk, in the desert, or wherever the story takes us next.

Happy April!

Ruth

But sometimes the illusion cracks open — and the real story underneath refuses to stay hidden.

In January 1942, just weeks after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army Air Forces quietly took over Atlantic City. Dozens of the grandest hotels — Chalfonte-Haddon Hall, the Traymore, the Claridge — were commandeered overnight. Ballrooms where Ziegfeld girls once danced became drill halls. Marble lobbies filled with rows of metal cots. Rooms that had cost $50 a night for honeymooners were now $1 barracks for young airmen. The city’s nickname flipped from “The World’s Playground” to “Camp Boardwalk,” and in the next four years it would process more than 300,000 soldiers: basic training, reassignment, R&R, and heartbreaking recovery.

Soldiers marching down the Atlantic City Boardwalk, Camp Boardwalk era, 1943.

By day the boardwalk thrummed with marching formations, the sharp rhythm of boots on wood mixing with the crash of waves. Steel Pier — still open —hosted USO shows and swing bands that refused to let the music die. At night the entire coastline went dark. Blackout curtains. Headlights hooded. The famous neon skyline vanished so German U-boats lurking offshore couldn’t use the lights as a bullseye. The glittering playground became a city of shadows, where escape was both desperately needed and dangerously fragile.

And the wounded — they came back to the same luxurious hotels, now turned into Thomas M. England General Hospital. Men with bandaged faces and missing limbs sat in wheelchairs on verandas that once overlooked champagne toasts. They laughed too loudly, danced when they could, held onto the illusion of normal life for one more night.

That tension — glamour and grit, dazzle and blackout, wonder and war — never left the boards. It settled into the theater walls, into the creaky stage machinery, into the very sawing box that still sits backstage in a theatre that was called the Scarlet Room, but that is now known as Black Widow Theatre.

I stood under the boardwalk last year, flashlight in hand, staring at the massive wooden pillars that hold up those famous planks. Weathered, barnacled, silent. Every creak felt like a whisper. The past doesn’t die here. No matter how deep you bury it, it keeps breathing.

That’s where Zigzag Girl begins.

Backstage, nine minutes before the finale on opening night. Lucy Moon, heir to America’s most famous magic family, is facing the one trick she dreads more than anything:

Hand me a flower and I’ll transform it into a dove.

Shoot me from a cannon and I’ll come out smiling.

But lock me in the box and saw me in half, I’ll scream bloody murder.

Unheard of for a Moon — a member of America’s most famous magic family — to be terrified of that creaky old standard, the sawing box. But you’re hearing it now.

In exactly nine minutes, Charlie, our production manager, and Van, my friend and costar, are supposed to reenact the famous Sawing a Woman in Half illusion as it was performed by Magnificent Morelli and his assistant Cleo West in this theatre during World War Two.

The classic poster hangs in the dressing room: a man with slick black hair and a thin moustache gesturing to a pretty strawberry-blonde who holds a Statue of Liberty torch.

Between them is the infamous sawing box. Black letters slash across the top of the poster:

MAGNIFICENT MORELLI! MAN OF MYSTERY

At the bottom:

NIGHTLY IN THE SCARLET ROOM WORLD-FAMOUS ATLANTIC CITY BOARDWALK

There’s one problem. Van should have been here two hours ago.

I can see Morelli and Cleo performing right there on that stage in the 1940s, when the theater was still alive with wartime audiences hungry for escape. The sawing box they used — it’s the same one Lucy will have to step into tonight. The same one where, very soon, she’ll find something no one was meant to see.

The weathered wooden pillars beneath the modern Atlantic City Boardwalk.

This is what I love most about Atlantic City: the layers. Walk the boards today and you’ll hear the echo of marching boots under the laughter of tourists. Stand backstage in an old theater and the air still smells faintly of cigarette smoke and stage makeup from 1943. The past doesn’t haunt this place — it lives here, quietly, waiting for someone brave enough to open the box and look inside.

In Zigzag Girl, Lucy Moon does exactly that. She steps into a theater that remembers. She steps into a story where escape isn’t just a trick — it’s a necessity, a miracle, and sometimes a danger all its own. A story that will take you from the bright lights of the boardwalk to the mist-haunted Pine Barrens, through a world of female magicians, old murders, and secrets that refuse to stay in the box.

The book publishes in exactly one week. It’s also just been named a finalist for the International Thriller Writers Award for Standalone Book of the Year — which still doesn’t feel quite real.

If you’ve been waiting, this is the moment. Pre-ordering now helps me enormously — and gets the book into your hands the day it lands.

Links to pre-order:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/ZigZag-Girl/Ruth-Knafo-Setton/9781917788038

The boardwalk remembers. I hope you’ll walk it with Lucy.

With moonlight on the planks and a few shadows that refuse to leave,

Ruth

Author of Zigzag Girl (March 3, 2026)

PS-- If you’ve already pre-ordered, thank you. If you read it and love it, an early review on Amazon or Goodreads makes a bigger difference than you’d imagine. And if you know someone who loves magic, mysteries, or Atlantic City — send them Lucy’s way.

Friends— Last month, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Divine Egypt exhibit, I stood before an ancient wooden coffin, its lid propped open to reveal the sky goddess Nut painted across the interior.

Her nude form arched protectively over the space where the deceased once lay, arms outstretched as if to embrace and lift the soul. Opposite her stood Osiris, god of the underworld, holding the ankh—the key to eternal life. Columns of hieroglyphic spells covered every surface: magical formulae to protect the dead on their journey, to help them pass the judgment of the gods, to ensure their resurrection.

But what stopped me wasn’t the artistry or the age. It was the perspective.

This coffin was designed not for the living who would view it from outside, but for the dead who would spend eternity looking up from within. From inside that coffin, the view was one of cosmic tenderness: Nut enveloping the body in a vault of stars, Osiris welcoming the soul into his kingdom, the spells surrounding the deceased like a protective cocoon.

A box can be a prison. Or it can be a vessel for transformation. The Egyptians understood this. And standing there in the dim gallery, I thought of another box—one I had climbed into myself.

The Sawing Box.

I thought I was prepared. After all, I had spent months researching stage illusions for my novel Zigzag Girl. I’d interviewed magicians and watched grainy clips from the 1920s. So when I climbed into the Sawing a Woman in Half box—a classic old-school cabinet—I expected to feel curious, maybe amused.

Instead, as the lid shut and the world narrowed to a coffin of polished wood and stale velvet, a small, bright spark of fear flared in my chest.

It surprised me. I knew how the illusion worked. I understood the angles, the panels, the choreography of deception. But when I heard the soft click of the lock, something in my body whispered, What if this time, it’s real?

There is always, I learned, one heartbeat of terror in every illusion—the moment before the impossible becomes safe again.

That heartbeat is what hooked me.

Looking up at the magician—a kind, patient man—I realized he’d never know how the world looked from down here, inside the box. The female assistant’s perspective was utterly different from his. Though she seemed powerless, waiting to be divided, she might have secret reserves of power he couldn’t imagine.

In magic, they used to call these women “box jumpers,” because of the popularity of the Sawing a Woman in Half illusion. The term tells you everything about how they were seen: anonymous bodies jumping from box to box, interchangeable, expendable.

But what if we told the story from inside the box?

The famous sawing illusion began in 1921 in London, and it was... rather disappointing. The inventor, P.T. Selbit, used a male bellhop. The audience was polite but unmoved. What is the point, after all, of pretending to slice an anonymous man in half?

But when American magician Horace Goldin stole the idea—there were lawsuits, threats, dramatic accusations—and placed a woman in the box, everything changed. Crowds lined up around the block. Newspapers raved. Hollywood paid attention. Something electric had been unleashed.

The early 1920s were the era of flappers, suffragettes, women riding bicycles unchaperoned and demanding the vote. Women were refusing to stay in the roles society built for them—so the stage built a box. Magic has always been a mirror, or maybe a funhouse mirror: it exaggerates the fears people already carry.

My feelings about this illusion are complex. Like my protagonist Lucy Moon, I see it as misogynistic—a way of controlling women’s power, especially in the context of the times.

And yet.

In Zigzag Girl, the ghost of Cleo West—a glamorous WWII-era magician’s assistant—sees it differently. Every night she performed this illusion for audiences of wounded soldiers, many of them amputees. And when she rose from the box, whole and triumphant, it was as if she was telling them (and herself): being broken doesn’t mean being destroyed. In Zigzag Girl, Lucy confronts her own ghosts in the footlights of Atlantic City, where every trick hides a truth—and every escape demands a price.

And then there’s the actual illusion, the Zigzag Girl.

Invented by Robert Harbin in 1965, it’s been called the “perfect illusion”—and I’ve been inside this one too. Not the original, of course, but a beautifully crafted replica.

Unlike the sawing box, where the woman lies down obediently, the Zigzag Girl stands. She faces the audience. She’s upright, visible, almost defiant. Then the magician slides the middle section of her body away, and the eye simply cannot make sense of what it sees. Her torso zigzags into impossible geometry. She should be broken. She should be screaming.

Instead, she waves her hand through a gap, and she smiles.

The Zigzag Girl is slippery, elusive—she refuses to be pinned down. You think you’ve figured her out, and then she shifts again.

So does Lucy Moon. Bold onstage, haunted offstage. Afraid of every sawing illusion because she knows too well what it means to be split, confined, diminished—and yet drawn to the Zigzag, to the illusion that lets the woman stand, face forward, and survive the impossible.

As Lucy puts it: “But lock me in the box and saw me in half, and I’ll scream bloody murder.”

On March 2nd, Zigzag Girl rises from the box!

Lucy Moon finally gets to tell her story. It’s a story about magic and murder, about the women who make illusions possible, about the secrets we carry and the boxes we escape.

If Zigzag Girl sounds like your kind of mystery, I’d be so grateful if you’d preorder now. You’ll receive your copy the moment it’s released, and you’ll have helped Lucy Moon step out of the box and into the world.

Why preorder? Preorders matter more than you might think. They signal to bookstores and publishers that readers are eager, which means more copies on shelves, more visibility, more chances for the book to find its audience. When you preorder, you’re not just buying a book—you’re casting a vote for the story.

For more info and preorder links to amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and more, go here:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/ZigZag-Girl/Ruth-Knafo-Setton/9781917788038

What reviewers are saying:

A propulsive, psychologically rich murder mystery that pairs a striking premise with a heroine whose insight and vulnerability shape every turn of the investigation. Don’t miss it. —BestThrillers.com

Ruth Setton’s ZIG ZAG GIRL is everything a wonderful book is supposed to be: magical, suspenseful, and completely unpredictable. Part ghost story, part murder mystery, ZIG ZAG GIRL is a breathtaking example of what a fine writer can do with a cast of great characters and a tale more than worthy of them.” -- Gar Anthony Haywood, author of IN THINGS UNSEEN

A mystery that understands how easily a performance can become a crime—and how dangerous it is to confuse the two. —Kirkus Reviews

So here’s my question for you this month:

Is there an object, ritual, or symbol in your life that carries more than one meaning—one you only recognize when you shift your perspective?

Hit reply and tell me. I’d love to know.

I’ll be back later this month with news about blog tours, NetGalley reviews, and in-person events. Stay tuned! And if you want to review the book, drop me a line! Stay warm and see you soon!

Ruth

On New Year’s Eve I walked through the gorgeously decorated Hopi House in the Grand Canyon, overwhelmed by the beauty and richness of Native American blankets, pottery, jewelry, painting, and sculptures. And then I saw this warm, brightly colored clay grouping, and I pressed my hand to my heart. I thought of the universal power of storytelling and how the love of story connects us to the ghosts of the past and to the spirits of the future.

I learned that Cochiti Pueblo potter Helen Cordero crafted the first Storyteller in 1964 to honor her grandfather, Santiago Quintana, a renowned oral historian—which is why the original figure was male with an open mouth (mid-story) surrounded by listening children. It was a radical departure from earlier “singing mother” figures in Pueblo pottery, and it inspired potters from Jemez, Santa Clara, and other Pueblos to embrace and adapt the form.

The storyteller is passing on the traditions—tales that contain our wisdom, our dreams, fears, and longings. That’s what storytellers do. Whether we tell or sing stories, write them, or perform them, we are links in an ancient, timeless chain. Story is the ultimate means of opening windows and doors, expanding the mind, discovering the world, and exploring the unknown.

But we have to take care not to hand down stories that are like iron bands imprisoning our children. Story should be a creative exploration, not a rehashing of ancient grievances that pass on hatred and ignorance. It should offer breathing spaces—what a master potter in my first novel, The Road to Fez, teaches his students to create: slits, holes, pinpricks that offer choices, freedom to interpret, to question.

The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke offered this advice to a young writer:

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.

Live everything. Live the questions now.

Rainer Maria Rilke

What better advice can a young poet, writer, or creator receive? The search is everything. The search is life. The search is different for each of us—and it’s what connects us.

If I can add one more thing on this second day of the new year—a memory. I was a graduate student, fortunate enough to study Shakespeare with a man who’d devoted his life to the Bard and who wept openly in class while reading us Hamlet. We were walking together one day when he asked how my writing was going. Because he was such a passionate, receptive soul, I heard myself complaining that I was tired, working hard.

After a moment he said quietly, “That’s not work, Ruth. That’s your calling.”

It is my calling. And it may be your calling too. Whether we tell stories with words—like the Pueblo storytellers—or with a paintbrush or a magic illusion, I encourage us all to be storytellers in the greatest, most expansive sense of the word, and to make our priority in this coming year to do as E.M. Forster suggests: Only connect.

A prompt for the new year: What question are you living right now? Write for ten minutes without searching for an answer—just inhabit the question.

Thank you for allowing me to connect with you. Please share my newsletter with your friends and share your responses with me.

Speaking of storytelling, magic, and living through questions—a reminder that my new novel, ZIGZAG GIRL, is on her way: March 2, 2026 in the US. Available for preorder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and most retailers.

Here’s what William Boyle had to say:

“Ruth Knafo Setton’s ZIGZAG GIRL is provocative and compelling, a work of fierce imagination. It sweeps the reader up in the uncanny magic of Atlantic City and the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Lucy Moon is a character for the ages.” —William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street

Next month will be packed with Zigzag Girl-related events and writing news! See you then.

Ruth

Entering the oldest magic store in Europe…

My thirteenth summer, I was technically present—pool, dinner, bike loops through the neighborhood—but emotionally AWOL. While the grown-ups thought I was “outside getting fresh air,” I was dodging lions in Kenya, dancing on a Paris tabletop, running across the moors with Heathcliff, or riding shotgun in Nancy Drew’s blue roadster as we hunted clues at 70 mph.

That summer I read 100+ books. I biked to parks, claimed shady river nooks, or just sprawled in the backyard grass like a starfish with a novel on my chest. The library encouraged kids to write down every book they finished. That was the first and last time I ever documented my reading. I remember that when I got to 100, I abandoned the list—and just kept on reading.

It was pleasure reading at its finest. I read everything that tempted me. That was the summer I discovered D.H. Lawrence in the adult section. Lady Chatterley’s Lover mostly whooshed over my innocent head, but I came out dazed by the tenderness, delighted they’d nicknamed their private parts John Thomas and Lady Jane, and stunned that grown-ups had once banned a book for being too beautiful. One line tattooed itself on me: “A man could be tender.”

The librarian, a free spirit, watched me smuggle grown-up books back to the kids’ section and let me check them out. My parents never censored my reading. They didn’t ask if Lady Chatterley’s Lover was “age-appropriate.” They trusted books—and they trusted me to find what I needed in them.

I also haunted old book fairs, where I found treasures of all kinds, especially books with handwritten inscriptions and notations in the margins that made me feel connected to those who’d read those books. I found all the Nancy Drews, the originals—antisemitic and anti-immigrant slurs and all. I devoured Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and dreamed of becoming a private eye like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. I adored Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa. I read Richard Halliburton’s Royal Road to Romance and dreamed that one day I’d travel the way he did. I fell in love over and over—with Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Hans Christian Andersen’s melancholy fairy tales, Dostoevsky’s brooding Raskolnikov, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Edmond Dulac, Dreamer of Dreams…

It may have been the best summer of my life. I solved mysteries, roamed the globe, made friends across centuries. I was utterly free—no camp, no school, no schedule. I met up with neighborhood friends every evening, talked to my family, went to the pool, but I lived in another realm. I was alone for hours each day, but never lonely. The characters I read about were my companions, more real than the kids splashing in the pool.

That summer I also decided I’d never get married. I’d travel around the world, and when I returned to my home—which faced the sea, of course—I’d write about my adventures. I’d invite my lovers to visit, but they had to be gone by breakfast.

Today that summer would be impossible. Someone would slap a tile on my bike, text “u ok??” every twenty minutes, or schedule “enrichment.” No one worried I’d be bored. Boredom was the point—it was the doorway. You had to be bored enough, idle enough, for imagination to take over. After a day of reading, I’d lie back on the grass, the book on my belly—sated, imagination leaping, heart racing, eyes burning—and stare at the setting sun and think: one day I’ll write a book that will make someone feel the way I do now, at this moment, as if I’ve given them the greatest gift of all.

December Prompt (Anti-Resolution Edition):

Before you draft another bullet journal page of self-improvement for the new year, I encourage you to resurrect some luxurious, unapologetic boredom.

Write about the last time you were truly, deeply, uselessly bored. Or give yourself my thirteenth summer—phone turned off, trackers disabled, zero plans. Just you, a bike (or a subway card), and whatever books, sketchbooks, or passions whisper your name.

What world would you vanish into if nobody could find you?

Susan Sontag wrote that books are “a way of being fully human”—not escape, but expansion. That summer, lying on the grass with books stacked beside me, I was learning how to live more deeply, trying on different lives. That girl on the grass, surrounded by teetering stacks of library books, didn’t know she was rehearsing: sailing around the world while teaching aboard ships, studying the art of illusion from masters, watching the sun rise over the pyramids of Gizeh, flying in a hot air balloon over the alien moon landscape of Cappadocia, attending a sacred gathering of Huichol shamans in the Sierra Madre Mountains…. She was already becoming the writer she’d need to be to birth Zigzag Girl—my thriller out this March, where a female magician battles real monsters in the glitter and shadows of Atlantic City and the Pine Barrens.

Thirteen-year-old me would have checked it out from the adult section in a heartbeat.

*

I want to take a moment to welcome my new subscribers. It means so much to me that you are joining me on this adventure. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. I will respond!

Wishing all of you who celebrate a happy Hanukkah, a merry Christmas, and a wonderful new year!

Ruth

I leave you with a few words from the great Lou Berney!

ZIGZAG GIRL is a tremendously original and engaging novel, a deft sleight of hand with a main character, Lucy Moon, I fell for hard and fast.

— Lou Berney, Edgar Award-winning author of CROOKS

She’s here! ZIGZAG GIRL arrived from London on Halloween eve — exactly when she was meant to. The story takes place during Halloween/Samhain, and Lucy Moon, my main character, was born on that night when the veil thinly flickers between worlds. So receiving the book on that night felt like the story stepping into the physical world at last.

Outside, cornstalks rustled like people moving just out of sight. Children in costumes laughed and darted between shadows. A night of masks, mischief, and wonder — when the ordinary blurs and something else breathes through.

It brought me back to the night I traveled into the New Jersey Pine Barrens, where Lucy goes in search of a clue — and where I first felt the pulse of the story.

A million acres of wilderness. Fire-touched leaves. Pines leaning like old storytellers. Ghost towns like Harrisville, Batsto, and Martha Furnace—all ruins with mysterious ends, whispering their stories to anyone who will listen. Lynchings… Ghost forest: dead trees that remain standing… Sugar sand that sucks people in… Silence wide enough to fall into.

Ghost town…

But the Pine Barrens are not empty. They are inhabited by story. And the oldest, strangest story of all: the Jersey Devil.

In 1735, a woman named Mother Leeds discovered she was pregnant with her thirteenth child. Thirteen mouths, thirteen winters of hunger. Exhaustion, despair, rage — all the feelings mothers are still not allowed to confess. So, when the time came, she cried out: “Let it be the Devil, then!”

The baby was born perfectly human.
For one breath.
Two.
And then—

The transformation began.

The skin split.
Bones bent.
Hooves struck the floor.
Wings unfurled like shadows catching fire.
Eyes glowed like embers waking.

The child screamed, but it was no longer a child.
It tore up the chimney and vanished into the Pine Barrens, where it is said to fly, cry, hunt, and remember the shape it once was.

Mother Leeds, who cursed her thirteenth child—was she villain or victim? In ZIGZAG GIRL, women’s curses become their power.

But the story begins far earlier.

The Lenni Lenape, who lived in the Barrens long before Europeans arrived, believed the forests were alive with Mising — a powerful spirit of transformation, change, and the wild unseen. Costumes, masks, wings, horns — ceremonial expressions of becoming.

Mising wasn’t a monster. Mising was possibility. Life-force. Magic. Awe.

So the Jersey Devil may not be evil, but a remembered echo of that ancient truth: The Pine Barrens are a place where forms shift. Where you can become more than you were.
Or less.

To this day, people driving in the vicinity of the Barrens report sightings and tell stories about a strange creature they encountered. The night I visited the Jersey Devil’s graveyard, where it’s said that he hides and sleeps for fifty years and then rises again to terrorize, the air crackled with blue motes, the ground hissed sharp and snake-tongued. What haunted me most: the Devil was BORN HUMAN. It’s a tale of transformation—from human to monster. And that day, in the place where the Devil slept, the dark heart of the murderer in ZIGZAG GIRL burst into life, and I knew what I needed to write.

Because the murderer Lucy is hunting in the novel — was not born a monster either. Something happened. A transformation. A curse spoken or inherited. A shape taken because another shape was denied. And Lucy — like all of us — must face the question: What are we becoming?

Here are 2 Prompts that I hope will inspire you in these dark days and nights:

1) The Jersey Devil was born human but transformed at the moment of birth. Write about a character standing at their own moment of transformation—not thrust upon them but chosen. What do they leave behind? What emerges? Start with: “The last human thing I did was...”

2) Think of a moment when you changed — even a little. A season shift. A heartbreak. A risk taken. What fell away? What grew wings?

Write one sentence about that moment.
Just one.
Keep it.

Thank you for being here, for reading, for traveling with me between the visible and the invisible worlds. More soon — March draws closer…

See you next month!

Ruth

ZIGZAG GIRL is action-packed and thrilling, but it’s the extraordinary cast that really make this sing. Pure magic.

--Sarah Hilary, author of BLACK THORN

Links for Zigzag Girl:

If you want to read it now: Order from the UK:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zigzag-Girl-Ruth-Knafo-Setton/dp/1917788037

If you can wait till March 2^nd 2026: Preorder from the US:

https://www.amazon.com/ZigZag-Girl-Ruth-Knafo-Setton/dp/1917788037/ref=sr_1_3?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LnbHjLrbBw6H2EAqw5S1-Q6YlNjQa-Vji-N6ZWvLyU1MZ80ZiE98uhxrkF7myoGX9BM1GXCP3uRWyKUDuBZVUg.6QL2M0dBEveYSJh2yKkBpdZDjwlGFZ5MbJ2uVaf4uOM&dib_tag=se&qid=1762013621&refinements=p_27%3ARuth+Setton&s=books&sr=1-3/

This will be short and sweet, but my heart is full: today, the 23rd of October 2025, my novel, ZIGZAG GIRL, is published in the UK! It will come out on the 2^nd of March 2026 in the US. So it will have two birthdays. Though I’m in the US and won’t hold my UK copies for a couple of weeks, knowing the book is out there in the world—finding its first readers—fills me with wonder.

If you’re in the UK or anywhere outside the States, you can get ZIGZAG GIRL right now! And if you’re in the US and don’t want to wait until March, you can order from amazon.uk:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zigzag-Girl-Ruth-Knafo-Setton/dp/1917788037/

It’s a paperback, and also available wherever books are sold in the UK.

ZIGZAG GIRL is a Halloween book—it takes place in the season of hauntings, masks, and disguises. I’ll let Lucy Moon’s Auntie Maze, a self-proclaimed Irish witch, describe it:

The season of Samhain marks the Gaelic new year as well as the end of summer and beginning of winter…. We’ve been feeling it creep up on us, haven’t we? Longer nights, the moon lowering to connect with us while the sun retreats. Voices and smells from the past remind us that we’re all here together sharing our fair earth. This is the season when spirits of the dead visit the living…

Here in Pennsylvania, there are cornfields and corn mazes, pumpkins and apples being picked and plucked, people going on hayrides and drinking hot cider, and the leaves turning red and purple and gold… It’s a time to believe in magic—whether it’s stage magic or Magic with a capital “M,” the kind that spills from stage to street, or from stage to boardwalk. And it’s the perfect season to curl up with a mystery novel:

ZIGZAG GIRL: When a dazzling stage illusion turns fatal, a young magician haunted by her own secrets is thrust into a dangerous hunt for a serial killer in Atlantic City and the haunted Pine Barrens. Armed with a band of bold female conjurers, she must unmask a murderer before she becomes his final trick.

I’ll let you know when it will be available in the US. But meanwhile I want to celebrate! After years of writing and rewriting, of Lucy Moon living only in my imagination, she’s finally stepping onto the world’s stage—appropriately enough for a book about magicians. If you do read it, I’d love to hear from you. Tag me in your photos or reviews—seeing ZIGZAG GIRL in readers’ hands will be its own kind of magic.

Ruth Setton’s ZIG ZAG GIRL is everything a wonderful book is supposed to be: magical, suspenseful, and completely unpredictable. Part ghost story, part murder mystery, ZIG ZAG GIRL a breathtaking example of what a fine writer can do with a cast of great characters and a tale more than worthy of them.”

-- Gar Anthony Haywood, author of IN THINGS UNSEEN

So here’s to magic, mysteries, and books that cross oceans to find their readers. Happy Halloween! I’ll see you in November.

Ruth

*** If you’re in the area, join Katherine Ramsland and me for a Halloween-inspired evening as we share the ghosts that influenced our novels! ***

The assignment was to sew a short-sleeved shirt with a front pocket. The class was Home Ec, and the teacher a Gorgon—at least that’s how I remember her. Always angry and impatient, stalking past the students to make sure our stitches were even. I loathed the class, dreaded it with every atom of my being. My mother was and is a brilliant seamstress who sewed outfits for us, and our Barbies, but I had an aversion to sewing. Part of it may be due to the hours I spent in fabric stores waiting for my mother. I remember breathing in chemicals and sneezing and weeping, as if I were allergic to the entire sewing enterprise.

The front pocket defeated me. The deadline to present our finished shirts was the next day. Mine was a hodge-podge of uneven stitching, the pocket in the wrong place—a mess. In desperation, I crumpled the shirt between my books and took it home for my mother to fix. She did, but afterwards, it was so wrinkled I decided to iron it. A rust-brown burn mark appeared on the chest pocket—the exact shape of the iron.

I still remember the horror of that night—the dread of facing the teacher the next day, how would I explain the burn mark on the shirt?—but I don’t remember what happened. I must have blocked it out. Perhaps some failures are so complete our minds refuse to keep them. Did I fail Home Ec? Very possible.

This memory rose a few days ago when I went to a quilt exhibit at a local museum. Though I will never sew, I can appreciate the work and artistry of stitching and sewing. The quilts were from the 1800s, made for warmth of course, but also for show. They revealed a mad work ethic, vibrant colors, experimentation in form, and pride in their work.

Many quilts were called Friendship Albums with each woman contributing a square to the whole. And if you looked closely, you saw personal touches in their squares: initials hidden in the design, a pair of scissors etched in the background, a heart or a bird. I was fascinated by the Friendship Album with its center square—an eccentric hand-embroidered depiction of Little Red Riding Hood. What did it mean to the woman who did it? It was given the place of prominence.

The Log Cabin/Crazy Quilt felt especially contemporary, with its wild textures—velvet, satin, cotton—and vibrant medley of colors and styles. I’d love to have this one in my home.

Looking at these quilts—created stitch by stitch, square by square—I recognized the same patient accumulation that builds a story, word by word. These quilts, with their links to Native American yarn paintings and Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs, are beautiful, evocative pieces that demonstrate the power of what people can create with their hands—piece by piece, with the whole in mind.

What struck me most was how different this was from my solitary struggle with that shirt. Women worked together on these quilts; it was a community project. I picture them coming together to sew their squares and then assembling them to form a whole quilt. No one working alone in panic the night before a deadline. No burnt pockets hidden in shame.

Writers need solitude to create, but we also need to connect with other writers. In person or on Zoom. Or in a coffeeshop, surrounded by others. We’re not in ivory towers. We’re all part of this world.

My prompt for you—and for me—this month is to try one of the physical arts:

· If you’re a writer, paint or draw a character or setting from your story

· Sketch a symbolic pattern that illustrates the form of your story or illusion—use colors

· Try your hands at clay for pottery

· Break glass or ceramics into fragments for mosaics

· If materials aren’t accessible, try digital collage or arrange found objects into patterns

I love these wordless arts, where you can touch, feel, hold your creations.

Quilts, like pottery and other “useful” crafts, were not often seen as art, but they were a means of expression for many women. And perhaps that’s the final lesson from both the quilts and my long-ago sewing disaster: every piece matters, even the imperfect ones. My burned pocket shirt may have been a failure, but it became part of the patchwork of memories that made me who I am—someone who can’t sew but can recognize the beauty in those who do, someone who learned that community makes the difference between struggle and creation.

After all, even friendship quilts must have had their share of crooked stitches and mismatched corners. The difference is, they were held together by many hands.

***

Friends— on that note, since many of you have been holding my hand on the winding road leading to the publication of my novel, ZIGZAG GIRL —

There’s been a change in the pub date. It will be published in the UK on October 23rd, and it’s available on amazon.uk for preorder:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zigzag-Girl-Ruth-Knafo-Setton/dp/1917788037?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE

It will be published in the US in February 2026. Yes, it’s a delay, but my publisher and I believe it will be for the best in the long run.

I’m excited and impatient to share it with you! But I will keep you updated.

Meanwhile, for locals in eastern PA— I’ll be doing a few events this month.

October 19 -4-5 pm: “Ghost Stories with Benefits” — Book & Puppet, Easton Book Festival:

https://www.instagram.com/eastonbookfestivalnews/p/DOyrpJLEgcg/

Katherine Ramsland and I will be talking ghosts that haunt our novels! I’ll reveal the ghost story that inspired ZIGZAG GIRL!

OCTOBER 28 - Katherine and I will take our Halloween-inspired show on the road to the Bethlehem Public Library. Come and see us!

That’s it for now. I’ll keep you posted with news as it develops.

Meanwhile I want to leave you with the words of the brilliant crime writer William Boyle on ZIGZAG GIRL:

Ruth Knafo Setton’s Zig Zag Girl is provocative and compelling, a work of fierce imagination. It sweeps the reader up in the uncanny magic of Atlantic City and the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Lucy Moon is a character for the ages.”

-William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street

Many thanks, Bill!! And thanks to all of you for keeping me company on this wild and beautiful journey. I wish you all a wonderful October!

Ruth

Friends— This week I’ve been working on the proofs of Zigzag Girl. An exhilarating and bittersweet task.

The proof as proof. The moment that the manuscript transforms from possibility to fact, from something that can still be abandoned or reimagined to something that has weight, heft… an ISBN number!

Seeing the words I wrote, reliving the experience of writing them. Seeing what I could have done but also seeing what I actually did. Seeing the scenes that were cut, but that hover behind the words. Like ghosts, rising from the past—reminders of what could have been, and what was, briefly.

A book is always more than what you see on the page. It’s the heart-ache of writing draft after draft that no one will ever see. The joy of getting something right. The excitement—when the words actually shiver on the page. The cool black on white that masks the turbulent storms of emotion, the bursts of inspiration, the tears and laughter, the passion and drive that keep the writer from giving up.

Stopping at a sentence and straining to recall when I wrote it. How I wrote it. Why I wrote it. The emotions rising between the words might be partly about the realization that what was once fluid and changeable is now crystallizing into its final form. The ghosts aren’t just memories but also all the alternate versions, the paths not taken, the sentences I cut, the different endings I considered. They hover there, visible only to me, while the proof itself marches toward its singular reality.

It’s not just memories haunting the text, but the past self who wrote it haunting the present self who reads. There's something powerful about how proofs force you to confront both what you wrote and what you meant to write, the gap between intention and execution becoming visible in a new way. It’s like watching a magic show from backstage—seeing the props and loads, the preparation—and then watching from the theatre auditorium and seeing the finished performance.

One scene was inspired by watching female magicians practice card tricks and flourishes at an outdoor café in Las Vegas on a gorgeous summer evening.

Another was haunted by the mystical memory of attending a drum circle in the Nevada desert through the night and watching the sun rise.

And yet another was when I was locked into a regulation straitjacket—no tricks, no gimmicks—and struggled to break free in front of a group of male magicians who watched encouragingly… and cheered me when I finally escaped.

And one more—here’s a scene I wrote that didn’t make it into the final draft, but that inspired so much of what did remain. I visited an old ballroom in a casino-hotel on the Atlantic City boardwalk. It was called a ballroom, but it was actually a small, intimate space with windows through which you could see the Atlantic Ocean… and a portal into the past.

My main character, Lucy Moon, is picturing the historic ballroom in the Old Tower, and how it must have been during World War Two, when Atlantic City was taken over by the Army. Jinx is the ninety-plus-year-old journalist who covered World War Two, and who knew Cleo, the glamorous magician’s assistant, and her lover, Frank…

I see the sun-dusted Crystal Ballroom in the Old Tower of Midnight, with its great windows and two stages, one at either end, where the big bands used to play. A couple years ago, an old-timer took me inside. In a quavering voice, he told me, “Tommy Dorsey played one end and Artie Shaw the other. In the center of the room people danced, swayed, moved to the rhythm of the horns and drums. Can you picture it, Lucy?”

Oh yes, I could picture it. What an astounding experience it must have been to dance to competing bands under swinging chandeliers while across the sea the war raged. But it was night, and the boys might be sent back to the front tomorrow, and the girls wanted to touch them and be touched and feel alive.

“Cleo dancing in her emerald-green dress,” murmurs Jinx.

Startled, I blurt, “I saw her.”

Silence.

“Who did you see?” asks Jinx.

“I was inside the Crystal Ballroom.” Elegant dancers whirled around the room, but one stood out. “I saw a woman in bright green dancing with a soldier in uniform. One arm in a cast, the other wrapped around her.”

They swayed in place, eyes on each other, whispering. I wanted to hold them in that circle of promise.

Before everything shattered.

It’s a kind of emotional archaeology—each correction is like a small excavation, revealing layers: the day I wrote that particular scene, what was happening in my life when I chose that metaphor, the person I was when that character first spoke to me. Some passages feel too raw now, others surprise me with their prescience—they sensed where I was going before I knew.

The title “Zigzag Girl” itself suggests a kind of indirect path—one that mirrors the zigzag writing process, the way a book moves through time, from conception through drafts to proofs to readers, never quite linear, always doubling back on itself. That movement from dream to reality—it’s both triumph and loss, isn’t it? The infinite possibility of the unwritten book giving way to the beautiful limitation of the actual one.

And it’s coming your way on October 23^rd. A book you can hold and read, characters I hope you fall in love with. It’s Gothic and romantic and dangerous and funny, and it’s my gift to you.

Tomorrow, I’m leaving for Bouchercon, the crime conference, in New Orleans—the city where Joe and I spent our honeymoon. More emotional archaeology! I’ll be pitching Zigzag Girl and speaking about screenwriting on a panel, and getting beignets and chicory coffee at the Café du Monde….

I’ll leave you with these lovely words from two crime writers I deeply admire, William Boyle and Sarah Hilary:

Ruth Knafo Setton’s Zig Zag Girl is provocative and compelling, a work of fierce imagination. It sweeps the reader up in the uncanny magic of Atlantic City and the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

Lucy Moon is a character for the ages.

--William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street

Action-packed and thrilling, but it's the extraordinary cast that really make this sing. Pure magic.

—Sarah Hilary, author of Black Thorn

See you next month!

Ruth

As a screenwriter and novelist, I often find inspiration in dark corners that many others might avoid. When I began writing my novel, Zigzag Girl , a murder mystery set in Atlantic City, I found myself researching noir, the magnificent tradition of shadows and moral complexity that emerged from the dark heart of the twentieth century. I immersed myself in the classic novels: Raymond Chandler’s labyrinthine Los Angeles in The Big Sleep, Dashiell Hammett’s fog-shrouded San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon, the psychological claustrophobia of In a Lonely Place.

Then I moved to film noir. I watched Bogart’s world-weary detective work his way through corruption, and John Garfield’s doomed anti-heroes struggle against forces larger than themselves. These were stories born from urban anxiety and postwar disillusionment, painted in cigarette smoke and neon, where morality came in shades of gray and justice was often personal. The past was the sound of footsteps running after you in a dark alley.

The visual language of noir became an obsession: Venetian blind shadows striping across a woman’s face, the single shaft of light cutting through a darkened room, rain-slicked streets reflecting the glow of streetlamps. Double Indemnity, where Barbara Stanwyck emerges from shadows like a predator, or The Third Man, with its tilted camera angles and Carol Reed’s expressionistic use of Vienna’s sewers and ruins.

Even in recent interpretations like the television adaptation of Ripley, we see this interplay of light and shadow—Tom Ripley moving through Rome like a wraith, classical statues watching with marble eyes as he navigates his web of deception, their ancient gaze a reminder that some truths are eternal, even in a world built on lies.

But what struck me most about the greatest noir works wasn’t their darkness—it was their insistence on hope. As Chandler wrote in his essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.”

Even in the blackest stories, there’s always that moment—a woman’s face caught in lamplight, a gesture of unexpected tenderness, a choice made for love rather than gain—that reminds us why the struggle matters.

This tension between shadow and illumination became the heartbeat of Zigzag Girl, and the inspiration behind the pilot screenplay I wrote as an entry into the world of the novel. My setting is Atlantic City, that faded queen of American resort towns, where the boardwalk stretches like a stage between dreams and disappointment. Here, beneath the weight of lost fortunes and broken promises, a serial killer stalks performers in the magic community. The city itself becomes a character—seedy and shady, heavy with the accumulated weight of a century of dreams deferred and hopes betrayed.

Yet even in this darkness, the Atlantic Ocean looms beyond the boardwalk, vast and powerful and eternal. Each morning it promises something more—a new day, a fresh start, the possibility that the tide might wash away yesterday’s sins. The ocean doesn’t lie or deceive; it simply is, indifferent to human schemes yet somehow comforting in its constancy. It reminds my characters—and my readers—that there are forces in the world larger than crime and corruption, older than deception and betrayal.

There are crucial scenes in the screenplay when my main character, Lucy Moon, enters the past through the boardwalk: she finds herself in Atlantic City during World War Two. Atlantic City had been taken over by the US Army—hotels were turned into hospitals and Army bases, soldiers and civilians crammed the city. It was known as Camp Boardwalk, and it was a different Atlantic City—a time of desperation and excitement, a sense of life on the edge, and death looming around every corner.

I decided the most powerful way to film these scenes would be in black & white. What inspired me was film noir, and in particular, Ripley. When we watch Ripley in the TV adaptation, he is not only in nearly every scene, we are so close to him we’re practically inside him. We witness and experience the world with him. He’s in glorious Italy, but this is not a tourist’s sun-drenched Italy. The endless stone and marble staircases he must climb and descend leave him constantly out of breath. We’re panting with him. The vast cathedrals and buildings dwarf him.

Eyes follow him everywhere—passersby, ancient statues and paintings, even cats track his movements. Every encounter is suspicious. We feel the dread. The elevator! Each time it creaks and groans its way up to his apartment, he tenses. We wait for the elevator door to open, for someone to step out. Whoever it is, it can’t be good for him. His paranoia is justified. Whatever we think of him or how we judged him for what he does, we share his constant state of dread. We’re in the moment with him.

What I did was set scene directions that indicate that we—the viewers—see the action through Lucy’s eyes—we don’t see her, we see only what she sees. A dizzying, jarring black & white world, where she jolts from place to place, not just watching the past come to life, but being inside it. Men in fedoras, women in tightly cinched suits and seamed stockings, GIs marching through town—and marching through her. She is invisible, and therefore, so are we. It’s claustrophobic and tense, and I hope, exciting.

The more I wrote, the more I realized I couldn’t stay in either pure darkness or pure light. Like a photographer who needs both shadow and illumination to create depth, I needed both to capture the full human experience. My characters exist in the between—that liminal space between magic and reality, between hope and despair, between love and loss. They’re flawed and frightened and sometimes morally compromised, but they’re also capable of courage, sacrifice, and unexpected grace.

I began calling it “noir with heart”—stories that acknowledge the darkness without being consumed by it, that find beauty in broken places and light in impossible circumstances. Because ultimately, what unlocks the heart of my stories—and I believe, most stories—is the possibility of love: romantic love, familial love, the love of justice, the love of truth, even the love of a perfectly executed illusion that brings wonder to a cynic’s eyes.

Here’s my challenge to fellow writers, filmmakers, creators walking their own dark streets: Don’t be afraid of the long and winding road that leads to your story. Research the shadows, but don’t forget to look for the light. Ask yourself: What thin places exist in your fictional world? Where does light seep through the cracks of ordinary reality? And perhaps most importantly: In the darkest moments of your narrative, what small flame of hope refuses to be extinguished?

The answer to that last question might just be the key that unlocks everything else.

I’m excited to have contributed to the FilmStack Inspiration Challenge! Who's up next for tomorrow?

Photograph: Alamy

When I began writing Zigzag Girl, I found myself researching two seemingly disparate worlds that would ultimately converge in unexpected ways: magic and noir. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different—one promises wonder and transcendence, the other delivers cynicism and moral ambiguity. Yet as I delved deeper into both traditions, I discovered they share a fundamental truth: both seek illumination in darkness, whether through sleight of hand or the harsh light of revelation.

Magic, I learned, exists in the spaces between what we see and what we believe. I researched stage illusions—the mechanics of misdirection, the psychology of wonder, the precise choreography required to make the impossible appear effortless. But I also explored the other kind of magic: the caol áit, the thin places in Celtic mythology where the veil between worlds grows gossamer-fine, where magic seeps through to reality like water through silk. These liminal spaces fascinated me—thresholds where anything might happen, where the ordinary world reveals its hidden extraordinary nature.

Then there was noir, that magnificent tradition of shadows and moral complexity that emerged from the dark heart of the twentieth century. I immersed myself in the classics: Raymond Chandler’s labyrinthine Los Angeles in The Big Sleep, Dashiell Hammett’s fog-shrouded San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon, the psychological claustrophobia of In a Lonely Place. I watched Bogart’s world-weary detective work his way through corruption, and John Garfield’s doomed anti-heroes struggle against forces larger than themselves. These were stories born from urban anxiety and postwar disillusionment, painted in cigarette smoke and neon, where morality came in shades of gray and justice was often personal. The past was the sound of footsteps running after you in a dark alley.

Photograph: MPTVimages

The visual language of noir became a obsession: Venetian blind shadows striping across a woman’s face, the single shaft of light cutting through a darkened room, rain-slicked streets reflecting the glow of streetlamps. Double Indemnity, where Barbara Stanwyck emerges from shadows like a predator, or The Third Man, with its tilted camera angles and Carol Reed’s expressionistic use of Vienna’s sewers and ruins. Even in recent interpretations like the television adaptation of Ripley, we see this interplay of light and shadow—Tom Ripley moving through Rome like a wraith, classical statues watching with marble eyes as he navigates his web of deception, their ancient gaze a reminder that some truths are eternal, even in a world built on lies.

But what struck me most about the greatest noir works wasn’t their darkness—it was their insistence on hope. As Chandler wrote in his essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.”

Even in the blackest stories, there’s always that moment—a woman’s face caught in lamplight, a gesture of unexpected tenderness, a choice made for love rather than gain—that reminds us why the struggle matters.

This tension between shadow and illumination became the heartbeat of Zigzag Girl. My setting is Atlantic City, that faded queen of American resort towns, where the boardwalk stretches like a stage between dreams and disappointment. Here, beneath the weight of lost fortunes and broken promises, a serial killer stalks performers in the magic community. The city itself becomes a character—seedy and shady, heavy with the accumulated weight of a century of dreams deferred and hopes betrayed.

Yet even in this darkness, the Atlantic Ocean looms beyond the boardwalk, vast and powerful and eternal. Each morning it promises something more—a new day, a fresh start, the possibility that the tide might wash away yesterday’s sins. The ocean doesn’t lie or deceive; it simply is, indifferent to human schemes yet somehow comforting in its constancy. It reminds my characters—and my readers—that there are forces in the world larger than crime and corruption, older than deception and betrayal.

The more I wrote, the more I realized I couldn’t stay in either pure darkness or pure light. Like a photographer who needs both shadow and illumination to create depth, I needed both to capture the full human experience. My characters exist in the between—that liminal space between magic and reality, between hope and despair, between love and loss. They’re flawed and frightened and sometimes morally compromised, but they’re also capable of courage, sacrifice, and unexpected grace.

I began calling it “noir with heart”—stories that acknowledge the darkness without being consumed by it, that find beauty in broken places and light in impossible circumstances. Because ultimately, what unlocks the heart of my stories—and I believe, most stories—is the possibility of love: romantic love, familial love, the love of justice, the love of truth, even the love of a perfectly executed illusion that brings wonder to a cynic’s eyes.

Magic and noir, I discovered, are both about transformation—one makes the impossible appear possible, the other reveals the possible within what seems hopeless. Both require faith: faith that the trick will work, faith that justice can exist in an unjust world, faith that somewhere in the darkness, light persists.

So here’s my challenge to fellow writers walking their own dark streets: Don’t be afraid of the long and winding road that leads to your story. Research the shadows, but don’t forget to look for the light. Ask yourself: What thin places exist in your fictional world? Where does magic seep through the cracks of ordinary reality? And perhaps most importantly: In the darkest moments of your narrative, what small flame of hope refuses to be extinguished?

The answer to that last question might just be the key that unlocks everything else.

My friends, I want to share my excitement with you. After years of work, Zigzag Girl, will be published on August 28^th in the UK, and on October 7^th in the US. Like Atlantic City with its rising and falling fortunes, the characters in Zigzag Girl transform themselves, revealing mask after mask. They include powerful female magicians, a ninety-something female journalist, a brooding bird-loving male magician, and a serial killer hiding in plain sight. Next month, I will tell you more about the book and its inspirations and secrets, but if you’re interested in reviewing it, interviewing me or writing about it, please let me know!

Wishing you all a happy August! See you in September…

Ruth

Photography and magic have much in common: they can both create the illusion of truth. A photograph is as much about what we don’t see, as what we do.

--Patrick Waterhouse

Lately, I’ve been thinking about faces—how much they reveal, how much they hide, and how essential they are to the way we navigate the world.

During the pandemic, our relationship with faces changed. We spent a couple of years seeing only the upper half of someone’s expression, and we had to re-learn how to see people... and ourselves with masks. Learn how to read expressions through eyes and gestures. How to understand tone and voice without seeing the mouth. We had entered our own kind of uncanny valley, where familiar faces became strange, where the art of reading emotion required new skills. For the first time in our lives, we had to consciously learn how to see each other again.

We wore masks in public, on the street, at work, sometimes even at home. There was safety in that, of course, but also a strange unfamiliarity. When the masks came off, I remember feeling oddly exposed—not just seeing others fully but being seen.

Photo by Flavio Lo Scalzo

Zoom added another layer. We saw each other in frames: small, pixelated versions of ourselves, complete with carefully curated backgrounds. We became both performer and audience, lit by ring lights and laptop screens. Faces were visible, yes, but also strangely flattened—missing that sense of presence we feel in the room with another person. And yet we got used to it. Maybe too used to it.

Now, as I work on a new novel set in the summer of 1969, in a world before Zoom or smartphones or computers, I find myself drawn again and again to the question of what a face means. My protagonist is a photographer searching faces for clues to the identity of a mysterious, dangerous figure haunting the city’s underground. Her camera is both a tool and a metaphor—a way of framing the world and trying to see through what she calls “the mask of the face to the heart and soul and whatever each person is hiding.”

There’s a link between magic and photography that I’d love to explore. Both are about perception, illusion, and revelation. Both invite us to look closer, to question what’s real, and to form a deeper connection with others and the world.

The strange thing is that in our current selfie-saturated world, we turn inward rather than outward—studying our own faces more than any generation in history. Ironically, many people report feeling disconnected from their authentic self-image. Zoom has magnified our every pore and flaw. We’ve learned how to filter, edit, and curate our images until they become our social media masks. We know our faces intimately yet somehow remain strangers to ourselves.

In a sense, it’s refreshing to voyage back to the late 60s, when a photograph was a precious thing—film was expensive, a camera a solid presence. The photographer had to see sense and meter light to come up with appropriate exposures. As Jerry de Wilde, a famous photographer of the 60s said, “Nowadays, most people’s photos look very similar because the camera is making the creative decisions instead of the photographer.”

Photo by Jerry De Wilde

My photographer finds magic in her darkroom, watching a face emerge slowly in the developer solution. First the eyes, then the shadows, finally the full revelation of features. During the pandemic, we experienced this process in reverse—we had grown accustomed to partial faces, and the full reveal felt almost too much.

But the face is our most human map. Whether we’re reading it through a mask, a Zoom screen, or in the intimate space of a photograph, we’re engaged in one of our most fundamental human activities: the search for recognition, understanding, connection. And for those of us who write, photograph, create, or simply try to understand, learning how to read the story it tells matters. When my photographer occasionally turns her camera on herself, it’s with the same searching intensity she brings to her subjects—not vanity, but investigation. What story does my own face tell? What am I hiding, even from myself?

Here are 3 writing prompts that I hope will spark your imagination:

1) Old Portraits vs Selfies

Old portraits say: This is how I want to be remembered.

Selfies say: This is how I want to be seen right now.

Or put another way: Portraits construct a legacy. Selfies construct a moment.

Study faces in old photographs versus contemporary selfies—what’s different in expression, posture, the way people present themselves to the camera?

2) Write a character sketch based solely on observing someone’s eyes above a mask.

What story do you construct from that limited information?

3) Imagine your character is a photographer, detective, or artist studying old photographs to uncover a mystery. Choose one face in a photo—describe it in vivid, precise detail. What emotion hides in the expression? What does this face say about what the character fears, desires, or is trying to forget?

Meanwhile, publication date for ZIGZAG GIRL is getting closer! It will be published on August 28^th in the UK, and on October 7^th in the US.

ZIGZAG GIRL is a contemporary mystery novel with magic elements set in Atlantic City and the eerie New Jersey Pine Barrens. The main character, Lucy Moon, is a brilliant young magician with a mysterious past. When she finds her friend’s body in a Sawing a Woman in Half Box on the stage of the theatre in Atlantic City where she’s performing, she goes in search of the killer. But as she discovers other similar murders, she finds herself falling for a charismatic magician who could be the killer. She realizes he may also hold the key to her true identity, and she is forced to dig deep into her own past to discover the secret that links her to the possible murderer.

I’ll write more about the novel next month. I can’t wait to share it with you!

Happy 4^th of July!

See you next month!

Ruth

Deep breath.

With everything that’s going on around us in the world, in life, in politics, and art, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by rage, frustration, and helplessness. There’s a time for rage, of course, but I believe there’s also a time for play. Deep play. The way children lose themselves in imaginative games. Serious play. “Every child is an artist,” Picasso observed. “The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

Last month I went to Sleuthfest, a crime writers’ conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. While I was there, I visited the Salvador Dalí Museum. I’ve been to the large Dalí museum in his hometown, Figueres, Spain, which is magnificent, but this one was a wonderful surprise. Dalí’s brilliance was evident in every room, but what charmed me most is that the organizers of this museum understood Dalí’s sense of play and adventure. Nothing was off-limits to Dalí. He made jewelry and furniture, created art for movies, and explored surrealism.

VR goggles invited me into his painting, “Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s ‘Angelus.’” I entered a vast ancient world—massive pillars, sand, stars—and felt like I was wandering through a myth.

In another painting, “Gala Looking Over the Mediterranean,” his wife/muse Gala stares out at the sea. But when you step away from the painting, Gala’s naked back transforms into the face of Abraham Lincoln.

In the gorgeous, lush “The Hallucinogenic Toreador,” the bodies of two Greek goddesses turn into the face of a man—the bullfighter.

Walking through the museum was like wandering through the imagination of a fearless artist who never forgot that art is play. Even the docent startled with the odd-shaped hat on her head, which turned out to be an upside-down woman’s high-heeled shoe. Dalí always played with the purpose of objects, she said, reimagining different uses for them.

Dalí understood something that many of us need to recapture: serious art emerges from serious play. “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams,” Dali once said. He recognized that creativity thrives on a paradox: intense focus paired with abundant space for the subconscious to wander, play, and make unexpected connections.

Picasso spent years mastering classical techniques before famously declaring that it took him “years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Deep play is that state where complete absorption meets genuine joy—where you’re so immersed in the creative process that you lose track of time, but unlike grinding work, it feels expansive rather than depleting. It’s being in the zone—building something with your hands, getting lost in a story you’re writing, or having a conversation that makes you see the world differently. It requires your full presence but gives back more energy than it takes. It also has a quality of fearlessness—you’re willing to look foolish, to try things that might not work, because the process itself is rewarding. It’s where Picasso’s “paint like a child” meets Dalí’s dreaming—a serious commitment to not taking yourself too seriously.

At my first magic conference, I watched one breathtaking illusion after another and confided to a magician that I was excited by their ways of thinking outside the box.

“What box?” he asked.

The box is our minds. The imagination our way out. Magicians create on the border between imagination and reality.

I believe one of the most powerful questions an artist can ask is, “What if—?”

What if… objects suddenly develop their own agenda? The writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, insisted that his pen and glasses were small demons who moved from place to place to drive him crazy. Another writer, Julio Cortázar, wrote a story in which a man tries to put on a sweater, but the sweater rebels and makes it very, very hard for him. To me, a sweater with agency sounds like the perfect blend of absurd and genuinely unsettling—there's something both cozy and sinister about clothing that has its own agenda. Inspired by that idea, I created a magic illusion that appears in my forthcoming novel, Zigzag Girl.

I love exploring the connection between magic and writing—how both art forms involve taking the ordinary world and revealing the strange possibilities hiding just beneath the surface. It taps into that slightly paranoid feeling we all have sometimes—like when your phone seems to know too much, or your car makes that noise only when you’re far from help. There's comedy in it, but also genuine eeriness.

So let’s imagine… What if— one day you wake up and your keys are plotting an escape? The books on your shelves shift their positions? Your mirror talks back to you? When you start imagining your everyday objects having opinions and motivations, suddenly your familiar environment becomes a playground of possibilities. It’s that Dali-like transformation of the familiar into the fantastical, but starting with something as simple as looking around the room and asking, “What if?”

Here are three more prompts for deep play:

Time Traveler's Review: Write a one-star review of the present day from the perspective of someone visiting from 100 years in the past or future. What would completely baffle them?

Lost and Found: Your character finds something impossible in a lost-and-found box. Write the scene where they try to return it to its “rightful owner.”

The Noir Text: Take the last text message you received and rewrite it as the opening of a noir detective story. Let the mundane become mysterious.

Remember the joy you felt when you first began writing? Or drawing? Or creating anything that came from your imagination? We didn’t worry about the destination, only the journey. It begins with curiosity and a question: What if?

This June—let’s rediscover joy. Let’s explore. Let’s dream.

And let me know if you have any suggestions on how to create a sense of deep play!

See you in July!

Ruth

Writing a novel is like giving birth. I hold the story inside me for as long as I can. I brood over it, feel it gestate and grow like a delicious secret inside me until it needs to be written. This is the labor phase, and it can go on for years. Many years. Many many years. And then, the sudden release into the world is shattering—painful, exhilarating, terrifying—it’s everything. A new life I’ve created with imagination and words and dreams… that has somehow become real. Despite all the work it requires, to me it’s as magical a process as giving birth to a child.

I’ve been thinking about the birthing metaphor lately because a novel I’ve worked on for a long time is finally going to see the light of day. I’ll share details at the end of this newsletter, but first, I want to tell you about two amazing women writers who have profoundly inspired me, and I hope they will inspire you too. Enheduanna, the first woman to sign her name to a piece of her writing, and Murasaki Shikibu, the woman who wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji.

Enheduanna lived in the 23rd century BCE in ancient Mesopotamia. She was remarkable as an ancient princess, priestess, and writer/poet. Her works offer us a rare glimpse into the female experience in ancient Mesopotamia during a time of political upheaval. In “The Exaltation of Inanna,” Enheduanna describes “being treated disrespectfully” during a political coup, and in one passage describes a sexual violation. She was attacked by a man in Inanna’s temple, and she pleads with her goddess to avenge her honor by punishing the man. This first-person perspective on assault from over 4,000 years ago offers a stark contrast to the official historical records dominated by male voices and military conquests.

In “The Exaltation of Inanna,” Enheduanna reflects on the creative process of writing, comparing the composition of her poem to the act of childbirth: “I have given birth, oh exalted lady, (to this song) for you.” I shivered the first time I read this passage. You can feel Enheduanna’s pride of ownership at the prayer/song she has created, and at the same time, her humility in offering this gift to her goddess. And her use of childbirth as a metaphor for artistic creation shows how deep its roots are in the human experience.

Let’s move across time and space to early 11^th century Japan where the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote The Tale of Genji, widely considered to be the world’s first novel. Through this monumental work, Murasaki gives us extraordinary insight into court life during Japan's Heian period that would be impossible to glean from official historical documents. But it’s more than that. The novel is witty and charming and depicts a complex picture of male-female relationships from a woman's perspective that foreshadows the works of Jane Austen.

Lady Murasaki's Genji is her ideal of manhood – “gentle, poetic, stunningly handsome, and, above all, a tender lover.” As for women, the typical Heian beauty required “a pouty mouth, narrow eyes, a thin nose, and round apple-cheeks.” Women used heavy rice powder to paint their faces and necks white, drew bright red rose-bud lips, and shaved off their eyebrows only to paint them back on high on their foreheads.

Most curious to contemporary readers, blackened teeth were considered attractive. Because women whitened their skin, natural teeth appeared yellow in comparison, so they painted their teeth black to create a more appealing contrast that also matched their black hair. When a person's teeth are blackened, “an illusion is created in which a wide smile is presented without showing one's teeth,” important in a society that valued modesty in women's expressions.

During the Heian period, literate and intelligent women could find employment based on their creative skills. Courts around the emperor’s principal consorts were filled with women whose work centered on creating amusement through conversation, writing, and artistic pursuits. Many of the greatest works were written by women of the court, including Ono no Komachi, Murasaki Shikibu, and Sei Shonagon. A phonetic writing script developed that was so associated with female literacy that it was alternatively called onnade, or women’s hand. This gave women a flexible writing medium closely related to spoken language—conditions that didn’t exist for women elsewhere in Asia or Europe until much later.

Women’s writing often captures experiences, practices, and perspectives that official histories miss. What constitutes beauty or proper behavior varies dramatically across cultures and time periods. The blackened teeth considered beautiful in Heian Japan remind us that our own beauty standards are equally cultural constructions, not universal truths. What I find particularly fascinating is that despite being separated by more than three millennia and coming from completely different cultural contexts, both Enheduanna and Murasaki Shikibu created works that spoke to universal human experiences and emotions while documenting aspects of their societies that would have otherwise been lost to history.

Here are 3 writing prompts you may want to try:

1. The Unseen Observer: Choose a major historical event and write about it from the perspective of a woman who was present but not mentioned in historical accounts. What did she notice that went unrecorded?

2. Beauty Standards Reversed: Imagine your current society but with completely inverted beauty standards (what’s considered unattractive is now the ideal). Write a scene where a character prepares for an important social event.

3. Letters Never Sent: Write a series of letters that might have been exchanged between women across different historical periods (e.g., Enheduanna writing to Murasaki Shikibu). What would they recognize in each other’s experiences? What would be utterly foreign?

And now, I am delighted to share the news that my novel, ZIGZAG GIRL, has a due date! Actually, two due dates: first, in the UK, she will appear in late August. You can pre-order the book on the Black Spring Press site or on amazon.uk/ In early October, she’ll emerge in the US. During the next couple of months, I’ll share insights into the process of the writing and publication of my first crime/mystery novel!

https://blackspringpressgroup.com/products/zigzag-girl

If you are attending Sleuthfest in mid-May, please come by and say hi! I’ll be doing a screenwriting workshop for crime writers and I’ll participate in a panel on Voice in writing.

See you in June!

Ruth

Passover is my favorite Jewish holiday — the symbolism, the beauty, the rituals, the history… Tonight is the first seder - ritual meal - of Passover/Pesach, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading a bit about what it means to us, especially in today’s world.

It’s been said that every Jewish holiday can be summed up by this response:

“The King (Pharaoh, Sultan, fill in the blank) tried to destroy us, we won/lost, let’s eat.”

That brings us to Passover, the eight-day holiday that commemorates the Exodus—the Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt to a 40 year-long trek through the desert that led to the Promised Land. The metaphor of an entire nation of people journeying from slavery to freedom is so powerful it’s no wonder many groups and nations throughout history have borrowed this story, remade it in their image, and used it as a banner of hope when times are dark.

It’s an understatement to say that we’re living through dark times. Which brings me to the first of the 4 questions traditionally asked during the Passover seder, the ritual meal in which Jews remember — and symbolically relive — the plagues suffered during the time they were slaves to the Pharaoh and their subsequent escape:

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Many of us are mourning the Israeli — and American — hostages raped, tortured, and kidnapped by Hamas terrorists — and those still in captivity. The seder in 2025 will mark the second Passover that the hostages have been held in Gaza. It’s believed that twenty-four of the hostages are still alive and being held prisoner by Hamas. For many of us this will be the second year we’ve lived through a terrifying onslaught of global antisemitism reminiscent of Nazi Germany and World War Two.

Below is a passage from my first novel, The Road to Fez, in which a family celebrates Passover/Pesach in Morocco while trying to decide whether it’s safer to remain in Morocco or to take the chance and travel to Israel. Papa Naphtali is the American heroine’s grandfather, a mystic and musician who was inspired by the memory of my own grandfather:

“This is what Pesach means to me,” Papa Naphtali says. “It represents the most courageous, terrifying decision human beings have ever made, to leave a known life of slavery, and to enter the unknown, dangerous promise of freedom. They had to lose the habits of slavery, to learn to straighten their shoulders and to look strangers directly in the eyes. It took forty years of wandering in the desert before the first generation of slaves was gone, and the new generation born free and wild in the desert was ready to fight for the promise. Imagine the terror. Imagine looking over the rocks into the land you thought was a myth, and seeing that it was real, that you could touch the ground and smell the air. We’re always on the verge of freedom, but frightened to take that last step. So what will we do, mes enfants? Remain in the desert for another forty years? Or advance to the vision of light, which may be a mirage?”

We don’t know what our world will look like in a year. It will certainly need to be navigated and explored as if we are entering a new country.

“Travelers’ reports differ as to what they saw when they entered the Promised Land. Bananas, oranges and pomegranates growing wild, or shimmering desert; a place of death, or one of life.”

Each Passover, Jews are urged to relive this experience of plagues, exile, freedom as if we were the ones who lived through the first Passover. Each year we make it a time of reckoning for ourselves and our world: which plagues have we survived? What exiles are we suffering? How has our world changed? What does freedom mean to us? And each year, the traditional wish is: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Papa Naphtali says, “Time circles and returns to that endless moment in the desert. For the Jews, it’s always that moment. For us, it’s always now.”

And I circle back to the first question: there are many answers, most involving the Passover meal, the ritual foods and songs, the four glasses of wine, and the matzah, but for me, the answer to why this night is different from all other nights is because it returns us to the wanderers in the desert. They are us, and we are them. We have fled plagues, slavery, starvation, and thirst, and now we are poised again on the edge of darkness. For a moment we stand together, remembering how it felt to press against each other in the uncertain darkness, before we take the next step, before we know whether it will bring more darkness or light.

That moment.

And then we take a deep breath, drink a glass of wine, and carry on. One step at a time. Let us each carry a torch as we lead each other out of the darkness.

Anyone remember water cooler TV? The discussions people had the morning after a jaw-dropping episode like “Who shot J.R.?” on Dallas or surreal moments from Twin Peaks? Social media has taken over as the place where we dissect episodes, propose theories about the characters’ relationships and secrets, and post memes. This season, Severance and The White Lotus have gripped our imaginations. I’d like to examine why and take a brief look at Adolescence. No spoilers!

“Innie” and “Outie” sound like kids’ terms, but thanks to Severance (Apple TV), which just concluded its second season, they’ve become shorthand for the work-life balance with which we all struggle. Employees at the mysterious Lumon Enterprises undergo a surgical procedure during which a severance chip is inserted in the brain. This chip splits them in two: the Innie—the work self—and the Outie—the personal self that lives a life outside of work. Why would anyone willingly do this? Well, severance offer a solution to the heartbreak of daily life. When life hurts so much it becomes impossible to bear, this is one way to remove the pain. Mark S, the main character, chose to be severed after his wife died in a tragic accident.

As you enter the sterile work-place of the mysterious Lumon Enterprises, you leave behind the messiness of life’s emotions and memories. Your Outie remains in the outside world to deal with those issues. Meanwhile your Innie sits at a computer and juggles seemingly meaningless numbers on a screen until it’s time to go home. Lumon, with its endless white corridors, secrets hidden behind locked doors, and excruciatingly awkward attempts by managers—particularly Mr. Milchik with his toothy smile and white turtlenecks—to simulate human joy with fruit baskets and forced dancing in the office, is simultaneously absurd and terrifying.

It’s also touching to watch the Innies bond with their coworkers and form new relationships, filled with secrets, passion, and humor. They can’t escape the human need for connection. Inevitable that their Innies and Outies discover threads that link their two selves and wrestle for supremacy. Once you’ve relinquished control over your Outie (who holds all your personal memories), what does free will mean? This is a dystopian show that explores profound questions about what it means to be human. Who is the real Mark S? The heartbroken man on the outside or the repressed employee on the inside?

From Lumon’s maze of corridors, we move to the sultry, decadent exoticism of The White Lotus, each season set into a different wildly extravagant resort. Each season opens with a dead body whose identity is not revealed until the final episode. Season three (not finished yet) is set in a luxury resort in Thailand, suffocatingly lush, teeming with snakes and lizards, vines and flowers. The pleasures of The White Lotus are not only in the glorious places we visit (Maui, Sicily, Thailand), but in the swampy depths and wild humor of the characters who come to the resort with their histories, needs, desires, and fears. Since they can’t surgically remove their memories like the characters in Severance, they numb themselves with Lorezapam, booze, and drugs, change their names, and experiment sexually and spiritually.

The real war in The White Lotus is not just between the wealthy tourists and the employees of the resort whose job is to serve and placate them, but between each character and their past. In a show that may superficially seem amoral, there is a deep sense of the search for goodness and meaning, symbolized by the enormous looming statue of Buddha. This season’s moral centers are Chelsea and Gaitok. Chelsea is the British girlfriend of an older man whose life has been poisoned by a quest for revenge. When her boyfriend goes to Bangkok, a shallow young man asks Chelsea why she won’t just hook up with him. She tells him she has a boyfriend, who is her soulmate. When he looks at her in disbelief, she says, “Hooking up with you would be an empty experience… because you’re soulless.” As for gentle, smiling Gaitok , so far (as of Episode Seven), he is a failure as the resort’s security guard: he hates to fight or to hurt people.

Why do these shows work so well? The world-building is stunning—whether it’s a glamorous resort or a futuristic building—every detail counts. But the complexity of the characters comes first. In both series, they are contradictory and surprising—just like real people. The stakes in these shows are personal—each character has their own secrets, desires, needs—and the more we learn about them, the more we care. Each one goes through an arc, and as they change, we change our minds about them. We go through an arc as well.

Also, the writing in both shows is superb. The writers give us mysteries that are never completely solved—questions are raised, not all of them answered. The writing is intelligent and trusts the audience to get it. Social commentary is presented in entertaining ways—with humor, mystery, and constant tension. What we see is that we don’t need a severance chip installed in our brains to feel isolated from ourselves and others, and when we travel, we always pack our memories.

Another show that recently impressed me is Adolescence. Harrowing and harsh, it’s a British show with four episodes, each filmed in a single take. Jamie, a thirteen-year-old boy, is accused of murdering a female schoolmate. His parents, his friends, the police—all form part of the web woven around him. Each episode is brilliant, but the third is one of the most mesmerizing hours of TV I’ve ever seen. It takes place in a claustrophobic interview room in the juvenile center where Jamie is being held. A child psychologist questions him, trying to assess him for court. The duel between the two is unrelenting: she probes, and he fends off her advances until she hits a nerve, and he reveals himself. This episode—and the entire show—feel unbearably real. We see the dangers of social media on young minds. Today’s bullies don’t need to corner their prey after school or follow them home—there’s no escape from social media harassment and trolling. And we’re left with a family—and society—trying to define masculinity in an age when its most toxic impulses get the most traction.

In all three shows—Adolescence, Severance, and The White Lotus—creators and writers have taken risks and plunged fearlessly into essential human truths. In real life, our Innies and Outies don’t always work together or merge. Sometimes we’re unaware of how volatile and repressed and enraged our Innies are until one day they explode.

Okay, so that’s pretty dark, but I think many of us are dealing with dark events, and that’s also why these shows resonate with us. That’s what great art does—it reveals us to ourselves. Please drop a line and let me know what you think.

My friends, next time I’ll fill you in on things that are happening with my work. Meanwhile, enjoy the blooming, budding season. See you in May!

Ruth