Goodreads asked Susan Rivers:

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

Susan Rivers My paternal great-grandfather Walter Rivers is a mystery wrapped up in a conundrum, as they say, and he covered his tracks well enough that I've not been able to pin down his details even with the most modern digital sleuthing tools. He immigrated from England to America just as the Civil War was commencing, and fought in the Union Army as a paid replacement for a wealthy industrialist's son. The story goes that he was badly wounded as a calvary soldier and this resulted in his addiction to morphine, which eventually killed him, but I've found a letter from his brother-in-law which attributes the morphine to an injury received when he was in a railway accident. He claimed he was the black sheep in a wealthy London family, the son of a "lord," but there haven't been titleholders with the surname Rivers since the 14th century. One thing is clear: he was re-inventing himself by coming to the New World, and all the things he became beg the question of what he came from. If I could gain some objectivity on his life, and dig up a few concrete answers, it might offer the elements of a fairly good story!

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