ON THE BACK COVER:
Ace Donahue has always craved the center ring. Past his prime and desperate for relevance, he's bought one for himself – Trentini’s Traveling Circus. But he's gutted seventy-five years of family legacy and now wears the Ringmaster's coat.
The name? Changed. The safety nets? Fraying. The most beloved animals? Disappeared.
The performers suffer. The audiences dwindle. The sawdust learns to absorb more than sweat.
Until Theo Crane – one of Ace's most vocal critics – decides that the best way to dismantle a fraud is from the inside.
“They simply can't fathom your genius, sir.”
Everyone knows Ace is dangerous. Everyone knows he's unraveling. But Theo Crane knows… the show must go on.
A dark fable of raw ambition, quiet complicity, and the fall that everyone sees coming but no one tries to stop.
About the Author
M.K. Milligan has wanted to be a writer since she was eight years old. In the decades between that eight-year-old and her debut novel Come One, Come All, she was a legal secretary, earned a degree in hydrology, worked as an environmental engineer, became a medical transcriptionist, then a real estate agent, and raised three children. She currently is a full-time caregiver for her youngest child who has special needs. Throughout the intervening fifty years, she was working up the courage to put her writing out in the world.
In addition to her debut novel, M.K. Milligan writes political and cultural commentary on Substack, and is currently developing Come One, Come All: Discussion Edition, a book that will include notes from the author, and will feature a foreword by Dr. Kerri Augusto. Milligan is also working on a multi-generational family memoir, working title Crash Course.
She lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with her middle child, who is in college and allegedly will move out someday; her youngest child, who has special needs; and seven cats who were not consulted about any of this, and judge her harshly, warranted or not.
WORK IN PROGRESS
CRASH COURSE
In June 2023, a stranger called to tell me my long-lost brother Tony had died — and had named me, a sister he hadn't seen in over four decades — as a beneficiary in his will.
That call, combined with my mother's final wish that I write her story using her personal journals, launched a years-long investigation into a family shaped by undiagnosed autism across three generations.
Crash Course weaves together Tony's traumatic childhood in 1970's New Mexico, my mother's private battle with her own demons, and my journey raising two neurodivergent sons whose diagnoses finally unlocked the mystery of our family's troubled past.
a family memoir
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