The rewards of lifelong learning are electrifying in their immeasurability. The most thrilling, for me, are the constant reminders of interconnection that pop up along the path of curiosity.

Yesterday, in looking for background on Jane Isay, author of the just published book Secrets and Lies: Surviving the Truths That Change Our Lives, I did a double-take upon scanning the “Resources” section of her web site.

In a description of favorite books and authors, she writes, “I love Sara Paretsky because I am a mystery reader, and I can’t get enough of her writings about corruption and morality, told through the adventures of a crack woman investigator.”

Sara Paretsky -- whom I would be meeting for the first time just a few hours later to help welcome her as keynote speaker to the thirty-second annual Key West Literary Seminar -- is in good company on the short list, also composed of Leo Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Marilynn Robinson, and Robert J. Lifton, whose “studies of the Holocaust and Hiroshima suggest that even under extreme conditions we can find the seeds of healing and transcendence,” according to Isay.

The names of Isay and Paretsky, both new to me, are sure to pop up everywhere now that I’m attuned to them.

The New York City-based Isay has written two previous books and worked as an editor for forty years on an extensive list ranging from Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia to Friday Night Lights, and she’s also the mother of Dave Isay, founder of the ongoing oral history project Story Corps, broadcast on NPR. Secrets and Lies hinges on her husband’s revelation of homosexuality after fifteen years of marriage and their decision to keep it a secret for the sake of their children.

Paretsky lives in Chicago, where she bases her New York Times bestselling series about V. I. Warshawski, a woman private eye dealing with complex politically charged issues, often related to feminism. In 2011, the British Crime Writers Association awarded Paretsky the Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement.

Over the next two long weekends where I live in Key West, I’ll listen to Paretsky and discover dozens of other writers working at the top of the mystery, crime, and thriller genres. Speakers including Megan Abbott, John Banville (who writes mysteries as “Benjamin Black”), Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Carl Hiaasen, Gillian Flynn, Attica Locke, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alexander McCall Smith will explore this year’s theme of “The Dark Side” at the sold-out Seminar. Again, Paretsky is in good company.

Just before she delivered last night’s keynote speech (“My Quest for Heroes: Voice and Voicelessness”) to kick off the gathering of readers and writers, I was able to chat with Paretsky and share Isay’s generous appreciation of her work. Happy and humbled to learn of it, she moved on to Isay’s subject of secrets and lies, and I asked her to expand on their inevitable presence in her mystery plots. Her most recent novel, Critical Mass, follows Warshawski and her closest friend in Chicago, the Viennese-born doctor Lotty Herschel, who lost most of her family in the Holocaust.

On Paretsky’s web site, a description of the book says that a character’s “…troubles turn out to be just the tip of an iceberg of lies, secrets, and silence, whose origins go back to the mad competition among America, Germany, Japan and England to develop the first atomic bomb. The secrets are old, but the people who continue to guard them today will not let go of them without a fight.”

In telling me about the story, Paretsky revealed that her own family was killed in the Holocaust. “It’s one of those scabs I keep picking at,” she said, echoing the message explored through Isay's own personal experience, more than fifty interviews with secret keepers and finders, and extensive psychological research, that painful family secrets are universal and can be healed only by truth and time.

“My books often deal with a secret that a family is protecting,” Paretsky continued, explaining that she’s most compelled by secrets with high stakes, those that could compel her characters to kill to keep them from being revealed. “It’s one of those things I try to grapple with in my own life. The sands of reality are always shifting…how can we know what the truth is?”

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