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Katrina Kittle's latest novel is set in a familiar place --
Cincinnati.
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In the opening scene of Katrina Kittle's second novel, Two Truths and a Lie, Dair witnesses a man wearing a dress stumble disorientedly across I-75 and fall to his death from the bridge crossing Clifton Ave. A question is raised: Was it suicide?
Two Truths and a Lie follows this question to its twisted conclusion, but don't file it under mystery just yet.
"I never meant to write a mystery," Kittle says from her Dayton home, "but when you have somebody dead in the first chapter you kind of set yourself up for that."
The story focuses on Dair and her husband, Peyton, who are dealing privately with their addictions, Peyton to an ex-heroin habit and Dair to alcohol and lies.
Dair has been embellishing the truth as long as she can remember without getting caught. She's good at it. In an acting class she learned the secret to a believable lie: Build it around two truths.
"As an actress, she's found the place where she's rewarded for lying," Kittle explains. But the story's focus isn't lying, or addiction either.
Kittle has carefully twisted multiple layers of communication to direct her story. "Human communication is frequently not honest at all. We have agendas and all these complexities," she says.
Characters lie for no reason and for very good reason, both causing problems. Addiction is explored as a miscommunication between body and mind. And people are even communicating telepathically with animals.
"The story that was developing seemed to be about the dangers of self-deception and all these pitfalls of human communication, and a lot of the addiction is communication from our bodies to ourselves through dreams, through illness, and then the animal communication suddenly started to become more in the forefront of my mind that this could be a parallel," Kittle says.
The man who died was Dair's friend, Craig, engaged to her neighbor. Traces of heroin were found in his blood, although he was not known to be a drug user. Craig and Dair had recently been cast opposite each other in a local Shakespeare production, and Craig was the only one who knew Dair's biggest secret, a secret now threatening her marriage. His death really is a mystery -- nothing seems to add up -- and only the animals witnessed what led to it.
A communication issue also threatens Dair's parents' marriage. Dair's mother, the animal communicator, says her father is fed up with it. She also tells Dair that her dogs may know something about Craig's death.
"People either really accept this and are interested, or reject it right away," Kittle says about reaction to the animal communication aspect of the novel.
Plenty of animals fill the book, from Dair's dogs to the African gray parrot upstairs with the creepy ability to mimic Craig's voice post-mortem to the elephants down the street. Dair and friends live in Avondale near the zoo.
"I remember being at Cincinnati Zoo and parking and walking through the neighborhood nearby. It just seemed so interesting to me that you could live somewhere in Ohio and you could hear elephants from your yard," Kittle says.
Kittle's previous novel Traveling Light, the heart-wrenching story of a man with AIDS told though the eyes of his sister, was set in nearby Dayton.
"In the reviews of Traveling Light, the setting of Dayton, the little Midwest town really struck people," she said, "I like writing about this area, but I needed it to be Cincinnati instead of Dayton because I needed more professional theater companies."
One objective of Kittle's two-book deal with Warner Books was to build her audience. She speculates that by creating a second book so different from her first, she hasn't really done that.
On the other hand, by writing an engaging novel that appeals on so many levels, it seems obvious she has quite simply done that. Kittle juggles characters and motivations in her genre-bending novel with ease, and the product is a story engaging to mystery fans, Cincinnati natives, theater and animal lovers and those who just like a well-told story.
Katrina Kittle signs and discusses Two Truths and a Lie at 7 p.m. on Thursday at Barnes & Noble in Kenwood and at 7 p.m. on June 27 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Norwood.
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