Goodreads asked Richard Puz:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Richard Puz I do genealogy as a means of keeping track of some 10,000 individuals, many with the same names or repeated names with different spellings. My greatest interest has been collecting family stories, which I have done over a period of years. When I tried to bridge the Atlantic for my grandmother's roots, I hit nothing but brick walls. Then, I had a breakthrough via a chat site and ran across a graduate student who had completed his thesis on a very small fiefdom in Slovenia named Kostel. Through him and his work, I found I could take this wing of the family back more than 400 years using church records as well as transcribed and translated castle tax records. The man's work was invaluable to me in writing Blood Tax. It will continue to serve me with the next novel, White Gold.

flag