The Miss Demeanors are delighted to welcome Skye Alexander for a guest blog. As you will see, she is the cat’s pajamas. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited to check out her new novel, What the Walls Know.
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A Blog for Readers and Writers of Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction
The Miss Demeanors are delighted to welcome Skye Alexander for a guest blog. As you will see, she is the cat’s pajamas. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited to check out her new novel, What the Walls Know.
Read moreI finally got to travel last week, and I loaded my kindle with plenty of reading material. Four in one week is not my personal best, that is reserved for the vacation where I read a book a day, ran out of books, and had to find a bookstore in a panic before the flight home. Obviously before kindles. I read a mystery novel (times 2), a memoir, and a sliver of vampire fiction by Octavia Butler, who never disappoints in the “taking a trope and turning it inside out, on its head, and sideways” department.
Read moreThis New Year’s Eve will be especially exciting for me. First, because 2022 HAS to be better than 2021 was,[…]
Read moreMy husband and I awoke early last Monday morning to eight inches of new snow in northern Wisconsin. It happened silently, overnight—a thick white blanket, erasing details and muffling sounds. For a moment, I marveled at the sight. Then, because I’m a writer, I thought about how snowfall can conceal footprints and other evidence of a murder….
Read moreLocked room mysteries are awesome because they usually present the environment as an oppositional adversary. It’s easy to imagine oneself trapped with a killer, and how delicious to burrow under a blanket and know you’re safe, while reading about people who most certainly aren’t.
So, here are three locked room mysteries I’ve read lately that are chilling, thrilling, and all around awesome.
Read moreI have a new story cooking in my head which I think might be gothic, but I’m not sure. I[…]
Read moreSetting can be a character in its own right. It can also be a metaphor. Setting creates a mood, grounds a story in reality, informs the characters, and often determines plot. Think of the wilds of Cornwall in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, or the bleak, treacherous moors in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles or the Dustbowl of the 1930s in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. These stories couldn’t have happened anywhere else, and the job of the author is to transport their readers to another time and place.
Read moreOn the Road Again I move around. A lot. My day job has taken me from the southeast to the[…]
Read moreI’m a new convert to audiobooks, and as all new converts, I’m now a zealot. Oh, sure, years ago there were “books on tape” and then on CD, but it was just somehow not the same.
Read more“Weather tonight: dark. Turning partly light by morning.”
Who remembers George Carlin, the Hippy Dippy Weatherman? A whole generation of viewers in the 1970s laughed at his weather forecasts, but the silliness struck a chord. People are obsessed with the weather. Even in books.