She writes plays, she writes stories, she writes novels. Many of us know her as Debby Johnston, but as her writer persona, Deborah Ann Percy has put her love for a good mystery into her newest novel, A Second Opinion (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2026).
“I just wanted to write something, and I had to start with a woman missing,” Percy says. “If you’re writing things and you keep coming back to it and thinking about it, sometimes before you go to sleep at night, more of it comes. You just keep working at it, and more of it comes.”
Percy says she had already started to write another mystery novel, but that one wasn’t quite flowing for her. It became the novel that her main character, the missing woman, also a mystery writer, had been working on. Parts of that manuscript are inserted into this book, a kind of book within a book.
The story, set on the waterfront of Lake Michigan, unfolds as the mystery writer seems to vanish without a clue. Her family—husband, children—and friends along with detectives, all enter into the story looking for clues. Her truck is gone, yet her phone and personal belongings are untouched. Through scenes and dialogue that read much like a play, characters and their possible motives are revealed—with a final twist at the ending.
Percy loves watching crime stories on television, she says, and loves a good mystery. The character in her mind, Allie, continued to grow in Percy’s imagination and become ever more colorful until she had no choice but to put her on paper.
“I did a lot of research,” Percy says. “If you’re going to have a person who is really quirky maybe you need to find some guidance from other people in the world who have diagnosed as quirky.”
Deborah Ann Percy has two fiction collections, Cool Front and Invisible Traffic, along with many plays and collaborations with her husband, writer Arnold Johnston.
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