Pike County chaos, family legends, Appalachian spirituality and one very inconvenient dream helped shape Cyn Mackley’s newest mystery.
“Purgatory County was mostly forest, mostly poor, and just radioactive enough to keep things interesting. They built a uranium enrichment plant here in the fifties, shut it down in the nineties, and had been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Now there was talk of bringing nuclear back, which felt about right for a place like this.”
If you live in southern Ohio, you may have a pretty good idea where author and crime reporter Cyn Mackley found some of the inspiration for her fictional Purgatory County.
That is not an accident.
“Purgatory inherited the geographic layout of Pike County,” Mackley said. “It even has the same number of towns.”
But the new novel wasn’t conceived as a fictional version of Pike County. In fact, it started before Mackley had any idea what the story was about.
It started with a dream.
“I swear I dreamed the first two chapters like an episode of a Netflix Appalachian noir mystery,” she said. “There was this woman who woke up in hell. She had lost her children and had to start over.”
Her name was Attie Ginn.
She had worked for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
She had lost almost everything.
And the place was called Purgatory.
In the dream, Mackley could hear Attie’s internal monologue and see her scrolling through photographs on her phone of the life she had lost. Mackley eventually changed that part because what worked like a television scene in her head didn’t feel as compelling on paper.
Seeley King was there, too.
“He was right there in the kitchen making pancakes, shirtless in jeans,” Mackley said. “I knew the minute I saw him exactly who he was.”
Then the dream stopped.
“Apparently my subconscious only ordered the pilot.”
That was inconvenient.
Mackley already had readers waiting for new books in her Goode Grace Mysteries and Camelot, West Virginia series.
Instead, Purgatory cut the line.
“It felt urgent,” she said. “It just wanted to be.”
And once Mackley started building the rest of the story, years of covering crime in southern Ohio began filling in the blanks.
The Day She Said, ‘This Is Going In a Book’
One of those moments came during a particularly spectacular hour in Pike County.
Two parolees and one careless mother managed to create a robbery, a stolen car, two police chases and a toddler firing a gun inside Walmart.
One of the parolees had been released from the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility that very morning. Within hours, authorities said he stole a vehicle, committed robbery and assault and led Waverly Police on a chase that ended in a crash.
A friend of Mackley’s worked at the prison.
At almost the same time, a toddler got hold of a gun in his mother’s purse at Walmart and fired into the ceiling. The child suffered minor injuries from the recoil. The mother went to jail on a child-endangering charge.
Then authorities found themselves chasing a second parolee, this time down Route 32 and onto back roads after he fled troopers. The chase became wild enough to wind up on On Patrol: Live.
Mackley messaged her publisher.
“Well, this is going in a book.”
Her other thought was simpler.
“This place is the Wild Wild West.”
None of the incidents were actually connected.
That’s where being a novelist becomes different from being a reporter.
“The reporter in me knows those were three separate things,” Mackley said. “But the writer in me immediately goes, ‘What if they weren’t?’”
That what if became part of Purgatory.
So did the shadow of the Rhoden family murders.
Mackley covered some of the hearings in the case and at one point was offered the opportunity to cover it more extensively for a regional news organization, though she did not have the time to take it on.
Purgatory does not retell the Rhoden murders.
But the idea of an enormous crime hanging over a small Appalachian county, generating rumors, theories and unanswered questions, absolutely left a mark.
A reporter has to stop where the known facts stop.
A novelist gets to keep going.
Then Came Addiction, Rehab Housing and the Next Question
The opioid crisis is another major piece of the world behind Purgatory.
So is the fallout surrounding recovery and rehab housing.
Mackley has reported on the anger surrounding poorly managed facilities, especially when large numbers of people are brought into small communities already short on housing, police officers, medical services and other resources.
She understands why people get angry.
Bad operators can take over badly needed rental properties. Neighborhoods can be overwhelmed. Some facilities have been accused of exploiting public funding while providing questionable care.
But Mackley kept coming back to another question.
What happens when you close them?
“Okay, people got their wish,” she said. “The bad place is gone. But where do all those people go now?”
That question became even more timely as Purgatory reached publication and Ohio began increasing oversight of the industry. Facilities around the state have already announced closures and layoffs.
The problem is that closing a building doesn’t make the people inside it disappear.
“They still have addictions. They still need housing. Some of them have criminal records. Some have mental-health problems,” Mackley said. “Somebody still has to deal with what happens next.”
In a small county, what happens next often arrives at the sheriff’s department.
That idea runs throughout Purgatory: decisions made somewhere else eventually land on the doorstep of the people trying to keep a community running.
Trafficking Doesn’t Always Look Like People Think
Human trafficking is another subject Mackley has spent years learning about and previously addressed in It Happened One Knight.
What surprised her most was how little some real trafficking situations resemble the popular image of a stranger snatching someone off the street.
Experienced traffickers can be much smoother.
Some deliberately seek out vulnerable women in jails, treatment facilities, recovery housing and group homes. They offer friendship, romance, housing, drugs, protection or simply the promise of someplace better to go.
“The more I learned, the less trafficking looked like what people think trafficking looks like,” Mackley said.
Addiction, poverty, unstable housing and the criminal justice system can all create openings for somebody who knows how to exploit another person.
That darker reality became another thread in Purgatory County.
Indicted Officials, Empty Offices and Lots of Money
Local government supplied another piece.
Pike County has dealt with a sheriff under indictment and on paid leave. Scioto County has dealt with a commissioner under indictment and away from office.
Mackley took the idea of those leadership vacuums and fictionalized it, creating a corruption case that unexpectedly gives a brother and sister the opportunity to step into major community roles.
Then she added redevelopment.
That is already one of the biggest arguments happening across the region.
How do you bring life back to old downtowns?
How do you replace the industries that disappeared?
What happens when major companies start looking at poor rural counties and suddenly there is real money on the table?
And in Pike County, there’s an especially strange wrinkle.
After decades spent dealing with the legacy of uranium enrichment and cleanup, there is once again serious talk about nuclear energy playing a role in the region’s future.
That contradiction was irresistible.
“You can look at what an industry left behind and still understand why people want the jobs back,” Mackley said.
Then comes the darker question.
What happens when a lot of money begins flowing through a poor county?
Who gets the contracts?
Who owns the right property?
Who knew something was coming before everybody else did?
Economic development can save communities.
It can also create opportunities for people who know how to skim a little off the top.
Attie Is Not Addie
Even Attie Ginn’s name has a real southern Ohio origin.
After Mackley’s Aunt Joyce died, the family went through old photographs. One showed Joyce with a woman who had lived next door to Mackley’s Mammaw.
Mackley had always believed the woman’s name was Addie Ginn.
Then she turned over the photograph.
Aunt Joyce had written the woman’s name on the back.
Attie Ginn.
“I had heard her name wrong my whole life,” Mackley said. “I looked at it and thought, ‘Attie Ginn. That is a great name.’”
That mistake became a private joke in the novel.
People sometimes call Sheriff Attie Ginn “Addie.”
She corrects them.
It’s Attie.
Mackley admits she has no room to judge.
Mammaw B Came From One Tough Lady
Some of the most important pieces of Purgatory have nothing to do with crime.
Mammaw B is a tribute to Mackley’s late Aunt Joyce.
“She was one tough lady.”
Joyce taught Mackley to love Star Trek, Dark Shadows and scary movies.
She was also a formidable cook who made endless pies and essentially assigned everyone in the family a favorite dish.
Restaurants were another matter.
“She could send food back anywhere,” Mackley said.
Her standard verdict:
“It ain’t fit to eat.”
Mammaw B inherited plenty of Aunt Joyce.
But not everything.
The fictional character is a former school bus driver, a detail inspired by someone else entirely, a real driver who thrilled kids by playing 1980s music.
That’s how Mackley tends to build people.
A personality comes from one person.
A job comes from another.
A phrase may sit in her head for 25 years before finally finding a home.
Becca’s particularly colorful way of describing being completely out of luck, for example, came from a news producer Mackley remembers running through a newsroom shouting it decades ago.
“We still yell it at home.”
Even one of the book’s more ridiculous stories, involving someone getting smashed with a cafeteria tray and later appearing in court with one pant leg tied up, has a real origin.
Mackley heard it years ago from a fellow student in a sociology class at Shawnee State University.
He was talking about his brother.
So what’s one detail readers will think she made up?
Mackley has trouble answering.
Maybe the town where two officers on duty are pretty much the entire police department.
Maybe roads falling off hills.
Those are the realistic parts.
Halfway Between Camelot and Heaven Is Purgatory
Longtime Cyn Mackley readers will find another layer in the book.
Purgatory has ties to both Camelot, West Virginia and the Goode Grace Mysteries, which take place in Himmel, Ohio.
There are Easter eggs and a few guest appearances, though readers don’t need to know either series to understand the new book.
Mackley sums up the relationship this way:
“Halfway between Camelot, West Virginia and Himmel, Ohio is Purgatory.”
It works geographically.
She imagines Camelot in southern West Virginia and Himmel in northwest Ohio.
It also works stylistically.
And then there’s the joke.
“Himmel” is German for heaven.
So somewhere between Camelot and Heaven, apparently, lies Purgatory.
The geography also gives Mackley a chance to explore an Ohio that people outside the region sometimes overlook.
“I don’t think a lot of people realize how much of Ohio is Appalachia,” she said.
Ohio can be flat farmland, old industrial cities, wealthy suburbs and major metropolitan areas.
Then there is southern and southeastern Ohio, where the landscape and culture can feel far closer to West Virginia and Kentucky.
That is Purgatory’s Ohio.
The Bible, Ghosts and Things That Make Perfect Sense
There is also some magic.
Or maybe there is.
Like Mackley’s Camelot books, Purgatory draws on magical realism, European faerie traditions, Native American traditions and Appalachian spirituality.
That last one is personal.
Mackley grew up in a world where people could believe deeply in the Bible and also believe in ghosts, signs, dreams and the possibility that someone might stop by to say goodbye before dying.
For her family, those ideas never contradicted each other.
When Mackley was four, she woke during the night and saw a woman sitting on the edge of her bed, stroking her hair.
Then the woman was gone.
She called for her mother, who told her she had been dreaming.
Moments later, someone knocked on the door.
The family didn’t have a telephone. They were living in a little rundown shotgun house down the street from Mackley’s Mammaw.
The visitor had come to tell the family that Mackley’s Aunt Melissa had died.
Years later, her mother told her something else.
When she was five years old, she had awakened on Christmas Day and seen her grandmother sitting on her bed, smiling at her.
Then she disappeared.
Someone soon arrived to tell the family that the grandmother had died.
Aunt Melissa had been Mackley’s mother’s beloved aunt.
“So of course it made sense to us that she came to see me the same way,” Mackley said. “Believing people come to visit you, either in dreams or in person, before they go is 100 percent truth in our family.”
That story later found its way into little Dreama Avalon in the Camelot books.
The same worldview runs underneath Purgatory.
What Is Magic Anyway?
Seeley King sits right in the middle of that question.
Even his name carries a faint suggestion of a fairy king.
But Seeley is also a technology whiz, a fixer and a walking example of Appalachian ingenuity.
Mackley likes putting the two things side by side.
Advanced technology can look like magic if you don’t understand it.
And something genuinely strange can happen right in front of you while everybody searches desperately for a rational explanation.
“What is magic?” Mackley said.
Purgatory is not always interested in giving a definitive answer.
Seeley also provides an interesting contrast with John Wayne Orkney, a favorite character from Mackley’s Camelot books.
Both men can fix nearly anything.
But John Wayne is a veteran who works as a firefighter, EMT and police officer, moving through the public sector while carrying emotional damage he hasn’t always known how to handle.
Seeley went to therapy.
He reads constantly.
He has a huge library.
And he moves through the private sector, accumulating money and property while also trying to put some good back into the world.
That difference matters when he clashes with Attie, whose entire adult life has been built around public service.
They may love each other.
That doesn’t mean they always agree about who should fix the world.
The Most Me Thing I’ve Ever Written
For all the murders, drugs, corruption, grief and strange things lurking around the edges, Mackley said she hopes southern Ohio readers come away from Purgatory feeling something very simple.
Seen.
“I want people here to feel respected,” she said. “I want them to recognize things. But I also want them to enjoy the mystery.”
Purgatory County has poverty and crime.
It also has humor, loyalty, ingenuity, family, beautiful places, ridiculous stories and people who keep going when common sense suggests they probably shouldn’t.
In that way, Mackley said, it feels like home.
And perhaps that is why this book pushed everything else off her writing schedule.
“Personally, it is the most real, most me thing I’ve ever written,” Mackley said.
Then she added the line that may best explain Purgatory.
“It’s very true, and the stuff that isn’t true should be.”