Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

Can you tell us a little about yourself? Are you a full-time author?

I retired from Federal service several years ago, but continued to work part-time in radio, my first profession. I’d written some short stories and an unpublished novel while in college, but then real life intervened, so they stayed in my files. Then one evening my wife was reading a paperback and tossed it aside. “You can write better than this junk,” she said. I decided to prove her right. The result was The White Vixen, my first published novel.

 

Can you tell us about The Dance We Shared (Men of Honor Book 3)?

The series is about men placed in situations where their personal honor is tested. How will they respond? Will they take the easy way out, as so many people do these days? Or will they do what it takes to meet the challenge?

In The Dance We Shared, we meet Ben Fletcher, radio announcer, age 54. He’s been single for a long time, has a good job, lives alone, trains in the martial arts, and tries not to think of Vernoica Starr, the glamorous TV host he loved — and lost — 20 years ago. Ronnie walked out on him after he made a foolish choice. She married another man and moved away.

One day, Ben is cleaning out a file cabinet in his office when he discovers an envelope. Inside is a card, with a phone number and a short message, in Ronnie’s handwriting: “Please help me.” Then he looks at the envelope and sees that it was postmarked five years ago…just before Ronnie disappeared.

 

 

Can you tell us a little about the characters?

Ben Fletcher was the top-rated radio announcer in La Crosse, Wis., when he met Ronnie. Recently divorced with two small children, Ben fell hard for the TV morning news anchor when they co-hosted a charity telethon. Things went well for a year and a half. There was talk of marriage and a child together, and then one night when Ronnie was out of town on assignment, Ben made a selfish choice.

Veronica Starr, the city’s most-watched TV news personality, seemed to recover quickly from her devastating discovery. She met an older man, a banker, married him after a short romance and soon moved with him to the Twin Cities, where she quickly rose to the top of the TV ratings again, getting notice from national networks. But as exciting as her professional life was, her home life was dull and suffocating. She often thought of Ben, and what they might’ve had together if she had just found the strength to forgive him.

Ben has moved on as best he can, getting a new job at the local university, spending his spare time weightlifting, swimming and training in taekwondo. Reasonably content, he’s starting to think about retirement, but memories of Ronnie won’t fade away. A day hasn’t gone by without regrets for what he did, but as time passes, so do his chances to make things right…or so he thinks, until the day he finds Ronnie’s five-year-old call for help.

 

Where is this book set and why did you choose that location?

As a native of Wisconsin, I like to set my stories in my beautiful state and its neighbors. We start in La Crosse, a charming city on the Mississippi, drop in on the Twin Cities, and then move to Wisconsin’s northwest, to the village of Birchwood, near where I lived for more than three decades. The novel then takes the reader farther north, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where Ben’s quest reaches its climax.

 

 

How can people benefit from reading The Dance We Shared?

Those of us lucky enough to still be with the love of their life, like I am, can remember a time when things were shaky. I don’t know any men who want to wind up like the guy in the Garth Brooks song, looking back on the memories of the dance he shared with the love of his life, knowing that it would end. Writing the novel took me back to a time early in my relationship with Sue, when it looked like we wouldn’t make it. But we did, and remembering those times, as tough as they were, can make us appreciate what we have. And for those who lost their loves, perhaps the story can give them some hope. It wasn’t too late for Ben, and maybe it won’t be for the reader whose dance ended way too soon.

 

Is this your only book?

Dance is my tenth published novel. I have four in my White Vixen series, which follows USAF special operator Jo Ann Geary through the 1980s into the early 90s. There are three in my Quest series, about middle-aged Wisconsin brothers Jim and Mark Hayes, partners in a security firm, and their adventures with their wives. Last but certainly not least are the first two entries in Men of Honor. In The Heights of Valor, modern-day Army officer Jake Dawson seeks inspiration and guidance from the diary of his great-grandfather Charles, who fought with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. And then we have The Man in the Arena, set in modern-day Crawford County, in Wisconsin’s beautiful Driftless Region. Air Force officer Scott Armstrong, forced into early retirement after his marriage implodes and a mission goes sideways, goes back to his boyhood home along the Mississippi, where he starts rebuilding his life. He meets beautiful divorcee Beth, and things start looking up, despite the presence of a drug gang which is poisoning the county, staying two steps ahead of the police. But when the gang turns its attention to trafficking, and its first target is Beth’s teenage daughter, Scott decides its time to be the man his late grandfather always wanted him to be.

 

 

Thank you so much for this interview, David. What’s next for you?

My wife and I are in the midst of a move from Wisconsin’s Northwest down into the Driftless, so it’s an exciting time. I still don’t have radio out of my system, so I’ll be dabbling in that down here. As for writing, I’m already starting to plot out my next novels: Man on a Mission (Men of Honor book 4), Quest for Justice (Quest book 4), and The Black Orca (White Vixen book 5).

 

Where to purchase the book:

The ebook is on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3T01SNz

Ben Fletcher seems to have it all going for him. In his early fifties, he’s in great shape thanks to a disciplined regimen of weight training, swimming and martial arts. He has a job that pays him a good living in the charming Wisconsin city of La Crosse. Divorced a quarter-century earlier, he remains close to his two grown children and grandkids. Ben is content with his life.

But he’s not happy. Twenty years ago, he was, during that glorious year and a half he was dating the glamorous Veronica Starr. They were an “item”: Ben, the city’s highest-rated radio announcer, and Ronnie, an award-winning TV newscaster. They were starting to talk about the future, one that would include marriage and kids. But then, Ben made a stupid mistake, and it all came crashing down. Ronnie broke off the relationship, met an older man and married him. Within a year she was gone, moving with her new husband to the Twin Cities. Ben had no choice but to move on with his life the best he could.

One day, he’s cleaning out a file cabinet in his office and finds an old catalog. Before throwing it out, he riffles through its pages, and an envelope drops onto his desk. Opening it, he finds a card. In handwriting he immediately recognizes as Ronnie’s are a phone number and the words, “Please help me.” When he looks again at the envelope he sees the postmark: it had been sent five years earlier…just before Veronica Starr left her husband, quit her job and disappeared. 

David’s latest book is The Dance We Shared (Men of Honor Book 3).

╰┈➤Book Details

● Title: The Dance We Shared (Men of Honor Book 3)

● Author: David Tindell

● Genre: Romantic Suspense

● Language:English

● Pages: 229

● Publisher: KDP

● Publication Date: August 9, 2026

● Price: Kindle $2.99

She makes her

Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12th century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18th century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cádiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.

╰┈➤ You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

Thank you so much for this interview, Mary. How did your family feel about having you write a book that might include them?

 

My parents were both gone by the time I wrote Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, and one of my older sisters had passed away. I was worried about how my other two sisters and the larger, extended family would feel about my describing intimate dynamics in the book, like my parents’ fighting or my father’s alcoholism. But my sisters and I talked about these things, and they were supportive. Before publication, I sent them both the finished manuscript — not promising to make changes but to hear their feedback and be influenced or not by it. I know one of them has read the entire book, and she was very moved. Her response has meant the world to me.

 

What was it like living in military quarters and never having a ‘real’ home that stayed in the same place? Do you feel it shaped who you are today?

 

In some ways, it wasn’t so much of an issue, since from the time we were very young, my sisters and I were moving every two years or so. It was all we knew and all we expected. The other kids on the Army posts where we were stationed had the same experience.

 

But a couple of things complicated that normality. Whenever they could, my parents enrolled us in Catholic schools, off post, and we would find ourselves surrounded by kids who had known each other since kindergarten. Generally, they looked at us like we were irrelevant — at least at the beginning. Eventually we’d make friends and be invited to their homes, where we’d see the continuity and stability of their lives, in contrast to our own.

 

And there were the visits to see our New Jersey cousins, who lived in a lovely house in a country town where they’d been all their lives. They’d gone to the same school, had the same friends, and so forth. It was an ideal domestic scene, and I loved being there. I was envious of their world but couldn’t imagine it for myself. It was too far out of reach.

 

When we were young, the moves were exciting. My parents would talk about the places we were going — California! Germany! — and my sisters and I would start imaging what they would be like. We’d read about and picture ourselves in the new situation. As we got older and had close friends and boyfriends, the moves were more difficult. It was sad and painful to have to leave, and we wished very much we could stay in the same place. Then, again, the new place would be exciting and different. We’d make new friends, and the cycle would continue like that.

 

Moving so much and not having a home has shaped me a great deal. After leaving my parents for college, I kept moving and am still am not quite rooted, although I’m married and have a nice house in Easton, Pennsylvania. But every three months my husband and I shift off to Spain, where we have a cabin in the mountains of Andalucía. I love being in Spain and would move here if I could. We have friends and more of a history here than we do in Easton. We don’t, however, have residency in Spain, so after three months, we come back to Easton. The year is divided up like this, and it feels perfectly familiar to me.

 

In one of your interviews you said, “Memories of my girlhood and forgotten fears of nuclear apocalypse were running through my brain day and night.” I can’t imagine the fear. Can you elaborate on this and tell us how you coped?

 

Living on military posts, I think we had more of a sense of the potential for nuclear war than other children in America. Because our fathers’ jobs were to get the defense apparatus ready for that eventuality, we were made constantly aware of it. Civil-defense shelters were everywhere, and we practiced the “Duck and Cover” moves at school, huddling under our desks and hoping that would do the trick! On the posts in Heidelberg and Stuttgart, Germany, there was a lot of talk about the Fulda Gap, a point on the border between West and East Germany where it was predicted the Soviet army would flood through to do battle with the Germans and the rest of Europe. These images and warnings kept the possibility of nuclear apocalypse in our minds almost all the time.

 

Apart from that, our parents were practicing Catholics, and the story of St. John’s Apocalypse often came up in the post chaplain’s sermons. Apocalypse offered a ready analogue to the talk of nuclear annihilation, and the chaplain would build on it, trying to imbue in us a sense of how close the end of world might be. The terrifying judgement of the living and the dead and the assignment of eternal damnation or happiness was always upon us.

 

These twin discourses of apocalypse were in the air, in our dreams and produced what I’d call a habit of fear, a trained response to seeing whatever troubling situation emerges as a sign of the end of days. Or the end of something. Like now, so many people my age are seeing the current political situation in the US as signs of the end of democracy and, perhaps, of America. But on a more personal level, the habit of fear has stayed with me and been a real handicap to my self-development and to my ability to genuinely live with confidence. Fortunately, it’s an obvious enough problem that I’ve known about it for a long time and have spent a lot of time (and money!) trying to come to terms with and manage it in therapeutical contexts.

 

Can you tell us the name of some of the places you have traveled to when your father was an aviator and which were your favorite?

 

We lived in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, infamous as a cancer hot-spot for people who lived there in the 50s. Then there was Fort Rucker, in Dothan Alabama, where my father taught pilots how to fly helicopters and I got to ride in a Bell helicopter once — like being up in the air inside a giant eyeball. We rented a farm way out in the country and had a horse, cows, chickens, guinea hens to look after. That was hugely fun, although rural Alabama was a very unfamiliar place and the people there weren’t easy for us — especially for my mother — to understand. I go into Franny’s way of responding to southern culture in the book, but suffice it to say here that she was quite unhappy. Later we moved to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, where we lived off post in a swampy development called Forestdale. There was a creek behind the house, but you had to watch out for water moccasins. I started my writing career there with a little newspaper a friend and I created, The Forestdale Gazette, in which we reported news of the neighborhood, using carbon paper for copies.

 

Later we moved to Fort Ord, in Monterey, California. This was really my favorite and my sisters’ too. We lived on post, but our parents enrolled us in the beautiful Carmel Mission School in Carmel, situated in an old monastery and arranged like a cloister walk around a gorgeous garden. We made friends there and loved the school, although some of the nuns were stricter than others. We stayed at Fort Ord long enough for my older sisters and me to start high school in Monterey. Then my father had orders to go to Stuttgart, so we had to say goodbye to people who had become important to us.

 

We crossed the Atlantic on the SS United States, an adventure in itself, which I also recount in the book. Germany opened up a whole new world. The enormous differences of language, styles of dress and manners, of what kids were allowed to do that they weren’t in the US and vice-versa, not to speak of the economic differences between them and us in those days — all these surprises were overwhelming. But it was fascinating. I scrambled to learn the German language and understand the few German friends I made. For the first couple of years we were in Stuttgart, a beautiful industrial city, and then we moved to Heidelberg, a handsome and historic university town. In both places we lived in the very closed environment of the post and didn’t get to know German people or their language or society very well. Among the military kids, my sisters and I came of age and got a taste of American teenage life that we’d never had in the States — drinking parties in the local Gasthauses that had no drinking age, and moonlit adventures in old Nazi sites. It was a strange and exotic experience which made me into a very different person than I’d been before.

 

Having lived through the Cold War, you know the fear of Russians invading or setting off a nuclear weapon was very real. Can you help us feel what that was like?

 

We were shown films in school with images of an enormous blast, followed by empty streets with trash blowing in the nuclear wind. The announcer would insist again and again that if we heard the atomic warning siren, we were to “duck and cover,” wherever we were. And we were told there might be no warning, that a blast as bright as the sun would suddenly happen, anywhere, anytime. Duck and cover movies warnings were played in schools and in the base movie theaters. Readiness warnings were issued at sports events and even in church. Repeatedly, we were told to be always alert for the warnings or the sun-bright blast itself. The message was meant to live in our psyches and be part of our thinking, our identity. We were people under threat. Nuclear holocaust was in my dreams and fueled a steady sense of fear and trepidation. From one moment to the next, you had to be ready for the world to fall apart under your feet. It was a tremendously unsettling discourse and kept all of us, I think, on edge and fearful.

 

I see this now in hindsight as a terrible experience for a child. Whatever the actual threat level at any given moment, ducking and covering probably wouldn’t have helped much. It only left us with a habit of fear. It probably made some of us more philosophical or religiously-minded than we might otherwise have been, given the end-of-the-world scenario we lived with all the time; but I think the more general effect was a fear, bordering on neurosis, of what could happen from one moment to the next. No wonder the late counter-culture that followed saw such an explosion of liberation and care-lessness, to counteract the intense, imposed caution of our childhood years.

 

In an earlier interview, you said you just wanted your mother and father to be remembered. Can you tell us what you would like people to know about them?

 

I think Jack and Franny were in some ways typical of their generation. Born in the 20s, they lived through the depression and came of age in the second World War. They weren’t subtle but saw things in black and white terms; and were very clear with their comments about everything from politics to homemaking. In many ways, I think they thought of themselves as opposite to the communists who they considered the enemy: communists were subtle, cagey, didn’t put their cards on the table. You couldn’t trust people like that, since what you saw wasn’t necessarily what you got.

 

Jack and Franny were both larger than life for me, but others outside the family responded to them as if they too saw them as striking characters. They were outspoken and definitive in their opinions. They were both loud and ready for an argument. I never heard them identify themselves as such, but they were politically independent and would size up the candidates carefully, then decide which was the better man (it was always, of course, a man). And once decided, that was it. There was little room for dialogic discussion of things, much less changing their minds.

 

As parents, they could be very difficult. They were strict, demanding, and kept a close eye on my sisters and I. They weren’t alone: child-rearing was like that in those days. Kids got spanked, and nobody thought it was wrong. My parents set the rules and the tone for our household, and we followed. There was no consulting us as to what we thought or hoped for or worried about.

 

But they were affectionate, and we knew they loved us. They hugged us a lot and always made a big deal of our birthdays. Christmas was a huge celebration with lots of good presents. And Jack and Franny were fun. Our moves across the country were always treated like adventures. The hotels, the pancake breakfasts at roadside restaurants, the sites along the routes of America — Carlsbad Caverns, Route 66, the Rocky Mountains — were part of a great expedition we were making. They inspired us with their excitement.

 

At a certain level, I suppose it’s simple vanity: I want them to be remembered because they meant so much to me. But they both contributed something to the world they came of age in, and they were characters of that time. I think that’s worth remembering.

 

What would you like future readers of your book to know?

 

I’d like future readers to know what life was like in the middle-to-late years of the twentieth century, particularly for the children of military families, a generally little understood component of American society. The focus of attention to US forces fighting overseas and preparing for war at home is usually on the service members themselves — all their adventures and sacrifices. I’d like readers to know more about the people who came along with them, followed in their wake — the spouses and children of the warriors. They may well not share the warrior’s priorities or even their ideology, but the children in particular are called on to be part of the picture anyway, like camp followers of all ages everywhere. I’d like people to know more about what life was like for us in our time, but I also hope readers will see how military children still experience the difficulties of moving all the time and the instability of life in warrior society. It’s an age-old portrait and one that’s little understood.

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War tells the story of Mary Lawlor’s dramatic, roving life as a warrior’s child. A family biography and a young woman’s vision of the Cold War, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter narrates the more than many transfers the family made from Miami to California to Germany as the Cold War demanded. Each chapter describes the workings of this traveling household in a different place and time. The book’s climax takes us to Paris in May ’68, where Mary—until recently a dutiful military daughter—has joined the legendary student demonstrations against among other things, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile her father is flying missions out of Saigon for that very same war. Though they are on opposite sides of the political divide, a surprising reconciliation comes years later.

⤷Read sample here.

⤷Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is available at Amazon.

╰┈➤Book Details

• Genre: Memoir

• Sub-genre: Women in History / Military Leaders Biography

• Language:English

• Pages: 323

• Paperback ISBN: 978-1442222007

• Kindle ISBN: 978-1442222014

• Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield

• Format: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle, Audiobook

╰┈➤Here’s What Readers Have To Say!

“Mary Lawlor’s memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War, is terrifically written. The experience of living in a military family is beautifully brought to life. This memoir shows the pressures on families in the sixties, the fears of the Cold War, and also the love that families had that helped them get through those times, with many ups and downs. It’s a story that all of us who are old enough can relate to, whether we were involved or not. The book is so well written. Mary Lawlor shares a story that needs to be written, and she tells it very well.” ―The Jordan Rich Show

“Mary Lawlor, in her brilliantly realized memoir, articulates what accountants would call a soft cost, the cost that dependents of career military personnel pay, which is the feeling of never belonging to the specific piece of real estate called home. . . . [T]he real story is Lawlor and her father, who is ensconced despite their ongoing conflict in Lawlor’s pantheon of Catholic saints and Irish presidents, a perfect metaphor for coming of age at a time when rebelling was all about rebelling against the paternalistic society of Cold War America.” ―Stars and Stripes