Where there any personal experiences you were able to draw from while writing this book?
Many years ago, when I was a crime reporter, I wrote several stories about police cold case squads in which homicide detectives were testing old physical evidence using new developments in DNA and sorting through large computer data sets—drivers’ licenses, Social Security numbers and birth records —to track down fugitives who had eluded the police for years.
I was fascinated with how these murderers had managed to avoid detection for so long. Of course, this was before cameras and smart phones became ubiquitous in tracking our every move. As a journalist, I covered the arrest of several fugitives who were eventually caught more than two decades later. Most were men who somehow managed to stay below the radar, but they said they were always looking over their shoulders, wondering when they were going to get caught.
But there were other fugitives, like Kathleen Ann Soliah, who managed to hide in plain sight as Sara Jane Olson, a mom and actress in Minnesota. As a community activist, Soliah-Olsen even testified before the state senate. But after a segment about her aired on America’s Most Wanted, she was arrested and convicted of planting bombs as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a leftist group operating in California in the 1970s.
Shortly after Soliah’s arrest, I moved to the South Side of Chicago and discovered that only a few blocks away lived former Weathermen activists and fugitives Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Both had managed to elude police for years after they were named domestic terrorists for their part in bombings to protest the Vietnam War. Eventually Dohrn and Ayers turned themselves in. They received reduced sentences, and both went on to teach, Ayers at the University of Chicago and Dohrn at Northwestern University. The couple even raised the child of Kathy Boudin, another Weathermen activist, who stayed on the run for more than a decade and eventually went to prison for 20 years for her part in a bank robbery in which two police officers were killed.
Ayers became a controversial figure during the Obama presidential run when media and
Republican opposition questioned how Obama could befriend a terrorist like Ayers. I’m not convinced they were friends, but they were neighbors.
By this point, my fascination with fugitives and their secret lives hit full obsession mode. I began to wonder what it would be like today if someone in similar circumstances —an activist whose part in a plot went deadly wrong—and they had to disappear. How do modern fugitives evade the police when the details of our lives reside in computers across the world? Our passports and drivers’ licenses are equipped with machine readable bar codes. We’re tracked by our credit cards, our TV viewing, even our cars. We are so dependent on our GPS phone maps that we don’t even know how to navigate without them.
That’s when Riley Keane was born on the page. Riley is a white, anti-gun activist who thirteen years earlier survived the worst school shooting in history with another student, Reece Taylor. That shared trauma forged an unlikely bond between a white and a black student. But unlike Riley, who decided to make a career out of fighting the police, Reece decided to become a cop and change the criminal justice system from within.
Riley is a woman of many conflicts, and chief among them is her affair with Republican
Councilman Finn O’Farrell, a proponent of the Second Amendment. What Riley doesn’t know is that her relationship with Finn is not an accident. Nor is she aware that Finn was present at that school shooting or that he played a pivotal role that day.
This triangular relationship erupts when Riley goes on a stakeout with Reece and a stranger attacks him. Reece tells Riley to use his gun to shoot his attacker. Instead, Reece is shot. As Reece is bleeding on the pavement, Riley notices someone filming them from a second-story window. Riley knows the optics are not good: a white woman shooting a black cop. Even Reece warns her to disappear.
But Riley’s is not a face you can easily forget: She has orchid pale skin, spikey black hair, and a don’t-mess-with-me attitude. Because of her numerous arrests at anti-gun protests, Riley’s picture is often in the media and on lots of law enforcement databases.
Riley’s best chance at escape is using old school methods. That means no electronics of any kind: no phone, no computer, no GPS maps. She needs to get out of town, avoid highways with cameras and state police. At the same time, she needs to get rid of her car—which also tracks her location. She must change her appearance. And she’ll need a source of money, which means she needs a job. But how do you get a job these days without a driver’s license and a Social Security card? How does one flee and avoid redlight, highway, and toll cameras? How do you survive without credit cards and ATM machines?
These are very real problems for my protagonist. For me all good stories start with a paradoxical question. For my first book, Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns, the question was: Why are young, modern women giving up men, money, and sex? For my second book, and first novel, Poison Girls, the question was: What would happen if a serial killer used drugs instead of bullets to kill politically connected daughters? Map of My Escape embraces my fugitive fascination and answers the burning question: How do you disappear in a digital age?
Cheryl L Reed
Thank you so much, Cheryl Reed, for your insight into the plot development of Map of My Escape!
I love that you did actually have such a personal connection with the storyline of this book. Learning about your experience as a crime reporter was fascinating and made the book even more meaningful to me!
One of my favorite parts in Map of My Escape was how Riley would frequently recall reading the book “Famous Female Fugitives” and took their lead when forming her own escape plan, so to learn that the inspiration for that was taken from real fugitive stories that you reported on is just so awesome! I have to imagine that being in the reporter’s seat for all of those stories was so interesting and clearly gave you amazing material for this book.
From what you referenced about your other books and their paradoxical questions, it sounds like I’ll be reading even more Cheryl Reed books in the very near future!! Those all sound like really great reads!
Thank you so much for sharing!!
Read my full review of Map of My Escape
The shooting of a homicide detective is captured on film by a mysterious figure from a second-floor window, implicating Riley Keane, an anti-gun activist and a school shooting survivor. Riley flees Chicago for a frozen island in Lake Superior. A race to find her ensues between her secret lover—Chicago politician Finn O’Farrell—a corrupt police lieutenant, and the mysterious cameraman who extorts Riley’s family and Finn. Finn’s entanglement with Riley and the extortionist threatens his ambitious political career.
On the island, Riley ingratiates herself into the close-knit community, but when she witnesses both an islander’s murder and another death in a suspicious boating accident, the local sheriff starts asking questions that begin to unravel her true identity. As the sheriff and the FBI are closing in on Riley, Finn faces media pressure to reveal his mysterious role in that long ago school shooting. If the facts come out, Finn may go to prison, but his biggest fear is that the truth will forever sever his relationship with Riley.
Read an excerpt from Map of My Escape:
I had often wondered what it would be like to disappear. As a teenager, I read books like Famous Female Fugitives and pored over stories in my mother’s magazines about women who had committed crimes with their boyfriends and ran. They changed their names, plucked birthdates off gravestones of dead babies to obtain new Social Security cards, and created new lives. I was never curious about the men who disappeared. The FBI’s Most Wanted lists were full of men who’d eluded cops for years, only later to be discovered as the quiet loner next door. The women fugitives, though sparse in number, were seldom quiet. They married, raised kids, built careers. Sara Jane even joined the PTA, acted on stage, and made speeches before her state senate. They lived their new lives in public as if they were flaunting the authorities in plain sight. I admired their tenacity.
There had been times in my life when I desperately wanted to disappear, when I dreamed of slipping away from the present and starting over somewhere else under a new identity. The pull became stronger after forty-four of my classmates, including my brother, and five of our teachers were killed by a guy in combat boots re-enacting his favorite video game.
I remember that day vividly. We were all at an assembly in the gym. I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the bleachers—they were the old-fashioned, accordion kind that pull out from the wall. I was reading index cards, trying to memorize trigonometry theorems for a test. Principal Brown was at the podium talking, but it was all background noise until a loud crack resounded through the gym. The metal doors at the front of the gym—the only way in or out—opened and slammed shut. Everyone turned to look. Even Principal Brown stopped talking mid-sentence. Darren Wallack, a guy no one paid much attention to, was standing at the gym entrance dressed like a Ninja warrior, a gun and ammo strapped across his chest, a rifle in his hands. He looked almost comical, except it wasn’t Halloween.
Nancy Greene, a whisper of a girl with thick glasses and braces, let out a high-pitched squeal. She was his first victim. Then pandemonium struck. Everyone moved at once. People climbed over others, trying to get away. Some hunkered down, attempting to hide. The air smelled of desperation and fear. Everyone was screaming, panicking. The gun blasted, again and again, loud, sharp cracks, like a whip cutting the air.
I noticed a guy slide his feet in between the thin slats of the bleachers. Our eyes met. He hesitated, then offered me his hand. We climbed down the support scaffolding. A few others chose to hide beneath the bleachers, too. We spread out in clumps of two and three as if we were safer with space between us. The stranger and I crouched in the corner, peaking through the gaps of the bleachers watching as Darren fired continuously, swinging his rifle from left to right like some character he’d seen in a bad movie.
“He’s going to kill us,” I whispered. I couldn’t breathe.
I’d never met this guy next to me, but his eyes were kind, reassuring. He was black. At our charter school, Blacks, Asians, Mexicans, and Whites didn’t mix.
“It’s going to be okay.” He patted my back. He seemed so calm.
Through the crack in the bleachers, we could see our classmates scrambling back and forth across the basketball court, shrieking terrified screams. Darren stalked them, firing a barrage of bullets until they slumped to the floor. I looked away. I couldn’t take it anymore.
Several rounds flew over our heads. “He’s coming toward us,” the guy said. “Get down.”
I lay on my stomach on the cold floor, the stranger next to me, convinced we were about to die. I thought about my family, my mother and father, and my older brother, who had just started college. And for a quick moment, I mourned for them. Then I thought about my younger brother, Ross. He was out there somewhere. I tried to remember where he was sitting. When was the last time I saw him?
“What is your name?” I whispered.
“What does it matter?”
“Because I don’t want my last minutes on earth to be spent with a complete stranger.”
“I’m Reece,” he said. “You’re Riley.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Everyone knows who you are.” He reached over and draped his arm across my back, his upper body forming a protective shield.
Darren’s boots stomped above our heads. Kids screamed, scuttled to get away. The gunfire sounded like firecrackers. I plugged my ears with my fingers. I couldn’t bear to hear it anymore. If Darren came down under the bleachers, we were dead. There was nowhere to run. It was the most horrifying fifteen minutes of my life.
Then the footsteps stopped.
We didn’t know if we could come out. We heard hard footfalls, police hollering as they hunted down Darren. It seemed like we were huddled down there for hours. When the police announced it was over, we walked out from under the bleachers like horror movie zombies.
That’s when we saw them.
Bodies were sprawled on the bleachers. They covered the gym floor, piled in some places. I recognized many of their faces, kids I saw in literature class or passed in the hallway. I stepped around them, my sneakers sticky with blood, looking for friends, anyone I knew. Then I recognized his mousey brown hair. His face looked serene as if he were taking a nap. He was wearing his new White Sox jacket with black sleeves and white on the torso. Our parents had given it to him for his birthday two weeks earlier. He only took it off to go to bed. Now the white part was ruby red. And my brother was never going to wake up.
For years afterwards, I dreamed about disappearing. Just up and walking out of my life—what was left of it. I hadn’t thought about my fugitive fascination in a long time. Of course, now it’s much harder to evade police in a digital age when a person’s every movement can be tracked. But I didn’t consider any of that the day I ran after shooting Reece.
Running is the natural reaction—even if you do not know where you are running to. The adrenaline and animalistic self-preservation kick in, leaving your brain a scrambled mess while your body takes over.
I drove in a daze, focused on the yellow line that I hoped would lead to a better future. Running from the cops is challenging for a normal person. But when you’re an activist and your mug shot is floating on police and FBI computers, vanishing is a lot harder. We are all electronic files, avatars moving from screen to screen, followed by one entity after another.
I had to jump off those screens. That meant no electronics of any kind—no phones, no GPS, no computers. If I wanted to escape, I had to do it old school, like the women in the Famous Female Fugitives.
***
Excerpt from Map of My Escape by Cheryl Reed. Copyright 2024 by Cheryl Reed. Reproduced with permission from Cheryl Reed. All rights reserved.
Genre: Mystery and Detective
Published by: Running Wild Press
Publication Date: June 18, 2024
Number of Pages: 402
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Cheryl L. Reed is the author of the nonfiction book Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns and the novel Poison Girls, which won the Chicago Writers’ Association Book of the Year. A former staff editor and reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and other publications, Reed’s stories have won multiple awards, including Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. She has twice been awarded a U.S. Fulbright Scholar fellowship by the State Department, first in Ukraine and then in Central Asia. She splits her time between Washington, DC and her home near the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia.
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