Month: October 2023

October by Karen Shughart

~ kshughart47 ~ 2 Comments

October is without a doubt my favorite month, filled with a bounty of richness and color that I embrace before the landscape turns into subtle shades of brown and beige. Here in the northern part of New York state, on the shores of Lake Ontario, there are breathtakingly beautiful days this time of year: cloudless cerulean skies; a Caribbean green lake with meandering white caps, perfumed like the ocean without the brine; a piercing lemon-colored sun that warms the coolness in the air, and crisp nights with a carpet of stars winking and blinking in an ink-stained sky.

By now many leaves have turned bright with shades of yellow, gold, deep rust and red, but until our first frost, the lawns will remain green.  The sea grasses in our backyard, almost as tall as our house, have feathery, burgundy tassels and, when the wind blows in from the northwest, sound like the gentle ebb and flow of waves on the water. Stately pine trees, red-berried evergreens and hollies provide contrast, reminding us that life continues, even in winter.

Burnap’s Farm Market – Sodus, NY

The farmstands, with domes of potted mums for sale in a riot of colors, will remain open for the rest of this month and into the holiday season. Berries, peaches and plums, lettuces, cucumbers, and zucchini, have been replaced with other fruits and vegetables that can be stored for longer periods of time and will warm our bellies on cold nights: local apples of every variety; hearty winter squashes; purple-green kale; cabbages; potatoes, and multi-hued varieties cauliflower.

In October I replace the summer cushions and pillows on the wicker furniture on our front porch with ones more representative of the season. Halloween is big here, so some of the pillows are patterned with pale green, orange, and white pumpkins with deep green and purple leaves and vines. Instead of sitting on our deck for our late afternoon happy hour, my husband and I move to the porch, drinking wine and welcoming friends who stroll by and then stop for a drink and to chat.

November is just around the corner, and there will be plenty to celebrate then, too, but for now I’ll rejoice in this beautiful month of October.

Karen Shughart is the author of the Edmund DeCleryk cozy mystery series, published by Cozy Cat Press. Her third book, Murder at Freedom Hill, recently was awarded first place in the mystery category and third place in fiction in the International Firebird Book Award competition. She is currently working on book four, Murder at Chimney Bluffs.

Guest Blogger ~ Marla A. White

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

Unveiling the Fun Side of Crime: My Murder Research Adventure

Maybe this should worry me, but there’s no shortage of people I want to kill on a daily basis, so coming up with victims for my plots is relatively easy. Cut me off on the freeway? Your car is now being driven by a soon to be dead character. Be mean to a friend? Murder will follow. 

The real fun for me comes when it’s time to research the details. For “Cause for Elimination” I had firsthand knowledge of the horse and eventing world because I lived it. But finding out how to blow up a boat (hint: it’s not as easy as it sounds), or what it would sound like if someone were stabbed and their lung collapsed, required a little more digging. Fortunately, I have a few real live resources I can turn to for answers.

There’s a fellow eventer and nurse who’s very patient with my myriad of weird questions about broken necks and blood loss. Another good friend is an expert in wiring and security systems. He was invaluable when I was trying to figure out how the spy camera I needed for a particular scene would work. My nephew builds boats and helped me with the boat question.

Obviously, the Internet is a beautiful thing. There’s a wonderful website, “How To Kill Your Imaginary Friends” with articles such as, “If you shock a flatline, I swear I will come to your home and beat you with a wet chicken”. One of my characters is Scottish so I have a ton of websites bookmarked to make him sound authentic, including “The Septic’s Companion” for British slang words and insults. Plus lots and lots of research on weapons; guns, swords, knives, and even what a cat-o’-nine-tails looks like. I dread the thought that one day someone will look through search history and promptly arrest or medicate me.

But many of the specific, colorful details in my books, however, come from personal experiences. Like I said, I boarded my horses and rode at most of the locations that appear in “Cause for Elimination”. One scene, where a boarder is bemoaning how their life has been ruined, was from an actual and hilarious encounter that I had. Beautiful Idyllwild, a place a go as often as I can, was the inspiration for the quirky town of Pine Cove in my cozy mystery, “The Starlight Mint Surprise Murder” and the upcoming sequel. My non-mystery books were born out of a visit to a historic inn.

Probably the single most useful research tool for me as a writer, however, is wordhippo.com. It’s like a thesaurus on steroids and helps me keep my writing fresh. Used with ProWritingAid, because I’m useless at putting commas in the right place, I’ve gotten much better at turning in manuscripts that are clean and avoid mistakes. Because while killing off people is fun, murdering the language is downright embarrassing! 

Fun facts

Something readers might find interesting about this book:

Much of what happens in this novel is inspired by real events, people and places from my years of riding horses. Emily’s distinctive pickup truck was inspired by a real truck I coveted. Justin’s uncontrollable ride with “whoa?” – happened to me on that very field. The horse she rides, Reese, is based on the last horse I owned right down to his big suitcase head that he likes to waggle.  Don’t even ask me about the upholstery story!  And though I’ve never forgotten to unhook my air-vest, I’ve certainly had my share of close calls.  

A fact about me readers might find interesting:

The first time I got on a horse was to ride a neighbor’s fat pony bareback. It took off, I clung to its side for maybe 100 yards before hitting the ground, and have been in love with horses ever since.  It’s entirely possible I hit my head.  

Cause for Elimination

After suffering a devastating riding accident, eventer Emily Conners is on the road back to reclaiming her life. Then she discovers the body of her friend and boss, Pam Yates, brutally murdered at the barn and it seems like nothing will ever be normal again. She’s out of a job, and annoyed by the handsome cop whose been sent to investigate the case.  Because while she wants to see the killer brought to justice, she has some dark secrets of her own she’d rather he didn’t unearth.

Detective Justin Butler usually gets his killer, but this time the investigation proves particularly difficult as Pam Yates had no shortage of enemies.  He looks to Emily for insights into a world that’s completely foreign to him and can’t understand why she’s resistant to help. Is she as busy as she claims, or is she scared off by the growing attraction they both share?

As the investigation heats up, dangers come from unexpected corners and buried secrets are exposed. Emily and Justin will have to work together to catch the killer, putting both their hearts and their lives on the line, before they strike again. 

Buy links:

Amazon  https://amzn.to/3qk7XCP

Books2Read  https://books2read.com/u/b6zjM6

BookBub  https://www.bookbub.com/books/cause-for-elimination-by-marla-a-white

GoodReads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62233827-cause-for-elimination

All Author https://allauthor.com/book/70256/cause-for-elimination/

Marla White is an award-winning novelist, story analysis instructor at UCLA and writing coach who lives in Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Kentucky where she took her first horseback riding lesson. After dabbling in hunters, barrel racing, and weekly trail rides, she fell hopelessly in love with the sport of eventing.  She “conquered” Novice level before taking a break to pursue novel writing but hopes to return to the saddle some day soon.  Her first novel, “The Starlight Mint Surprise Murder,” was published in 2021 followed by the first two books in her Keeper Chronicles series. When she’s not writing, she’s out in the garden, hiking, or working on a jigsaw puzzle.  

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/TheScriptFixer

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marlawriteswords/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarlaAWhiteAuthor

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@marlaw825

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21467766.Marla_A_White

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/marla-a-white

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marla-A.-White/author/B094DVMCR4

The End Is Nigh

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 5 Comments

by Janis Patterson

For every beginning there is an ending… and conversely, for every ending there is a beginning… and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.


This year has been a landmark year for me – it’s been one of the lowest output years for me in well over a decade (only two books as opposed to the four or five I usually do) and yet I’ve been busier than I ever have.
In case you have been living under a rock and not heard about my republishing blitz I’m going to give you a quick précis…


During the covid crazies I got very lazy. The Husband was home – and even retired during this time – s0 we had things to do and my writing business came in a distant second to being with him. I knew that rights on previously published books were coming back to me, but being distracted by other things I just let the reversion letters pile up on my computer.


Until January of this year. Life was returning to a semblance of normal and I realized I wasn’t getting any younger (are any of us?) and if I wanted to get back into this writing thing I had to get busy, so a good start would be republishing those reverted books through my own company. A quick wander through my hard drive shocked me, because there were 26 (yes, TWENTY SIX) of the little beasties. Gulp.


A quick perusal decided me that for various reasons four of them were going permanently ‘under the bed,’ hopefully never to be seen again. That left 22 to be republished. As I am lazy, doing that could possibly take a couple of years, years which I might not have. As I was raised in advertising and journalism, the fact that deadlines are sacred is bred into my blood and bones. My father taught me that (to use his words) “There is only one excuse for you to miss a deadline, and that is death. Yours.”


So I set myself a deadline – I would release a book freshly edited, freshly formatted and most with new covers every other Wednesday until all were out, starting on January 15. MISTLETOE MAGIC, the last book, comes out October 25.
22 books released every other Wednesday, each on schedule, each reworked as promised and all without missing a single release day. (Actually, there were 24 released – one through one of my publishers and the other as an outlier which appeared suddenly through a set of circumstances too complex to go in to… neither of which I counted as part of the blitz.)


I’m exhausted. I would love to take a few weeks off away from the computer, but I have deadlines… one for a July 4th mystery anthology, one for my new Flora Melkiot book and one for a summer Regency romance anthology. Sigh. Even though we spend our days pretty much in the same room (the den) The Husband says I spend more time with the computer and my invisible friends than with him and lately he’s been right. I’ve taken my computer along on every trip we’ve made this year – and it saved my sometimes tenuous sanity the days we were holed up in a motel in Mississippi when he fell ill on our way home from NINC!


Anyway, the blitz is now over and the encroaching deadlines await. It doesn’t get any easier, people. It really doesn’t.

And now for some good news! EXERCISE IS MURDER is now available in audio from Audible! (The ebook is available from Amazon and will hopefully be available in paperback before too long… it is the first appearance of the redoubtable Flora Melkiot!)

Why we write what we do

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

I started writing a post on here about Indigenous People Day. Which is today. It was made a federal holiday alongside Columbus Day in 2021. But by the time I was at the end of writing the post, I decided someone might take my post as political and moved it to my personal blog. If you’re interested, you can read it here: https://writingintothesunset.net/

But today is why I write the mysteries I write. I have been fascinated and in awe of the Indigenous people since I was old enough to understand all that they have gone through. And to see how some of the tribes have grown along with technology and have raised their people up in knowledge, living conditions, and being heard. I know there are some that are still struggling with being heard and seen as productive part of society, but there are others who are thriving. Getting back their culture and language and being economically sound and successful for their tribe.

Their resiliency, belief in their culture, and their desire to give each generation the best life inspires me to write about them. To bring their horrors and their determination to readers. That’s why I have Native American characters in my three mystery stories, to show readers that while they live a different culture, they are just like everyone else with the same dreams, goals, and desires.

I hope that my stories, while they aren’t as full of the culture as some other writers, still portray the culture and the real people who live each day not only with similar struggles but also with more. They are still labeled and seen as different by many.

The theme of my books all deal with injustice. Whether it is someone who is killed, someone who is believed to be the suspect, or it is the characters dealing with prejudice.

My newest release, Damning Firefly, deals with a completely different injustice. One that I tried hard to portray with empathy and from the first reviews, I did my job.

Damning Firefly

Book 11 in the Gabriel Hawke Series

A church fire.

An unconscious woman on Starvation Ridge.

Gabriel Hawke, fish and wildlife officer with the Oregon State Police, helps with a fire at the Lighted Path church before heading out to check turkey hunters. He discovers a car wedged between two trees and a woman with a head injury reeking of smoke. Is she the arsonist?

Hawke encounters the county midwife gloating over the burnt church and learns she and the victim in the car know one another.

Two seemingly separate events lead Hawke to a serial rapist and a county full of secrets. https://books2read.com/u/bQeBDZ

Guest Blogger ~ J. Woollcott

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

WHERE DO PLOTS AND CHARACTERS COME FROM?

It was summer and I had finally finished my working career. I wanted to write and travel, but Covid happened, and travel was out of the question, so writing became my focus. I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of book I wanted to work on, except that it should be a mystery and probably have a detective in it. As I hail from Northern Ireland, I figured that was the perfect place. I had a relative who had been in the police over there and I thought, well, if that’s not serendipity, I don’t know what is.

The next part—actually writing the darn thing—was a little more difficult.

The plot? A good question. I don’t really know where that came from. Ask any writer and most of the time they will say the story came from an overheard remark or something they read in the paper or on line. Not copied, just a stray word or sentence that sparked another idea. Stephen King, in his wonderful book, ‘On Writing,’ tells how a casual remark someone made about a basement with ‘rats as big as dogs,’ led him to write Graveyard Shift. I suspect Mr. King doesn’t really suffer from a lack of plot ideas though. I rather think he has more than he knows what to do with.

And where do the characters who populate our books come from? Now this is murky. They often rise fully formed out of the writer’s imagination—or so it seems. I suspect my hero, DS Ryan McBride, and the other members of the squad are an amalgam of too many hours spent reading detective crime fiction and watching British tv mysteries and movies.

So, a plot can spring unbidden from anywhere and characters can tap you on the shoulder and say; ‘Hey, let me out, I want to be in your next story.’

I was a designer and artist, and tend to be visual, so when I started to write A Nice Place to Die, I had an opening scene in my head. A woman’s body lying by a river outside Belfast. Crows cawing above in high, dark trees. A day of sun and cloud. Around that time there had been a lot of talk about date rape drugs and the like, and also articles about mistaken identity. Somehow, by a mysterious alchemy, both subjects came together and ended up in my book.

The Belfast Murder Series; Book One, A Nice Place to Die.

The body of a young woman is found by a river outside Belfast and Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride makes a heart-wrenching discovery at the scene, a discovery he chooses to hide even though it could cost him the investigation – and his career. As Ryan untangles a web of lies, his suspects die one by one, leading him to a dangerous family deception and a murderer who will stop at nothing to keep it. And still, he harbors his secret …

For DS McBride’s second outing, Blood Relations, I’d like to say that came to me in an ordered way, but no. I have even less idea where that plot came from, other than an opening scene of a bleak country house, dark clouds rolling in and a retired Detective Inspector lying dead upstairs on bloody sheets. Once again the story sprang from bits and pieces of chat, random conversations and well, just everyday life – not the murder part of course, I made that up … of course I did.

The Belfast Murder Series; Book Two, Blood Relations.

Belfast, Northern Ireland: early spring 2017. Retired Chief Inspector Patrick Mullan is found brutally murdered in his bed. Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride and his partner Detective Sergeant Billy Lamont are called to his desolate country home to investigate. In their inquiry, they discover a man whose career with the Police Service of Northern Ireland was overshadowed by violence and corruption. Is the killer someone from Mullan’s past, or his present? And who hated the man enough to kill him twice? Is it one of Patrick Mullan’s own family, all of them hiding a history of abuse and lies? Or a vengeful crime boss and his psychopathic new employee? Or could it be a recently released prisoner desperate to protect his family and flee the country? Ryan and Billy once again face a complex investigation with wit and intelligence, all set in Belfast and the richly atmospheric countryside around it.           

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Relations-Ryan-McBride-Novel-ebook/dp/B0CFJWF69D/

J. Woollcott is a Canadian author born in Belfast, N. Ireland. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and BCAD, University of Ulster. Her first book, A Nice Place to Die won the RWA Daphne du Maurier Award, was short-listed in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in 2021 and a Silver Falchion Award finalist at Killer Nashville 2023.

Website: https://www.jwoollcott.com

Twitter: @JoyceWoollcott