Press release for the narrative nonfiction book ONE NIGHT IN A BAD INN A True Story by Christy Leskovar

SCANDAL, WAR, MURDER, MAYHEM, MONTANA

One might have thought they were family secrets, but mostly they were pieces of the past no one knew about until engineer-turned-writer Christy Leskovar started looking into her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ past. The results of her extensive research, which took her across the U.S. and to Europe, are found in her narrative nonfiction book ONE NIGHT IN A BAD INN. “In all these years, no one ever mentioned that my great-grandmother had been accused of murder. Funny how that never came up before,” says the author. Learning that startling news prompted her to leave her 15-year engineering career with Bechtel and devote all her time to uncovering the rest of the story and writing a book about it. “We didn’t know the whole of it until I found the court files and newspaper clippings,” she says.

The book was a 2007 High Plains Best New Book Award finalist.

ONE NIGHT IN A BAD INN is the fascinating true story of a notorious Welsh matriarch, two daring fugitives, a heroic Irish doughboy, and a beautiful inspiring lady who endure and overcome scandal, war, murder, and mayhem on a desolate eastern Montana homestead, in the raucous mining town of Butte, and on the bloody battlefields of the First World War. It is a remarkable saga through which the reader learns intriguing history through the lives of some very intriguing people.

The story begins on that desolate homestead near Forsyth, Montana, in 1913. The house burns to the ground, the body of a dead man is found in the ruins. The inquest determines he was the man who lived in the house, Arthur Hughes, Leskovar’s great-grandfather. The autopsy reveals he was dead before the fire. A murder investigation ensues. Stops along the way include the Olive Hotel in Miles City, the orphanage in Twin Bridges, New York City’s seedy Bowery, and the prison in Deer Lodge. And that’s only Part One, and it’s all true.

The book is packed with history and historic photographs. It also provides a slice of life of the early 20th century West: the rigors of homesteading, the goings-on in a bawdy Butte boarding house, the experience of a little girl in an orphanage in 1913 (the author’s grandmother), what life was like for prisoners back then. And if everyday life wasn’t fraught with enough perils, the story includes the horrors of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history as seen through the eyes of one of the rescuers; a botched robbery that ended in murder and the ensuing trial in Boulder, Montana; and the heroism of the “Powder River Gang,” a band of fearless miners and cowboys who fought in the 91^st “Wild West” Division in the First World War. To piece together the riveting war narrative, Leskovar traveled to the battlefields in France and Belgium, the National Archives, the Military History Institute, the Montana Historical Society, and Fort Lewis. She even tracked down a 107-year-old former soldier. The war story centers on her Irish immigrant grandfather, Peter Thompson. He saw the worst of the fighting on the Western Front where he saved a man’s life, at great risk to his own. He returned home with a bullet hole in his chest and mustard gas burns on his back.

Christy Leskovar was born in Butte, Montana, and grew up in Kennewick, Washington. In 1982 she graduated from Seattle University 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 Las Vegas. During a trip to her hometown of Butte in 1997, she learned the shocking news about her great-grandmother being arrested for murder. She ultimately left her engineering career to devote all her time to finding out what happened and writing a book about it. The research and writing took eight years.

The undisputed heroine of the book is her grandmother, the indomitable Aila. After Aila’s two-year stay in the orphanage, she lived in that bawdy Butte boarding house, run by her mother, Sarah, and later eloped with Peter to Pocatello. Despite intense pressure from her mother to enter the demimonde and the trials and tribulations of life with her charming though footloose husband, she lived an impeccable life. “What is most important about this book,” says the author, “apart from the murder mystery, the war drama, and what not, is that even though my grandmother came from a notorious family, she refused to follow that example. She chose to rise above it all. She refused to let what she grew up around determine the person she would be. She was a remarkable woman.”

ONE NIGHT IN A BAD INN was published by Pictorial Histories Publishing of Missoula. To learn more, read an excerpt, and see a list of historic sights from the book, visit www.onenightinabadinn.com.

Note: The cover art can be downloaded from the home page.

Christy Leskovar 4952 Mount Pleasant Lane, Las Vegas, NV 89113 702-220-3816 cell -702-321-3173 cleskovar@cox.net