The Author
Dianne Kaye
Dianne Kaye lives in the Pacific Northwest and draws inspiration to write from the many courageous people she has met during her twenty years of human services as youth worker, addiction counselor, family therapist, and HIV case manager. Kaye has published her first novel, Misled, in 2016 and attended the Hollywood Book-to-Screen Pitch Fest in November. Several production companies have recommended the story for adaptation to a studio feature film, independent film, HBO series, or television series. Global Summit House, New York has partnered with Universal Studios to release the screenplay for Misled. Kaye patiently awaits an option from Hollywood.
Kaye is skilled at spotlighting current social issues and embedding reality in fiction. In MISLED, she introduced the concept of negative soul-ties and the use of Devine Intervention for a woman to break away from an abusive relationship. In Resolution, the dark side of humanity is exposed during the pursuit of a corrupt antique dealer and recovery of a family fortune. In JADEN’S GRACE, Kaye tells a story about a young woman trapped in Mexico, caught up in the immigration crisis, cartel activity, and the frantic search to find her. Kaye gives the characters credit for tuning a torrid love story between Nadine Jaden Hawke and Stephan Peltzini and search for a family fortune into an action-packed trilogy.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I retired in 2013, after twenty years in human services. I found my motivation to write from the many courageous people I met as a youth worker, drug and alcohol counselor, family therapist, and HIV case manager. Frequently puzzled by women who chose abusive men and suffered negative consequences, I researched the reasons.
I’ve learned that the main reason a woman stays in an abusive relationship is that they are dependent on the abuser for financial assistance or emotional support. Other reasons: She does not want to be alone; she feels she doesn’t deserve any better; she believes she should be punished for failure to please the abuser; she may have children to consider but does not have the means to support herself and them too; fear of losing her children plays into her decision to stay.
Most of the women I’ve met do not know how to leave an abusive relationship, or they say, “I love him.” And they couldn’t let go. The most enlightening reason I’ve found is the religious concept called soul-ties. A soul-tie is created when we are intimate with someone and it can be either positive or negative. If the relationship involves violence, the soul-tie turns into a trauma bond, which is very difficult to break. It may take Divine intervention to break an unhealthy soul-tie.
Compelled to write about a woman who found herself in a dangerous situation, a story began to take shape in my mind. I’d read enough fiction to know a good story needs a solid historical foundation to give it meaning. At the same time, I inherited information about my family history. My mom’s two sisters and a cousin had spent countless hours researching our ancestry. They’d compiled genealogy charts, copied documents, and organized all the information in a large three-ring binder. It was like a treasure chest to me.
I learned that most of my ancestors on my mother’s side were German. They’d migrated south from the Netherlands and settled in West Germany, in Rhineland. They lived there for several centuries and were known as Westies. Some of our ancestors lived and were buried in Düsseldorf and Berlin. Others were brave enough to cross the sea in the Mayflower in 1620. Some family sailed out of Prussia to America in 1880. More came later through Ellis Island and left a trail of records. They eventually moved away from New York and settled in the upper Midwest.
I was humbled to read about their struggles to stay alive in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America. Some men came as Hessians, recruited by the British sometime between 1775 and 1783, to serve in the American Revolutionary War. Some of my ancestors were caught up in the Indian uprising and killed in the famous Wyoming Massacre of 1778. More were slaughtered by Sioux Indians in 1857 in Iowa in the Spirit Lake Massacre. Hundreds of whites were killed five years later in Minnesota in the Sioux Uprising. It was a wonder anyone survived those times.
Curiosity about my German ancestors drove me to research European migration. According to Malcolm Todd in The Early Germans, the European migration period (about 375 BC–AD 550) was also known as the barbarian invasions or Völkerwanderung. It was an intense human migration that ushered in the early Middle Ages, along with changes within the Roman Empire beyond a barbarian frontier.
First to arrive were the Germanic tribes such as Goths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons, Lombards, Suevi (my ancestors), Frisii, and Franks. The mass population of Europe can be traced back to the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (September 9 AD) when the Cherusci migrated from the Netherlands, led by Arminius, and ambushed and destroyed three Roman legions. A four-hundred-year war ensued, and the Romans were pushed back to the west of the Rhine River. They built a seven-hundred-mile wall of stone and clay along the border for protection and called it the Lines. The wall, with fifty-foot timber watchtowers, was manned twenty-four hours a day by Roman sentries in an effort to prevent the German barbarians from invading the empire.
Todd explains, “For many centuries Germanic peoples occupied much of northern and central Europe. From the fourth century onward, migrant groups extended their power and influence over much of western Europe and beyond to North Africa. In doing so, they established enduring states in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain.”
During my research I discovered that bracteate was the collective term for the most popular and most expressive gold coins of the migration period. The name derived from bractea, the Latin word for “metal and gold foil.” I googled bracteates and found a wealth of information from Wikipedia and the Vintage News (December 27, 2016) by David Goran, summarized below.
The majority of bracteates were found in hoards, along with other jewelry worn by women. Bracteates had been found in north German regions, mainly in Denmark and on the islands of Öland and Gotland, but also in Norway in the Oslo Fjord area. Nordic bracteates had also turned up as burial finds in Kent, England; the Netherlands; Germany; Poland; and Hungary. Bracteates appeared to have played an important part in the thinking for the north Germanic tribes in social, magical, religious or mythological contexts.
Scholars sensed that their depictions, runic inscriptions, and symbolic characters described mythical concepts, saga figures, and historical events. Many of the pictorial motifs of the bracteates bore a close resemblance to Roman coins and medals. During the migration period, there were four types: a bust of a man, full-length human figures, a human head above a quadruped, and one or more animal figures without a human.
The gold came from coins paid as peace money by the Roman Empire to the north Germanic neighbors. The bracteates were rimmed in beaded gold and fitted with a loop. Most were intended to be worn suspended by a leather string around the neck as an amulet. The motifs were commonly those of Germanic mythology and believed to be Germanic pagan icons giving protection, or for divination.
The present-day typology of bracteates was established in the 1870s and divided them into several letter-named categories, a system introduced in an 1855 treatise by the Danish numismatist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. More than one thousand migration period bracteates of types A, B, C, D, and F were known in total.
The 270 E-bracteates belong to the Vandal period, were produced in Gotland, and were made from silver and bronze. Silver bracteates, also called “hollow pennies,” are different from the migration period bracteates. They have been the regional coinage minted in German-speaking areas and lasted well into the fourteenth century. Medieval silver bracteates are one-sided, embossed pennies from a thin silver sheet with a diameter of 22–45 mm. The coin appears in a high relief while the back remains hollow.
Those coins were called back regularly, once or twice a year, and exchanged for new coins at the rate of three new coins for four old coins. This system has worked like a demurrage—people will not hoard their coins because they lose their value. This practice increased the velocity of money and stimulated the economy.
When monetization increased and it became harder to handle recoinage (around 1300), bracteates lost their function as the principal coin. The last bracteates were “traveler bracteates,” embossed medallions worn as a pendant, which served as a marker for pilgrims and were in use until the seventeenth century, when bracteates were taken out of circulation.
I became fascinated with bracteates and decided to use them as the basic theme for my story. I also wanted to set some of the action in Germany. As I read through my family history, a woman who traveled alone on a steamship from Prussia to America captured my interest. It was unusual and dangerous for a woman to travel without a companion at that time. I combined the result of my research with my family history and developed the historical background for a novel. As a budding writer, my imagination started to spin out a scenario, and I began to ask, “What if?”
Could the woman have left something behind to make the trip to America? I imagined she was a widow and left a family fortune in Germany. History told us that the distribution of property was male to male then. It would have been uncommon for property to transfer to a woman. Usually, the first male next of kin would inherit the deceased’s possessions, unless legal documents stated otherwise.
When I discovered the first Deutsche Bank opened in Düsseldorf in 1880, a deeper plot began to grow in my mind. Suppose the woman’s grandfather hoarded bracteates and deposited them in Germany in 1880 and set up an estate for future generations. Maybe the lone traveler carried with her proof that a fortune existed. She could have ferreted away some amber trinkets, a gold coin or two, and maybe even a key that fitted a bank lockbox. Perhaps those family heirlooms were passed down from generation to generation. Maybe the family crest was stashed in someone’s file box, the history and fortune lost forever.
What if someone in modern times finds the crest, the key, a gold coin and follows the trail to a bank in Germany? I imagined what would happen if a woman found out she was sole heir of a family fortune and that all she needed to do was retrieve it.
What if she knew a man who knows Germany like the back of his hand and speaks the language too? Perhaps he had a special set of skills and arranged the whole trip. She might think she knew him but would get taken on the ride of her life instead.
And there we have it, a plot for a suspense-filled novel: A cautionary tale of romance, a spy thriller, and a courtroom drama all rolled into one story.
In Misled, “Jade Anne” was exposed to extreme darkness. She needed some Resolution for all her misery. The characters led me to the sequel. I was inspired to give her another opportunity to obtain the Hawke family fortune, a reunion with her long-lost father, and a second chance for Stephan to redeem himself. And then, there is the light at the end of a dark tunnel with a new love, Bryce Coates.
Nadine Jaden Hawke is confronted with ghosts from the past, smoke and mirrors, and a bittersweet reality in Jaden’s Grace.
Kaye published Misled in 2016, Resolution in 2020, and completed the trilogy with Jaden’s Grace, in 2024.
