Miss Demeanors

Tag: mystery

mystery

That Time I Threw a Book At the Wall

January 12, 2022
Susan Breen

I don’t generally throw books against the wall, but when I read Tana French’s book the first time, I was so aggravated by the ending that I tossed it. The story was engrossing. The characters richly detailed. The book won an Edgar when it was published, in 2007. But the ending drove me crazy because it left something important unresolved. I actually thought I’d got a misprinted book that had lost the last twenty pages.

December 30, 2021
Sharon Ward

This New Year’s Eve will be especially exciting for me. First, because 2022 HAS to be better than 2021 was, right? We’ll be getting COVID under control, either through vaccinations or growing immunity, and soon we’ll have more options open for socialization and entertainment—at least I hope so. And there will be a ton of fabulous new mystery novels ready for publication, including Emilya’s Behind the Lie, coming February 8! The second reason I’m excited for 2022 is because book 2 in my Fin Fleming Sea Adventures Thriller series of books is coming out on January 31. I love the main character in this series. Fin Fleming is a very accomplished underwater photographer, but she has trouble achieving the recognition she deserves because someone stole her work and then accused her of plagiarism. She also struggles with self-esteem and feelings of abandonment. All the books in the series are rollicking adventures and mystery/thriller books, but the real underlying theme is Fin’s struggle to find acceptance and a sense of family. You’ll have to read the books to find out what sets her heroine’s journey in motion. Here’s the back cover copy for Sunken Death: A few months after a death in her […]

December 20, 2021
Sharon Ward

My First Miss Demeanors Blog as a Member This is my inaugural blog as an official Miss Demeanor, so I wanted to devote the blog to thanking the group for inviting me in and being so welcoming. First, I have to thank C. Michele Dorsey for extending the invitation to join. About eighteen months ago, Michele and I started having a weekly phone call to discuss our work and the state of the publishing industry. I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer—I’m fine now, so no worries—but between the treatments and COVID, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house. Those weekly conversations were a life saver, and I can never thank Michele enough for her time and friendship. As you probably know, Michele is the author of the award winning Sabrina Salter mystery series, and she has several amazing “stand alones” as well as another Sabrina mystery book almost ready for publication. Can’t wait. We also managed to talk our way into starting a self-publishing journey, and that too has been a blessing! Thanks to her encouragement, I published my first mystery thriller novel, In Deep, this year, and the second book in the Fin Fleming Thriller series, Sunken Death, is coming out on […]

November 16, 2021
Emilya Naymark

Locked 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.

November 12, 2021
Alexia Gordon

I recently spent a long weekend binge-watching horror movies/series. After several hours of corpses, missing people, and mysterious figures hiding in dark corners, it hit me that, of the shows I watched, only the haunted house story felt like horror (and even that had a few whodunnit moments). The others felt more like crime fiction. People were being murdered, perhaps more gruesomely/inventively than in straight-up crime fiction, and someone else had to figure out the who and why before the whole town ended up dead. Prior to the horror movie marathon, I went on a trip and met someone who announced that they preferred “English literary novels” over crime fiction. I replied, “put a dead body in it and it’s crime fiction.” This person later conceded that Wuthering Heights was a crime novel. I argue Crime and Punishment (crime right there in the name), Hamlet, Les Miserables, and half of what Dickens wrote fall under the crime fiction umbrella. Jane Eyre stopped pretending to be lit-tra-chure and became The Wife Upstairs. These revelations prompted me to ask my fellow Missdemeanors: What books, short stories, films, TV series, etc., that aren’t traditionally thought of as crime fiction also work as crime […]

November 10, 2021
Susan Breen

October 21, 2021
Susan Breen

A weird thing happened when I started to write my new novel, Maggie Dove and the Lost Brides. (Coming on November 9!!!)

October 20, 2021
Connie Berry

Last week my husband and I spent the better part of a day trekking on Dartmoor in Devon. There we saw stone walls built in the 1300s. The stones, we were told, were so skillfully fitted together, they rarely fall. These dry stone walls have long outlived their human makers. They have witnessed births and deaths, celebrations and wars, abundance and famine. If walls could talk, think of the untold stories they would tell.

October 13, 2021
C. Michele Dorsey

I was honored to receive an advance copy of Death at Greenway annotated by the author Lori Rader-Day, which I won in a charity auction. I made myself read it slowly, savoring the experience of having the insight of the author as I read her fabulous story about Agatha Christie’s holiday home. Lori generously answered a few of my questions to share with Miss Demeanor’s readers.

October 5, 2021
Alexia Gordon

O Frabjous Day! That’s what I exclaimed the day I went online again. The logistics of a cross-country relocation and moving into a new apartment meant that I went without Wi-Fi for several days. Quelle horreur! You wouldn’t think I was old enough to remember the days before Wi-Fi was a thing. I missed being able to connect to the world in an instant. Absence Makes the Heart Grow Desperate My days spent without made me realize how reliant, dependent even, I’ve become on the internet. How did I manage growing up in the analog age, a time when I had to look up information in a set of encyclopedias (which still take up an entire shelf in one of my mother’s bookcases) or physically go to the library and use a microfiche machine? I had to *gasp* get up and walk ALL. THE. WAY. over to the TV set to change the channel, of which there were only 4 or 5 (6 or 8 if I stayed up late and adjusted the antenna just right). My address book (printed on paper!) only had one line for a phone number because people only had one line, a landline—and no space […]