As s child, I had a difficult time finding books to read. This was mostly because of the books that were available to my age group at the time. I had a few Babysitters Club books, but they didn’t really interest me. And this problem didn’t get much easier when I reached high school. Trips to the public library were few and far between so I was limited to the books inside my school’s library. I always gravitated towards books which were beyond my so-called reading level. So, when you’re in middle school, and you can read at a high school level, you feel sort of stuck. When you’re in high school and you can read at a collegiate level, you really feel stuck. Thankfully my mother recognized this and began finding books for me that seem to speak to my mature reading ability. When I was in tenth grade she gifted me a copy of When Death Comes Stealing by Valerie Wilson Wesley.

This was what I consider to be my first “grown up” book. It’s a mystery by the former executive editor of Essence magazine; the first in a series. The main character, Tamara Hayle, is a former New Jersey cop who now works as a Private Investigator. She’s also a single mother—being the daughter of a single mother that appealed to me. Her ex-husband/father of her son shows up one day in desperate need of help. Someone is killing his sons, and he can’t seem to get any real help from the police. Tamara decides to help him find the killer, before her own son becomes a victim.

This book is very well written, and I remember being unable to put it down at the time. I didn’t know it was part of a series until a few years later, and I do plan to track the remaining seven books down and read them as well. I do believe this book was also a contributing factor in my becoming a writer later on. I so rarely found books on the shelves written by people who looked like me; especially women. It made me feel like becoming a writer myself, was possible.