Bookstore Gig Inspires Author's Mystery Novel
University of Iowa employee turns experience working at Wisconsin store into a who-done-it
Iowa native Lisa Avelleyra was an avid reader while growing up.
“I gravitated to mysteries, but I read whatever I could get my hands on,” said Avelleyra, 63, who now lives in Iowa City and works as a coordinator in the biomedical science Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa.
That love of reading eventually evolved into an interest in writing.
“Always in the back of my mind I wanted to write a book,” Avelleyra said.
But her path to becoming a published author would be a long one, with stints at several newspapers and a bookstore in Madison, Wis., along the way.
In 2022, she published her first book, a memoir called “Get Me to the Abbey.” In it, she detailed her struggles with alcohol abuse.
“I didn’t really decide to write a memoir, it just kind of happened,” Avelleyra said, noting that she felt compelled to write it after spending time in rehab.
“So it kind of was decided for me what my first book was going to be,” she said.
Though it wasn’t how she imagined starting her career as an author, the process helped get the creative juices flowing.
“Writing ‘Get Me to the Abbey’ gave me the motivation, the confidence, just that experience of writing a book,” she said.
For her next project, she decided to get back to her first love as a reader: mysteries.
Her initial thought was to write a mystery centered on a reporter uncovering some kind of scandal that puts their life in danger. She has a degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin and spent several years working for newspapers in Wisconsin, but she never encountered anything quite that dramatic as a reporter.
She decided it might make more sense to focus on another part of her career: her time working at the bookstore.
“I realized that most authors, they use their personal experience in their book,” Avelleyra said. “And after writing ‘Get Me to the Abbey,’ I realized that it would be best for me to also draw upon my personal experiences and people that I knew.”
That’s exactly what she’s done in “Shelved,” a who-done-it-style mystery released March 3 by Little Creek Press. The book centers on a murder that takes place at a bookstore in Madison, Wis., in the late 1990s. There are no cellphones but plenty of well-crafted characters — many of them based on real people whom Avelleyra worked with during her years as a bookstore employee from 1997 to 2005.
“I had so many colorful characters to draw from,” Avelleyra said.
She didn’t start the writing process knowing who the killer would be — after all, the murder aspect of the story is purely fictional. So deciding how to wrap up everything “was a little harder than I thought it was going to be, but it was fun, too,” she said.
One of the few characters in “Shelved” who isn’t based on a real person is the lead investigator in the story, Madison Police Department Detective John Meyer.
Initially, Avelleyra said, Meyer didn’t make an appearance until about the midway point of the book. When one of her early readers suggested introducing him into the story sooner, she resisted.
Then, she attended a weekend-long writing workshop in which she was asked to bring a passage from something she’d written. She brought in a portion of her book draft that centered on Meyer.
“Everybody liked John a lot,” she said, and the writers in her group just assumed the passage was the opening scene of the book.
It wasn’t at the time, Avelleyra said, but it is now.
The unexpected popularity of the character gave Avelleyra the inspiration for her next book, which she’s working on now. She’s relocating Detective John Meyer from Madison to Iowa City, with a murder to investigate at a hospital rather than a bookstore.
