Doug Moe interviews Libby Hellmann
Tuesday, March 22 at 7pm
 Chicago video producer, Ellie Foreman, has been absent from thriller author Libby Fischer Hellmann’s repertoire for almost a decade. Now she’s back...and soon entangled in a web of espionage, murder and suspicion that threatens to destroy what she holds most dear.
Hired to produce a profile of Chicago-based aviation giant, Delcroft, Ellie is dismayed when company VP Charlotte Hollander, the architect of a new anti-drone system for Delcroft, trashes the production and cancels the project. Ellie believes Hollander was spooked by shots of a specific man in the video footage. But when Ellie arranges to meet the man to find out why, he’s killed by a subway train before they can talk. In the confusion, she finds a seemingly abandoned pack of cigarettes with a flash drive inside that belonged to the now dead man.
Ellie has the drive’s contents decrypted, but before long she discovers she’s under surveillance. Suspecting Delcroft and the ambitious Hollander are behind it, she’s unconvinced when Hollander tells her the dead man was a Chinese spy. Ellie and her boyfriend Luke try to find answers, but they don’t realize how far they’ve gone into the dangerous echelons of hidden power where more lives are on the line, including their own.
JUMP CUT is award-winning author Libby Fischer Hellmann’s twelfth novel and fifth in the award-winning Ellie Foreman mystery series.
 Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago 35 years ago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. Twelve novels and twenty short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and crime writing community and has even won a few.
With the addition of Jump Cut in 2016, her novels include the now five-volume Ellie Foreman series, which she describes as a cross between “Desperate Housewives” and “24;” the hard-boiled 4-volume Georgia Davis PI series, and three stand-alone historical thrillers that Libby calls her “Revolution Trilogy.” Last fall The Incidental Spy, a historical novella set during the early years of the Manhattan Project at the U of Chicago was released. Her short stories have been published in a dozen anthologies, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ed Gorman’s “25 Criminally Good Short Stories” collection. In 2005 Libby was the national president of Sisters In Crime, a 3500 member organization dedicated to the advancement of female crime fiction authors.
* She has been a finalist twice for the Anthony, twice for Foreword Magazines Book of the Year, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Daphne and has won the Lovey multiple times.
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Doug Moe is a lifelong Madisonian and a 1979 graduate of he University of Wisconsin. He has worked as a journalist in the city for nearly 40 years, most recently as a newspaper columnist, first for The Capital Times, and then the Wisconsin State Journal. Prior to that, he was editor of Madison Magazine. He has been named best local writer or columnist in a variety of reader polls more than a dozen times. His books include The World of Mike Royko, a Chicago Tribune Choice Selection of he Year, and Lords of the Ring: The Triumph and Tragedy of College Boxing's Greatest Team, runner-up for the August Derleth Award for the best non-fiction book of the year by a Wisconsin author. His most recent book is Good Men: The Lives and Philanthropy of Irwin A. and Robert D. Goodman. He is currently working as an independent writer on books, articles, corporate histories and more, and can be reached by email at 
