Press Release for the lively new memoir    

Finding the Bad Inn: Discovering My Family’s Hidden Past

by Christy Leskovar

The dust jacket can be downloaded from the web site.

IT BEGAN WITH A FAMILY PLOT

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, Montana, to First World War battlefields in France and Belgium.   And after amassing a treasure trove of intriguing stories, Finding the Bad Inn chronicles how she managed to knit those stories into a compelling book.

“Finding the Bad Inn is about how I discovered where the bodies were buried, literally, in my first book,” explains Leskovar.  “It tells the story of my travels and misadventures and about the interesting and colorful people I met along the way.  As I traveled to the places in the book, finding the story became as interesting as the story I was finding.  I felt as if I were living in a novel discovering all this, and I decided to write it down.  The two books go together but are independent.  You can read either first.”

Christy Leskovar was born in Butte, Montana, and raised in Kennewick, Washington.  She graduated from Seattle University in 1982 with degrees in mechanical engineering and French.  She then joined Bechtel in Gaithersburg, Maryland.  After stints in Kansas, Barcelona, and San Francisco, she transferred to an assignment in Las Vegas.  It was during a trip to her hometown in 1997 that she heard the startling story about her great-grandmother, a story so irresistible and mysterious that she walked away from that secure career and set out on a quest to unravel the mystery and write a book about it. 

To uncover the story, she had to learn new skills, morphing into a true-crime detective, archival archeologist, and ground-level historian.  Just how does an engineer go from designing nuclear power plants to tracking down a fugitive through time and following the footsteps of a soldier and see his stunning act of heroism explode into an epic fight to the death between massive armies and then write the story such that it doesn’t sound like an engineer wrote it?  “None of it was easy,” says Leskovar, “But it was quite an adventure and a lot of fun.” 

“You never know what you’ll find when you start snooping around in the family closet,” she says, “saints, sinners, heros, vagabonds.  I didn’t give it a thought.  I already knew that my great-grandmother Sarah was notorious and that my grandfather Peter was a war hero, and that my grandmother was a remarkable woman, but I didn’t think about what else I might find, or worry about what I might find.”

Leskovar collected some unusual souvenirs in her travels, the details of which she says are best understood in context in the book. 

Finding the Bad Inn will be available in hardcover in late August 2010.  The Kindle e-book is available at Amazon.  The hardcover, published by Pictorial Histories Publishing of Missoula, Montana, includes pictures and a map that are not included in the e-book.  Read an excerpt at www.christyleskovar.com