Inside an American Crime Family
Billings woman pens thriller and uses her family as the backdrop
To say 36-year-old Brittnay Sears is a bookworm would be an understatement. She rolls through about six titles a month. Twisty thrillers are her favorite. For a few years, she owned a charming little bookstore and café north of Atlanta. She never imagined that, one day, her own title would sit on a bookstore shelf.
This Billings Senior High alum says she was on a trip to Oregon with her four sons last summer when the plot of her debut novel, “The Left Hand” started to build in her mind.
“The book is set in 1948 at the start of the jazz club era and follows my great grandfather’s progression in the mafia,” Brittnay says. “The main character is my great-grandmother, Jan. She assists his path up the ranks, essentially doing the dirty work from behind the scenes.”
The book’s title refers to the fact that while her great-grandmother is a key player, a woman could never be a mafia boss’s right-hand man.
“My great-grandfather, Lavio, was always in trouble,” she says. “It was easy for my great-grandmother to pull him out of those situations. To bring them back to life in this way, it was very personal for me.”
She’s quick to point out, however, that while the characters mirror the personalities of their real-life versions, “It’s not real,” she says with a laugh. No, her great-grandparents were not a part of an American crime family.
As you flip through the pages, some of Billings old stomping grounds make cameo appearances.
“The Skyline Club was a restaurant up on the Rims. I used that as the location where they would do some of their deals,” Brittnay says, adding that many nights the action inside the novel would end at the Mouse Trap, the night club underneath the restaurant.
When Brittnay owned her bookstore, The Inside Story, she often crossed paths with literary agents looking to promote the authors they represented. One agent would often call Brittnay before sending samples and merchandise. Over the years, the two became friends.
In the beginning stages of her book, Brittnay says, “I hit her up out of the blue. I sent her a text and said, ‘Hey, I am working on something. I want to send it over and get your feedback on it.’ And that was it.” The woman ended up becoming her agent, delivering her manuscript to five of the largest publishing companies.
“She got a snag on it,” Brittnay says, adding that in the end, Ig Publishing, a sister company of Simon and Schuster, picked up the book and agreed to print 68,000 copies in the first run.
“It’s crazy,” she says, “really, crazy.
Last November brought rumblings that there might even be interest in making her book into a movie. Brittnay flew out to Santa Barbara to have lunch with a superstar in the genre of thrillers, Gillian Flynn, author of twisty reads like “Gone Girl,” and “Sharp Objects.” Gillian is the founding publishing partner at Zando Projects, the company looking at purchasing the movie rights to her novel. The two dined at the Belmont Hotel as they chatted about the prospect.
“She was everything that you would want her to be — humorous, kind,” Brittnay says of the best-selling author. “She’s very much an advocate for women and especially women who don’t have the means to share their voice.”
In the end, Gillian took Brittnay’s book. She’s still waiting to hear if her words will be scripted for a major motion picture. That doesn’t stop her, however, from continuing to contemplate who could potentially play her beloved great-grandmother and great-grandfather on the silver screen.
While Jan and Lavio were Brittnay’s great-grandparents, they raised her as their own after her biological mother landed in trouble with the law.
“She was in and out of prison,” Brittnay says, adding that her mother orchestrated an intricate series of identity thefts. “I think the one that really took the cake was when she was married to a man who came from a lot of wealth. She took his mother's identity and that's what finally sent her in for the fourth and last time.”
Lavio died when Brittnay was 14, and Jan passed away 16 years ago, when Brittnay was in her early 20s.
“Selfishly, when I locked myself away in my library to write this, it was as if I was getting a little more of that time with them that I felt I didn’t get,” she says.
While she knows her great-grandfather would get a kick out of being cast as a mafia boss, she wonders what her grandmother would say if she knew that she had become the mastermind behind some of the crime family’s dealings.
“I think she would really love it. She had a dark sense of humor. I like to think that’s where I got it,” Brittnay says with a chuckle.
Beginning in late February, Brittnay launched a heavy travel schedule to promote her book. She plans to hit events in Salt Lake City, Deadwood, Cody, Omaha, and St. Louis. Next August, she’ll head to Scotland for a signing. The living family members who have cameos in her book couldn’t be more excited for her.
“They just hype me up all the time,” Brittnay says, “which is really special.”
As a child, Jan helped Brittany get past the struggles she had learning to read. Knowing that she would later own a bookstore and go on to pen her own novel would more than likely have her great-grandmother smiling from ear to ear.
“She was such a huge inspiration for the woman I knew that I wanted to be,” she says.
TO KEEP TABS on Brittnay Sears, visit brittnayjsears.com. She’s currently working on a four-part book series based on life in a Butte brothel in 1910. The audio book of “The Left Hand” hit Audible on April 15.
