Who doesn’t love an old castle, rife with secrets and lore and mystery? Of course, most readers tend to imagine Scotland or England when incorporating a good castle, but what about Midwestern Wisconsin? Believe it or not, Wisconsin boasts a castle or two, and they’re not necessarily White Castle, the home of the hamburger sliders. It was with this (the castle, not the hamburgers) that I decided to write a dual-time Gothic mystery surrounding a castle, vanishing women over decades, with heroines who are determined to find the lost and save their tragedies from being unremembered. Of course, taking inspiration from history is always a must and therefore as the author I entered the realm of study, focusing on one of the worst female serial killers known to humankind. Elizabeth Báthory, Hungarian countess, is most widely known as the woman whose fascination with the torture and bloodletting of young women took the lives of possibly hundreds in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. With this purported fascination, reports funneled in of not only the disappearance of local girls in the surrounding areas but also of women from the more notable families. This inspired an investigation that landed Elizabeth in…