Victoria Bolton may be recovering from an injury, but apparently no one has convinced her that recovery is supposed to involve actually slowing down.
“I probably need to sit down somewhere,” Bolton jokes.
Instead, the author is talking about the release of Scions of Legacy: The Public Trust, the second installment in her Scions of Legacy trilogy and the latest expansion of the fictional universe she began with her Rude Boy USA series.
Even while taking an unintended break, Bolton is clearly excited about putting another book into readers’ hands. And this time, her characters are heading straight into Washington.
The Scions of Legacy trilogy follows the now-adult children of the protagonists from Rude Boy USA, allowing Bolton to continue the world of the original books while shifting the focus to a new generation dealing with their own ambitions, relationships and consequences.
With The Public Trust, those ambitions collide with national politics.
Bolton describes the novel as something of her “House of Cards moment.”
“I’ve always had an interest in politics,” she says. “I wanted to find a way to incorporate that into the world I had already created.”
Politics is not entirely new territory for her fiction. The Tide Is High, the third book in the Rude Boy USA trilogy, ventured into local politics. But Bolton says she knew that if she returned to the subject, she wanted to go considerably bigger.
Washington provided that opportunity.
What interested her was not writing a story that simply pits one political party against another. Instead, she wanted to explore the machinery surrounding power: what happens away from cameras and campaign speeches, how relationships are formed, how influence is exercised and how people learn to operate inside a system where the public version of events may not tell the entire story.
“I didn’t want it to be about saying one party is good and the other one is bad,” Bolton says. “I was more interested in what happens behind closed doors and how some politicians operate within the system.”
That distinction could make The Public Trust particularly interesting in Washington, a city accustomed to being analyzed by journalists, historians, political scientists and, increasingly, novelists and television writers.
The question is whether Washington enjoys reading about itself.
Political fiction has always had an unusual relationship with the capital. For readers outside the Beltway, Washington can function almost like another fictional universe—a place of private negotiations, alliances, rivalries, ambition and carefully managed public appearances. For those who actually live and work around politics, however, the experience can be different. Fiction invites them to recognize familiar behaviors while wondering how closely the imagined version resembles the real one.
Bolton seems comfortable inviting that comparison.
She is less interested in reproducing a particular administration or delivering a partisan argument than in asking what power does to people—and what people are willing to do to obtain, protect or remain close to it.
That approach also fits naturally into the larger world she has spent years creating.
The Scions of Legacy books are not disconnected political thrillers. Their characters arrive in Washington carrying histories inherited from Rude Boy USA. Readers familiar with the earlier series know the families they come from, the personalities that shaped them and, in some cases, the complicated legacies they have inherited.
The children are grown now.
And they have entered rooms their parents never occupied.
For Bolton, that generational progression is part of the appeal of the spin-off. Rather than abandoning characters and a world after one trilogy ended, she became interested in what happened next—and particularly in what would happen when the children raised around those personalities developed identities and ambitions of their own.
The books themselves are also only one part of the way Bolton tells those stories.
She creates music connected to her fictional universe, develops promotional visuals and trailers, and builds much of the surrounding material that accompanies her releases. Bolton estimates that she handles roughly 97 percent of the creative work herself.
That is intentional.
“I can defend what I put out because it comes from me,” she says. “It’s not just me using somebody else’s interpretation.”
For Bolton, maintaining that level of involvement means the imagery, music and promotional material can function as extensions of the stories rather than simply advertisements for them. She enjoys creating all of it—the books, the visuals and the music—and sees them as different ways of opening the same fictional world to an audience.
It also means that taking a break apparently does not look much like taking a break.
While recovering, Bolton is still discussing the novel, thinking about its presentation and preparing to introduce readers to the next chapter of Scions of Legacy. She readily admits that she should probably be doing considerably less.
But there is an unmistakable enthusiasm when the conversation turns back to the book.
Perhaps that is fitting for a writer whose latest novel is concerned with people who have difficulty stepping away from the worlds that consume them.
With The Public Trust, Bolton has taken characters born from the Rude Boy USA universe and placed them closer to the center of American political power. The result is a story that asks readers to look beyond party labels and public performances and consider the people navigating the system underneath them.
Now comes another question—one Bolton may be particularly interested in having answered: What happens when Washington reads about Washington?
