A Blog for Readers and Writers of Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction
By now you’ve probably eaten the last of the Thanksgiving turkey. I don’t know about you, but I love turkey—for about four days. Then I’m over it. The problem is waste. I hate to waste food.
You’ve probably guessed, though, that I’m not here to discuss Thanksgiving dinner. By “leftovers,” I’m talking about the words, sentences, paragraphs, and scenes that lie on the proverbial cutting room floor when you’ve finished your last revision.
In a very early draft of my first novel, A Dream of Death, one of my beta readers said of[…]
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The Perfect Beach Read—a phrase readers often see on the covers of paperback novels. But what exactly is a beach read? And what if I prefer a lake or the mountains or the forest for my summer vacation? Does it make a difference?
I thought I’d ask my fellow Miss Demeanors…
When readers see authors asking, sometimes begging for reviews of their books, they may wonder why are they doing this?[…]
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Launching a new book always feels a little like watching your child climb onto that big yellow school bus for the very first time. There she goes—your baby—into the big, wide world without you. In exactly a week—on May 10th—The Shadow of Memory, the fourth in the Kate Hamilton Mystery series, will make its debut. To celebrate, I’m giving away a signed copy (plus a few other goodies) to one lucky commenter during the month of May.
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Recently I spent twelve days in the hospital. One thing I discovered is that there is actually a limit to the number of Law & Orders you can watch. But, when I turned off the TV, I discovered myself awash in some of the most profound and moving stories I’d ever heard.
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Setting 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.
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–and what better way to celebrate than by taking a peek at three gorgeous historical novels set in days when literacy was not only rare, but, for some, deathly dangerous.
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Who was the last person to have read every book in existence? Believe it or not, this is a hotly[…]
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Last Monday, after a three-month-long writing marathon, I completed the draft of my fourth Kate Hamilton mystery and sent it[…]
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