Call Me Lillian

Philadelphia, 1959. Lillian Reis already knows how quickly a woman can become a story in someone else's mouth. She is about to learn how difficult it is to take that story back.

When the home of John Rich is burglarized in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Lillian is drawn into an investigation built from confessions, disputed testimony, enormous claims about missing money, and the men who move through her world.

Then the story grows.

A witness is brutally attacked. Two brothers connected to the investigation are killed. Police pursue Lillian across jurisdictions. Newspapers turn accusation into reputation, and before long the nightclub owner from Philadelphia has acquired a name she never chose:

Tiger Lil.

Through trials, a hung jury, a conviction later set aside, and years of unresolved prosecution, Lillian fights not only for her freedom but for ownership of her own identity. When a national magazine turns her life into a sensational profile, she takes the battle into another courtroom-this time as the plaintiff.

But every attempt to correct the record creates another record. Interviews become tapes. Tapes become exhibits. Private memories become testimony. Even silence can be given a meaning she never intended.

Based on the documented life of Lillian Reis, Call Me Lillian is historical fiction about accusation, notoriety, law, and the dangerous distance between who a person is and the story the world decides to remember.