Today we’d like to introduce you to Cynthia Tolbert. They and their team shared their story with us below:
Licensed in Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Cynthia Tolbert retired after thirty-five years of practicing law and began writing full-time. She entered and won the Georgia State Bar Fiction Writing Contest with the short story OUT FROM SILENCE, then began developing the winning short story into a full-sized novel. In 2019, OUT FROM SILENCE, the first novel in the Thornton Mystery Series, was published,
OUT FROM SILENCE is a procedural murder mystery featuring Emma Thornton, a young lawyer and single mother who passionately defends her disadvantaged clientele. Three additional mysteries in the series have also been published: THE REDEMPTION in 2021, SANCTUARY in 2022, and THE LEGACY in 2023. All but one of the books is set in New Orleans, a city so enigmatic it has become a major character in the series,
In 2024, THE LEGACY was chosen as a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, a nationwide annual book contest. Also, SANCTUARY and THE LEGACY have both been featured in the Kirkus Reviews monthly magazine.
Cynthia taught at Loyola Law School in New Orleans for several years, where she directed a homeless clinic and worked with third-year law students in actual cases. All of these experiences have informed her fiction.
She is an avid reader, a mother of four, and a grandmother to three beautiful girls. She recently moved from Atlanta, Georgia, to Austin, Texas, where she lives with her husband.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road to publication for the Thornton Mystery Series has been a long one, with nine years between the publication of OUT FROM SILENCE as a short story and the publication of the story as a full-sized novel. Those years were filled with revisions, rewrites, and thousands of edits.
Finding a publisher was a triumph, but it triggered the beginning of a frenetic schedule of marketing plans and other required deadlines. Marketing was the biggest challenge for me, especially since my publisher didn’t provide marketing or a marketing budget. There is no formula for marketing success; it’s expensive, and most marketing investments don’t give a measurable return in book sales.
I would prefer spending my days writing instead of marketing. We write for many reasons, but ultimately, all writers want others to read their books, making this difficult task a necessity.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a retired attorney. Prior to law school, I earned a master’s in special education and taught learning-disabled students for ten years. Throughout my thirty-five-year law practice and earlier teaching career, I gathered stories, stockpiling them in my memories for later use. Some of the stories were heroic; some were stories of injustice. When I started writing, I began to look at it all in a fresh, new way.
My first published book, OUT FROM SILENCE, is set in a small college town in Georgia; it’s the story of a young deaf man erroneously accused of killing his girlfriend. The second book in the series, THE REDEMPTION, is set in New Orleans, where a sixteen-year-old young man has been set up by adults to take the wrap for a murder, a practice common in gang culture. In the third book, SANCTUARY, a nineteen-year-old homeless girl is accused of killing the leader of a New Orleans cult. Finally, in the fourth book, THE LEGACY, a young man with serious mental health issues is accused of killing his mother.
Although facts from actual cases were not used, all of these stories were based, in part, on real-life situations and experiences. I was fortunate to have spent three years teaching at Loyola Law School in New Orleans in its Poverty Law Clinic. At Loyola, I was introduced to cases impacting poverty, including murder and attempted murder. Each of these cases informed my stories and became the heart and soul of the series.
What’s next?
I am currently working on book five in the Thornton Mystery Series.
Pricing:
- $16.95 paperback
- $5.99 Kindle
Contact Info:
- Website: www.cltolbert.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/cltolbertwrites
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/cltolbertwriter
