SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Kate and Charlie, what a charming story. High school sweethearts apart for 50 years reunited by fate in Florida. Then after their wedding and in their honeymoon suite, Charlie has a question for Katie.
BONNIE KISTLER: Do you remember the Tylenol murders? What? She blinked hard. She couldn't imagine why he was bringing this up now. In Chicago, back in the '80s, when somebody tampered with the bottles on the store shelves and put potassium cyanide capsules in with the pills. Seven people died. Oh, now she understood. God, yes, she said with a groan. That's why we all have to suffer now with these damn tamper-proof caps. He had no trouble, though. He flipped the cap and tapped a pill into her hand. She popped it in her mouth and took a big swallow of the champagne to chase it down her throat. What fool ever said you couldn't have it all? - she thought. She had everything now, everything she'd ever dreamed of. Katie, Darling, he said sadly as the room tilted leftward. I have a confession to make.
SIMON: That is Bonnie Kistler reading from her new mystery "Shell Games," and she joins us from the studios of WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina. Thanks so much for being with us.
KISTLER: It's a pleasure.
SIMON: Charlie isn't just confessing that he had too much cake at the reception, is he?
KISTLER: No, he's not. He's apparently confessing that he was the Tylenol murderer in the notorious unsolved crime from 1982.
SIMON: So what happens when Kate tries to do the responsible, if painful, thing and calls the police?
KISTLER: He then denies that he made such a confession and says that she was obviously just hallucinating as a result of too much wedding champagne. And the police are able rather quickly to establish that Charlie had an alibi for the time in question. He was stationed overseas and could not have been in the Chicago area in 1982. And then her son-in-law, who's never liked her very much, declares that obviously she has dementia. The dilemma then becomes the problem of her daughter, Julie, who is torn between - is her beloved stepfather, in fact, a con man who's trying to bilk her mother out of her vast fortune, or is her brilliant mother losing her mind? Is she sinking into dementia?
SIMON: Tell us about Kate and her brilliant career. She's a real estate developer in her 70s and a force, isn't she?
KISTLER: That's right. She is a self-made woman, a billionaire, depending upon where the market stands, who has made a fortune in real estate development along coastal Florida. She has done this all on her own. She's a force of nature. She's a power broker in Florida politics and has raised her daughter, unfortunately, in her shadow, and Julie has grown up not to be a force of nature as her mother is.
SIMON: I read this plot premise came to you in a dream.
KISTLER: Scott, I'm embarrassed to admit this is true because it's so contrary to my nature. I am a realistic person. I write realistic fiction. But it is true that this - I literally had a dream in which I was the bride, and my brand-new husband confessed to me that he was the Tylenol murderer. And in my dream, I ran out of our honeymoon suite to the nearest police station. And he followed hard on my heels and shaking his head sadly, said to the police, she's having another one of her episodes.
SIMON: Oh, my
KISTLER: I like the gaslighting aspect of that. I was really interested in the mind games and the psychological manipulation. And I thought, let me see if I can take this weird dream and make it into a real book.
SIMON: Is there - I have to ask you about this carefully - an undercurrent of ageism in this in that when you have people say, oh, they're in their 70s; it's got to be dementia.
KISTLER: Exactly.
SIMON: There are a lot of people who say, yeah, got to be dementia.
KISTLER: Exactly. Yeah. Kate is 70, has, you know, shown no signs up to this point, other than the usual absent-mindedness that busy people often have of not remembering, you know, where they put their keys. But when you start to look through the lens of ageism, you can start to say, well, I've been seeing the signs, you know, and not remembering somebody's name - these kind of things that sort of happen to everybody but then slapping a label of dementia or Alzheimer's on them.
SIMON: Ms. Kistler, are you a lawyer who became a writer or a writer who got sidetracked into the law then became a writer?
KISTLER: Very much the latter, Scott. I always wanted to be a writer. I wrote all through my childhood and teens in college, and I would have continued and not gone to law school, except that I had - as I said, I'm a realistic person, and I wanted to be able to earn a living and got very much sucked into it. It's an all-consuming profession. It's hard to be a part-time lawyer, especially if you're doing big-city, big-firm litigation. And so I did put my writing dreams and hopes off to the side for some time but couldn't ever get rid of the itch entirely, would scribble notes on the train and during my morning commute, you know, would try to steal hours on the computer during lunch and finally got to a position where I was able to make the break with the law and become a full-time writer.
SIMON: No one was ever charged in the Tylenol murders.
KISTLER: No.
SIMON: Police in the FBI have thought at one point or another they had the person, but no DNA tests with any of the subjects have ever matched up. In a sense, and even in your novel, does the story go on?
KISTLER: Because it was never solved, it remains a little bit ripe for fictitious retelling. In real life, there was someone who was identified as the prime suspect, but they could never establish that he was in Chicago to do this in-store tampering, and thus he was never charged with that crime. There's a long tradition in crime fiction of sort of injecting true crime into it. It's a way of sort of tapping into the cultural memory of these real-life events and hopefully creating a little ripple in the reader of, oh, yes, I remember that - or for those readers who don't remember that, awakening, I hope, a curiosity.
SIMON: Bonnie Kistler, her new novel, "Shell Games." Thank you so much for being with us.
KISTLER: It was my pleasure, Scott. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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