Cathy Berry’s Novel
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About the Book – A Historical Mystery
The county’s first murder of the year didn’t happen until the tail-end of 1922. Frank Rodrigues entered the Montecito cottage and found Death’s calling card, Terror, waiting just inside the door.
In the historical mystery novel, “Reckoned by the Light of Stars”, Bianca Fairchild had been brutally murdered. Her young son was missing, and Frank Rodrigues felt his mind split as sanity wavered and he fought to stay with reality. Though he had tried for years to guide and counsel the troubled young woman, his goddaughter, Frank had failed and now Bianca was dead. He could not recover all the parts of his fractured self.
Even before her death, Frank could not reconcile the speed at which life had altered after the war, especially as Santa Barbara County’s population doubled in only five years. Young and old had become obsessed with the lives of motion picture stars and popular icons, worshipping their wealth and fame above all else. Likewise, a new breed of zealot surfaced, fond of provoking violence by way of politics or industry or the society pages to meet their ends. Legislative cowards bankrupted truth. Prohibition mocked, divided, inflamed. Elitists fomented fascism. 
Technology, that eternal double-edged sword, developed apace. Worst of all, time seemed to accelerate past trend after trend after trend until the world had little resemblance to the one in which he had been so at home only a few years earlier.
Only after Bianca’s death did Frank learn the truth about her life: The truth was Bianca traded in deadly secrets. The truth was, she ran wild. The truth was Bianca Fairchild never had a chance.
Though barred from the official murder investigation, Frank Rodrigues scoured the distinct and close-knit communities of Portuguese, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Greek, Japanese, the African-American neighborhoods, and even in the small population of Chumash who had endured the harshest history had to offer. In order to reclaim himself, Frank turned to his family and lifelong friends, his horses and his cat, and even the sea and valleys, the hills and fields, the birds and creatures he had lived among his whole life.
Reckoned by the Light of Stars, is a historical mystery with themes that echo in our own time, as well. Then, as now, escalating financial disparity plagued much of our nation and the world; environmental damage depleted resources; drug abuse and alcoholism ravaged; traditions were trashed; sex enjoyed a licentious revolution.
Reckoned by the Light of Stars is my debut novel. I have spent the past fifteen years as the assistant to the Executive Director of a large health and human services agency (Tri-Counties Regional Center). As a native Californian and lifelong resident of Santa Barbara County, I have met a fair share of local characters whose lives rival any fiction.
On learning more about the extraordinary true history of the area, readers are introduced to the multi-cultural communities of families who fished and farmed, built homes, highways, railroads, faced racism, lack of opportunity, and yet, despite natural and societal constraints, their spirits were and are luminous, they glow even now, in the modern day through their stories, their artifacts—talisman—and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who live here still.