Hi Marci, welcome to Reader Views! What is Wednesday Night Whites about, and what inspired you to write it?

Hello, and thank you so much.

The story began as a birthday gift to a friend of mine. I gave him a character in my next novel, though I wasn’t certain who that character would be, or what the novel would be about. I was watching a documentary on Heinrich Himmler and his Lebensborn experiment one evening and my writer’s brain started a slow boil. What if Himmler utilized the program himself to assist in the Aryan experiment, and what if he shipped his spawn to different places on the globe, a legacy of white supremacy, and what if … and it grew from there. So my friend, who received the birthday gift of a character named Pádraig Cassidy—instead of a bottle of red wine—became a Nazi hunter, and the story took root.

Wednesday Night Whites weaves together Nazi bloodlines, missing women, a private intelligence organization, a mute teenager hidden in the woods for thirteen years, and a law firm rotting from the inside. What holds all of that together?

This is a complex question and I gave it a lot of thought. In the end, I think the answer is simple: The glue that holds it together is being voiceless in a society in which we—as women—have long fought to considered at least equal. Though the mute teenager is in many ways a minor character, she became the hope and the heart of the story, the nucleus around which the mainframe is built. Keep fighting, lend your voice to all things equal, and against all odds, never give up.

As a former judge, what did your time on the bench put into this book?

As a female judge in a world where patriarchy still—regrettably—reigns, though I’m not sure how many would lend voice to this opinion, and I crafted my fierce female characters against that backdrop, no matter their station in life. It was an honour to serve as a judge, and the people who appeared before me, their stories, their voices, had a huge impact on how I see the world. Everything one learns, understands, and absorbs, becomes a seed for a concept, a story, a character.

The contrasts in this book are stark and deliberate. A billionaire’s bunker with a movie theater and priceless art, while people down the road live in shacks without running water. What were you saying about power?

The contrasts needed to be stark. Sugar coating inequality will never get anyone’s attention.

When we were kids we were told “follow the golden rule” in other words, treat others as you would want to be treated.

And then, it was—in truth/in jest—changed to “he who has the gold makes the rules.”

Again, it becomes the stark truth of how powerless one is when one doesn’t have the means to even buy food for oneself. How voiceless one becomes.

Kindness, helping ones neighbour, it takes a village to raise a child, taking a hot meal to an acquaintance who is struggling, just listening sometimes. Where did all that go? What happened to equality? Why is there so much disparity? Why can’t the billionaire giants understand they climbed there on our backs – the backs of little people?

And there’s a time to learn, a time to earn, and a time to return.

Like MacKenzie Scott. A woman. Who is an inspiration and bright light in her philanthropic pursuits. 

Stark? Blunt? You bet.

Zale Augustine, a junior partner at the Chester law firm of Christmas, Hollywood and Bear, has never lost a case, yet she’s still working toward equity partnership while her senior colleague Ruben Hollywood, sends her flowers with cards that read “Come sit on me, baby.” She also feels a connection to managing partner Crandel Christmas she can’t quite name. Who is Zale beneath the professional exterior?

Zale is a little bit of every woman with fears and hopes and ambitions. An empath who doesn’t want to be controlled by her emotions. A woman who likely wishes she could be more like Spock on Star Trek.

White supremacy in this book wears a King’s Counsel designation, campaigns for a Supreme Court appointment, and runs a legitimate law firm. What were you saying about where that ideology actually lives today?

I think one only has to watch the news to answer this question.

Ruben Hollywood’s lineage traces back to Himmler through Lebensborn experiments, a teenage mother who renamed herself after a Hollywood film, and a grandfather who died without facing justice. How much of that is rooted in documented history?

Aside from Ruben’s purported grandfather, Heinrich Himmler, snapping down on a vial of cyanide and dying without facing justice, the rest of the storyline is purely rooted in my imagination. . .

Ruben has a tattoo across his collarbone that reads “01-08-23/14303” and tells people it means his destiny. What is encoded in those numbers, and why put his ideology in his skin?

Heinrich Himmler joined the Nazi party on August 8th, 1923, and his official Nazi party membership number was 14303. In earlier versions of the book, Ruben Hollywood’s father had the same tattoo, and had them tattooed on Ruben as a young boy. Ruben’s father was a veritable monster. Ruben never once believed that anyone would ever guess what those numbers meant.

It’s the women with the least to their names who are often the most willing to risk everything for the right reason. Where did that come from?

Before I was appointed to the bench, I worked for 25 years as a lawyer representing people who weren’t able to afford private counsel. I practiced both criminal and family law. In the family law realm, I represented mostly women, who were often the most impoverished of the broken mother-father unit. The mothers stayed home and looked after the children, the fathers worked, and when they separated, very few fathers stuck around to pay child support or even visit with their children. The mothers had nothing — no outside job skills, no income except perhaps social assistance, and little support. And yet the spirit of most of these women, the degree they would go to, to protect and provide for their children was a lesson in love and humility. If their former partner was abusive inside the relationship, which was quite often the case, the risk of fighting for some degree of support became even more dangerous. And yet they did it. Time and time again. Willing to risk everything to give their children a little bit of comfort in a harsh world. It left an indelible mark on me, and I am sure that’s where the concept originated. Interesting how intuitively it came through in Wednesday Night Whites, and how you picked up on it though. Wow. Thank you.

You cover quite a bit of dark territory. Violence against women, white supremacy, trafficking, institutional failure. What was it like living inside this story while writing it?

I didn’t see it as dark territory when I was writing it. I suppose I’ve seen so much darkness, but also light, as a lawyer and a judge, that it was almost a catharsis of sorts. Nothing in the novel was anything that ever specifically happened to me or anyone that I knew. But my writers brain just kind of went there. I did not plot the novel. I did not even know what was going to be written when I would sit down to write every night. It just came out of me. And at the end of the night I would often look at what I had written, and say: well, I didn’t see that happening.

The book has been called a reckoning. For readers who finish it and feel the weight of it, what do you want them to do with that?

Be aware of what is going on in the world today. Be aware of the inequity and the inequality that is being foisted on so many people. Be brave and fight against it.

Chester is clearly not finished with you, and you are clearly not finished with Chester. What’s waiting on the other side of this book?

I have just finished the sequel to Wednesday Night Whites, called Graves Island. Graves Island is a tiny provincial park connected to East Chester, just outside of Chester, by a tiny causeway.

Here is the synopsis:

When forensic anthropologist, Marigold Merry, discovers the tiny skulls of three children while hiking on Graves Island, the cause of death is clear. They’d been victims of Josef Mengele-style medical experimentation, each showing signs of a drill hole bored through the front of their skulls prior to their death. Knowing this find has all the markings of Nazi Germany, Marigold contacts her brother who works for known Nazi hunter, Pádraig Cassidy, for help.

Hearing the news, an Indigenous man, who only goes by ‘the Cardinal’, meets with Cassidy, and hires his firm to make a grid of Graves Island, using ground penetrating radar and LiDAR, to determine if there are any unmarked graves on the island.

Although there is no record of it, or proof of any sort, the  Cardinal believes Graves Island is the site of an unreported Residential School, where doctors who’d worked at death camps during World War II, and brought to Canada under a government program called ‘Operation Matchbox’,  plied their evil trade. His theory is that the experimentation these doctors of death used on the Jews at Auschwitz and other death camps, continued in Canada, but their victims were the children held captive in residential schools.

As the search continues, mass grave sites are discovered all over the island containing thousands of bodies. As the crisis escalates, the RCMP, the Federal Department of Policing and even Joint Task Force 2 are called in to assist.

But there’s more to this theory than meets the eye. What really happened on Graves Island? Where had the bodies of these people come from? Who killed them and buried them there? And how was this allowed to happen unnoticed for decades in the sleepy hamlet of East Chester, on an island expropriated by the provincial government in 1967, and used as a provincial park?

A sequel to the international award-winning Wednesday Night Whites, the usual cast of characters is back in action, as they search for answers, and discover the true identity of Adonis Toph, creator and CEO of the Worldwide Organization of White Supremacists, and the man who single-handedly brought Toph Enterprises 2.0 to the pinnacle of success using the blueprint forged in Nazi Germany during the Nazi’s reign of terror.

GRAVES ISLAND by Marci Lin Melvin will be available on Amazon September 1st, 2026.