Based on Actual Events

Love, jealousy, and murder shake a small rural Michigan community in 1896. The events in this story involve relationships tragically broken by alcohol abuse and its effects on mental competency. Shocking consequences are entangled with deep family bonds, religion, practice of law, and politics. Emma’s Waterloo is a gripping example of late nineteenth-century jurisprudence.

Tom Tisch was raised in the blue-collar town of Muskegon Heights, Michigan. During the 1970s, the foundries and factories began closing. Then the retailers started closing their doors. The “Heights,” a city of almost 20,000, imploded, leaving behind the hollow shell of a once-thriving community. Crime increased as the city sickened, culminating, for Tom’s family, on May 18, 1994, when both his elderly parents were brutally murdered during a home invasion. Tom’s writing explores the emotional devastation that impacted persons drawn into horrible events from days long gone. Recorded history may detail a tragic story, but it takes an author like Tom Tisch to compassionately describe the intimate feelings of those involved. Emma’s Waterloo reminds that people who lived decades before us reacted to crisis no differently than we do now. The cascading events in Emma’s Waterloo are a reminder that our human experience has not changed since the time this impactful story took place.