BOM: How the idea germinated

As often happens, the idea for LET DARKNESS COME sprang from a couple of sources. First, I was involved in a rather unpleasant legal proceeding, and had to spend a great deal of time dealing with lawyers and reading about depositions and the like. Since I had to go through it, I reasoned, I might as well learn from it and tackle a legal book . . . maybe a thriller?

**SPOILER ALERT FROM THIS POINT ONWARD**

Second, I stumbled upon a special called "I Am My Own Twin" on the Discovery Health Channel (yes, I got part of the idea from THE FACE from that same channel. It's simply fascinating!) In the special, they interviewed a woman who actually gave birth to three children whose DNA did not match her own--according to genetic specialists, she was NOT related to her own children. They were ready to accuse her of kidnapping someone else's children until they watched her give birth to the third child, they typed the infant, and discovered that the same situation existed with the third baby. Apparently her ovaries came from a fraternal twin she had absorbed in the womb. She was a chimera.

(This makes me wonder about all those IVF cases where they implant three embryos and end up with one baby. Are the other two infants absorbed into the third? Hmmm.)

They interviewed another woman with the same condition--you could examine random hairs on this woman's head and they would appear to have come from two different people.

So--I was fascinated again. And I thought, "What about the souls of these second babies? Did they ever exist? Did they depart when the fetus was absorbed?" I was going to go with the idea of fetus in fetu, but thought the idea was a little too gruesome for my readers. I mean, imagine--ugh.

So the chimera seemed to fit. At that point, it was simply a matter of working out the murder, the accused, and the "detective," who in this case turns out to be the inexperienced defense attorney, Briley Lester.

Briley, BTW, is named after my cousin's cat. :-)

There is not a lot of spiritual content in this book, and I didn't intend to include a lot because I knew the publisher, Mira, is a secular publisher. But still I wanted to address the idea of eternal souls, and I also wanted to emphasize the sort of living-for-others exemplified by Timothy, Briley's boyfriend, and Briley's late father. Briley begins to follow their lead, even though she is reluctant to at first.

And there you have it . . . how the pieces of the idea came together. :-) Tomorrow: the research.

~~Angie