Goodreads asked Sophia Martin:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Sophia Martin In 2011 my cousin Isabelle disappeared. The police found her car parked in a remote location near a canal. They found one shoe. They've dredged the canal and some ground-level water tanks not far off from the site where her car was found. They've combed the woods in the area. They've read her diary and looked at her computer and found she had plans to go on a motorcycle trip a few days after she disappeared. She had just bought a motorcycle helmet. Six different psychics have applied themselves to the case with no results. We will probably never find out what happened to her. That is a mystery I will always wish we could solve--I can't imagine what it does to my aunt, her mother, not knowing what happened to her daughter.

I've thought about addressing it in one of my Veronica books. I'm not sure I ever will, though; I wouldn't want my aunt or any of Isabelle's other loved ones to feel like I was exploiting what happened to her. That's not why I would want to write about it, of course. I'd do it because often my Veronica books are a door to my fantasies--come uppance for vile people in the real world who will never get a real come uppance, that sort of thing. If I wrote about Isabelle in some way, it would be to create a story where the mystery is solved, and she is found. But like I said, I'm not sure I'll ever do that, or if I do, that I'll publish what I write.

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