Delighted to say that after a long wait, Carried to the Grave and Other Stories: A Food Lovers’ Village Mystery, is out in audiobook today, in all audio formats. It’s the last book in the Village series, a collection of five contemporary short stories featuring Erin and the Villagers, and a novella, “An Unholy Death,” a historical prequel set in 1910, the year Erin’s great-grandparents, Paddy and Kate Murphy, married and started the Merc in Jewel Bay, Montana. Turns out Erin may have inherited her sleuthing skills.
There is one more Village short story, “The Picture of Guilt,” originally published in Murder in the Mountains, a collection of short stories by 9 authors. It’s also available free to newsletter subscribers — sign up here. Erin and Adam are on the trail of the wily huckleberry, and an equally wily killer.
And who knows, maybe Erin or Kate will return for another story or two! Meanwhile, enjoy the trip to Montana — via audio.
“Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn’t know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future. We need that same skill as an art of survival. We need to overhear the tiny but very consequential things we say that reveal ourselves to ourselves.” – Irish poet David Whyte
Novelist Paul Lynch said something similar in his PBS interview, which I quoted a few weeks ago, about the difficulty of listening to ourselves in the modern world, shaped by the noise of technology. I think the Irish writers are on to something!
How can you make time in your day to quiet yourself enough to hear your own voice?
(Painting: In the Clearwater Valley, by Leslie Budewitz; pastel on suedeboard)
When four women separated by tragedy reunite at a lakeside Montana lodge, murder forces them to confront everything they thought they knew about the terrifying accident that tore them apart, in Agatha Award-winning author Alicia Beckman’s suspense debut.
Twenty-five years ago, during a celebratory weekend at historic Whitetail Lodge, Sarah McCaskill had a vision. A dream. A nightmare. When a young man was killed, Sarah’s guilt over having ignored the warning in her dreams devastated her. Her friendships with her closest friends, and her sister, fell apart as she worked to build a new life in a new city. But she never stopped loving Whitetail Lodge on the shores of Bitterroot Lake.
Now that she’s a young widow, her mother urges her to return to the lodge for healing. But when she arrives, she’s greeted by an old friend–and by news of a murder that’s clearly tied to that tragic day she’ll never forget.
And the dreams are back, too. What dangers are they warning of this time? As Sarah and her friends dig into the history of the lodge and the McCaskill family, they uncover a legacy of secrets and make a discovery that gives a chilling new meaning to the dreams. Now, they can no longer ignore the ominous portents from the past that point to a danger more present than any of them could know.
Writers working on a mystery or thriller typically focus on the protagonist, the main character, who is often also the narrator, and sometimes a stand-in for the writer. The writer is most interested in that person, the problems they face, how they unmask the villain and save the world or their community. And too often, not enough thought goes into the villain or antagonist –– they are a foil the writer moves around the page, coming up with their motivation (if at all) as an afterthought. It’s hard, I know. Believe me, I know! So I liked this perspective:
“The protagonist’s journey in both thrillers and mysteries is effectively the unveiling of the villain’s plan, as experienced by the protagonist. The protagonist is our (the reader’s) ‘guide’ through the story, because the protagonist is the character leading the reader along as they uncover what the villain was/is ultimately up to. As such, I like to define twists as follows: Twists are the reveal of the villain’s truth. This truth feels “twisty,” because the reveal of the truth is unexpected to the protagonist.“
Later this month, at Malice Domestic, the convention celebrating the traditional mystery, I’ll be moderating a conversation between the nominees for Best Contemporary Novel. I’ve been loving reading the books and thinking about what to ask. So I thought I’d bring you into the conversation, and let you meet these terrific women and their books.
In Wined and Died in New Orleans, Ellen Byron’s 2d Vintage Cookbook Mystery, it’s hurricane season in New Orleans and Ricki James-Diaz is trying to shelve her fears and focus on her business, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbook and Kitchenware Shop, housed in the magnificent Bon Vee Culinary House Museum. She’s thrilled when repairs on the property unearth crates of very old and valuable French wine. But when a dead body turns up on the property, Ricki has to help solve a murder and untangle family secrets, all while living under the threat of a hurricane that could wipe out everything from her home to Bon Vee.
In Helpless: A Zoe Chambers Mystery by Annette Dashofy, Vance Township Police Chief Pete Adams and his wife, County Coroner Zoe Chambers-Adams, must race against time and a hurricane to capture the mysterious killer, who murdered a young mother and kidnapped her daughter while leaving the only witness, the little girl’s father, critically wounded and trapped beneath a disabled farm tractor. Will Pete be able to stop a savage and cunning predator? And will he and Zoe be able to reunite a family before it’s too late?
In Case of the Bleus by Korina Moss, the secrets to an enigmatic and award-winning blue cheese may be gone forever when its creator –Willa’s former boss, Max — dies. But when the presumed heir is killed for those secrets, the hunt for Max’s Church Bleu begins. When Willa discovers that she’s the intended heir, she must decipher the riddles Max left in order to find the cheese and the killer before the killer finds her.
The Weekend Retreat, Tara Laskowski Every year, the illustrious Van Ness siblings gather at their secluded winery estate for a joint birthday celebration. It’s a tradition they’ve followed nearly all their lives, and now they are back with their significant others for a much-needed weekend of rest and relaxation, away from the public spotlight. With lavish comforts, gorgeous scenery, and indulgent drinking, the trip should be the perfect escape. But it soon becomes clear that even a remote idyllic getaway can’t keep out the problems simmering in each of their lives. As old tensions are reignited, the three couples are pushed to the edge. Will their secrets destroy them, or will they destroy each other first? And who’s been watching them from beyond the vineyard gates?
One murder. Four impossibilities. A fake séance hides a very real crime. Tempest Raj returns in The Raven Thief by Gigi Pandian, where sliding bookcases, trick tables, and hidden reading nooks hide something much more sinister than the Secret Staircase Construction crew ever imagined.
Leslie: What would you most like readers to know about your book? Ellen: It’s funny, twisty, and loaded with the flavor of New Orleans. Annette: At its core, Helpless is a story about friendship and priorities. Sometimes you have to put the demands of your career aside to help a friend. And sometimes, the only thing you can do is just be there to sit and listen. Zoe’s hands are tied during most of the story, yet her simply being there is the most important role in the book. Korina: It’s a mystery with cozy shades of The DaVinci Code and Ocean’s Eleven… with cheese thrown in. Tara: The family in the book is not based on anyone I know, especially my own family (thank god!) Their terrible self-centeredness is all the product of my imagination. But I still love them all. Gigi:The Raven Thief is a locked room mystery, also known as an impossible crime novel, that pays homage to the Golden Age of detective fiction. I wanted to channel authors like John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie, who wrote fair-play puzzle plot mysteries, but putting my own modern spin on the genre. The puzzle plot is the key to the story-but family, friendship, and food are the heart. With The Raven Thief, I went even further than one locked-room mystery, creating four ways in which the mystery looks impossible.
Leslie: What did you learn, about writing, life, murder, magic, or some other weird or amazing subject, while you were writing this book? Ellen: I happened to be in New Orleans while I was writing this book and my daughter and I had to evacuate for Hurricane Ida. I learned how frightening and traumatic that experience is, and how it takes the resilience of those amazingly strong New Orleanians to move beyond it and get your mojo back. Annette: I learned an inordinate amount of information about incapacitating an old Ford farm tractor and also, about how to fix one. Korina: There can be a dark underbelly to the cheese world. In one year, almost seven hundred blocks of Saint Nectaire were stolen in France for the black market. In Italy, Parmigiano-Reggiano makers have started putting edible microchips the size of a grain of sand on their 90-lb cheese wheels to combat counterfeiters selling rip-offs. It’s no wonder—last year, a 4.8 lb. wheel of Calabro from northern Spain sold for $32,000. Tara: I learn something new about my writing process every time I work on a book. It’s usually a very painful lesson, though. This time, I learned that I need to do a lot of “people work” upfront and really understand my characters and their motivations before I start writing, because so much of their actions and the plot depends on who they are, essentially, as humans. I didn’t do enough of that in my early drafts of this book, thinking I’d figure it out as I wrote, and that got me into trouble! Gigi: At the center of each Secret Staircase Mystery is a renovation project, building magic into peoples’ homes through elements like sliding bookcases and secret doors that lead to hidden libraries. In The Raven Thief, the woman who’s hired Secret Staircase Construction hosts a book club focused on classic mystery novels, and she also requests a faux séance in the room. To create the most fun book club room for mystery enthusiasts and a space that would work for a séance-gone-wrong, I reread many of my favorite classic mysteries with an eye towards elements I could turn into architectural details, and I learned more about how fraudulent spiritualists faked séances. I thought I knew a lot about how tricksters could fake séances, but wow there are a lot of tricks!
Leslie: What keeps you going, on days when writing is hard? Ellen: Deadlines! Annette: My readers. I’ll never forget the email I received very early in my writing career. A woman wrote to tell me she’d bought Circle of Influence as a Mother’s Day gift for her mom who was going through chemotherapy. Reading my book during the treatments helped her mother take her mind off her illness. I learned this mother and daughter lived about a half hour away, and at her next chemo session, I went to the hospital and sat with them, signed the book, and had pictures taken for them. It was a humbling experience and a stark reminder of the real reason I do this. Korina: Hearing from readers, especially when my books are getting them through a hard time in life. Tara: When I’m having a really bad writing day, I try to tell myself, “It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be there.” My wonderful agent Michelle Richter once told me, “You can’t edit it if it’s not on the page.” So I give myself permission to suck, hoping that once there are words, it’ll be easier to fix them. It doesn’t always work, but it is a kind of writer self-care, a sort of grace we can extend ourselves so we don’t get so wrapped up in our heads. And most of the time, when I go back later and re-read it, it’s not as bad as I feared. Gigi: Connecting with my fellow book people is the best! Some of the readers and writers I’ve met since I started writing have become my closest friends. My fellow Agatha nominee Ellen Byron is one of the fabulous women in my writers group! I always want each new book I write to be better than my last, so if I’m ever feeling stressed out that a book isn’t coming together as I want it to, I simply chat with one of my author pals or pick up one of my beaten-up old Elizabeth Peters novels to read a few pages. Either one does the trick to inspire me.
THE AUTHORS: ELLEN BYRON: Winner of multiple Agatha and Lefty awards, Ellen Byron transitioned from a twenty-plus-year career writing television sitcoms to penning humorous mysteries and has never been happier. She is also an award-winning playwright but considers working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart her most impressive achievement.
ANNETTE DASHOFY: USA Today bestseller Annette Dashofy is the author of fifteen novels including the seven-time Agatha Award nominated Zoe Chambers mystery series about a paramedic-turned-coroner in rural Pennsylvania as well as the Detective Honeywell series set along Lake Erie. Her standalone novel, Death By Equine, won the 2021 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award for excellence in thoroughbred racing literature.
KORINA MOSS is the author of the Cheese Shop Mystery series (St. Martin’s Press) set in the Sonoma Valley, including the Agatha Award winner for Best First Novel, Cheddar Off Dead. She lives in Connecticut, where she is devoted to the art of cheese.
TARA LASKOWSKI is the author of the suspense novels The Weekend Retreat, The Mother Next Door and One Night Gone, winner of the Agatha, Macavity, and Anthony awards. She also wrote two short story collections, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders. Her short fiction has won Agatha and Thriller awards, and she was the longtime editor of the online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly. She lives in Virginia with her husband, crime writer Art Taylor, and their son Dashiell.
GIGI PANDIAN is a USA Today bestselling mystery author, breast cancer survivor, and locked-room mystery enthusiast. She writes the Secret Staircase mysteries, the Accidental Alchemist mysteries, and the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt mysteries.
If you’re headed to Malice Domestic this year, I hope to see you at 3:00 Friday afternoon, in Ballroom B/C, for what I know will be a delightful conversation. If not, I hope you’re intrigued by the nominated books and will pick them up for a guaranteed good read!
Jeffrey Brown : “You have written about the role of the novel today and I guess a concern about whether it can still be valued, even important, have a place in our society.”
Paul Lynch: “Yes. It goes back to what I call the whisper in the ear. I mean, the novelist can whisper in the reader’s ear, and that’s a beautiful conversation. There’s also whisper in the ear that you have with yourself. But we live in a time where technology has done something to us.
We are no longer, for many of us anyway — unless you cultivate it and shape it, we are not in tune with ourselves. We’re not hearing the voice in the ear. And it’s harder to read fiction too. And I think that a culture that cannot hear itself think is a culture that is in serious trouble. …
And I like that idea of fiction just being a little bit more dangerous, a little bit more engaging, pushing into — seeking this hidden charge of things and giving the reader maybe a little bit more electricity, but doing it respectfully.”
“I’m interested in this idea of the personal cost of events.
And I think that, if you go back through literature, you go through a great book like The Iliad, it foregrounds the politics. It foregrounds the heroics and the great characters. But if you take The Iliad and you turn it inside out, you arrive at [the protagonist of his novel, Prophet Song] Eilish Stack. You arrive at the individual living the ordinary life and how the individual is caught up within the cogs, the machinations of this enormous thing that’s unfolding.…
I’m really interested in the problem of grief, not grievance. I’m interested in the idea of the political of what is lost, how fragile this world that we’re in is.”
“If I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it.” — Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Some days are like that. Just keep going. Remember, you can do anything for 15 minutes, and that might be enough to write a page, write a chorus, or plan the colors for a new weaving
Flow. We know it when we feel it, but what is it? How can we cultivate it? A new study done at the Drexel University Creativity Research Lab used brain imaging to study jazz guitarists working on an improvisation and summarizes the results this way:
“The findings reveal the creative flow state involves two key factors: extensive experience, which leads to a network of brain areas specialized for generating the desired type of ideas, plus the release of control — “letting go” — to allow this network to work with little or no conscious supervision.”
I like this so much, not just because it rings true, but because it also tells us what we can do to experience flow more often and more readily: practice the work, whether it’s chord structures or writing dialogue, creating new pathways in the brain, and practice giving up conscious control of the process and the results.
At the Pikes Peak Writers Conference last April, I met author and teacher Carly Stevens, who asked me to chat with her on YouTube about writing about the law and lawyers, as a followup to my PPWC presentation on common mistakes writers make about the law. Our conversation is now up, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. (We also talked last summer about building your characters, based on another PPWC presentation I gave, and you can watch or listen to that interview, Writing Better Characters, too.)
Carly and I talked about the types of lawyers and practice, the relationships between lawyers, discovery (that is, how evidence is shared before trial), and some of the common mistakes writers make about the law. You can revisit my blog post on common mistakes as well, which covers a few topics she and I didn’t discuss.
I came across another common mistake recently — one not on the list only because it has so much competition — and that’s the availability of juvenile records. Many people assume juvenile records are automatically sealed or destroyed at a certain age, but that’s not always true. State law varies tremendously, as do the records themselves. Factors include the nature of the crime — was it a misdemeanor or felony, a crime against property or a person? Repeat offender status. Age. Whether the offender was sent to a juvenile prison. Other factors may be considered, depending on state law.
Even if the records are sealed, a potential employer may have some access. Law enforcement retains access to most juvenile records, unless officially expunged. This state-by-state summary of laws relating to juvenile records from the National Conference of State Legislatures is enormously useful.
