Finding the Bad Inn: Discovering My Family's Hidden Past (Butte) by Christy Leskovar

Imagine while at a quiet family gathering, your aunt happens to mention a fire and a dead body and that your great-grandmother was arrested for murdering your great-grandfather. After you pick your jaw up off the floor, what do you do? Of course, you abandon your successful engineering career and go traipsing across the globe to find out what happened and write a book about it.

That is what Christy Leskovar did. Her first book, One Night in a Bad Inn, a High Plains Book Award finalist, tells the true story of what she found out. Finding the Bad Inn: Discovering My Family's Hidden Past is the detective hunt behind how she discovered who started the fire, how the body ended up in the house, why her grandmother was sent to an orphanage when she wasn t an orphan, what really happened when her grandfather saved that man in the war, and so much more.

Armed with many questions and only a handful of clues, she set off on a quest to solve the mysteries, a quest that took her across the globe to her family s ancestral homes in Wales and Ireland, to the coal mines of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to a desolate Montana homestead near Forsyth, to the historic copper mines of Butte, to First World War battlefields in France and Belgium. And after amassing a treasure trove of intriguing stories, we learn how she managed to knit those stories into a compelling book.

Finding the Bad Inn and One Night in a Bad Inn are two pieces of a remarkable true story. Begin with either one.

Hardcover, 300 pages.