A Holiday Mystery Anthology

November 14, 2022November 11, 2022 ~ patyjag

Last January, my author co-op, Windtree Press, had a quarterly meeting and it was decided we’d put out a mystery anthology, since we had 8 authors in the group who wrote mystery/suspense/thriller books. We chose to make it have a holiday theme and every story had to have or mention a dead body. That and the length were the guidelines.

We set dates by when the short stories had to be sent to the person editing (me) and when I had to have all the stories ready for the person formatting, and when they had to have it ready to publish. It was fun reading each authors stories and helping them where they needed to beef up the mystery or flesh out a character. Once the author and I were happy with the story, I then sent it on to another author in the group to proofread.

In the end we have 10 completely different, yet entertaining mystery stories.

CRIME NEVER TAKES A HOLIDAY

A cornucopia of ten cozy mystery stories that are perpetrated during holidays from New Years to Christmas. This collection explores unexplained disturbances, college pranks gone wrong, and almost always one or more murders around a holiday. Solve these spooky crimes that lurk beneath celebratory parties and help search for the murderers. Kick off your shoes, grab a warm drink and snuggle into a blanket before you get lured onto the sparkling snow for the next crime spree.

A Body on the 13th Floor by Paty Jager
Dead Ladies Don’t Dance by Robin Weaver
Took Nothing Left Nothing by Pamela Cowan
Busted for Bones by Dari LaRoche
Yuletide Firebug by Kathy Coatney
Starry Night Murder by Mary Vine
The Twelfth Night Murder by Ann Chaney
Blue Christmas by Melissa Yi
Two Turtle Doves by Maggie Lynch
Five Golden Rings by Kimila Kay

https://books2read.com/u/b6zYgp

A Body on the 13th Floor by Paty Jager

Dela Alvaro, head of security for the Spotted Pony Casino, has a dead body in an elevator on New Year’s Eve. The unfortunate soul was stuck between the 12^th and 14^th floors when he met his demise.

This short story pulls together a good number of the cast from my Spotted Pony Casino Mysteries series. I had a fun time coming up with the plot and making it as interesting as I could in a short amount of time. I think all writers should not only write novel length stories but also write short stories to help hone their skills and learn to tell a story in few words but ones that can make an impact.

If you grab a copy, I hope you enjoy the mysteries!

Guest Blogger~Christine DeSmet

November 12, 2022November 7, 2022 ~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

From the Land of 11 Lighthouses

The question always comes up when I do a book talk: What part of your background is in your character of Ava Oosterling?

I was raised on a 160-acre dairy farm in southern Wisconsin near Barneveld. I feel nostalgic when driving by fragrant, new-mown alfalfa fields. I remember bringing up cows from our far-flung pastures while I was going barefoot in the soft, dusty cow paths that had seen thousands of hooves over the years.

Being a farm girl is also the background for Ava Oosterling—star of my Fudge Shop Mystery Series, including the new holiday novel, Holly Jolly Fudge Folly.

My character of Ava Oosterling is far more adventurous than I am. She’s been nearly burned alive and drowned by bad guys. But I’m not exactly a wallflower. I have climbed ancient oak trees and ridden cows—and never fallen

I started my writing career years ago as an adult. I entered a national manuscript contest sponsored by Romance Writers of America. I won the “Golden Heart”! But I didn’t get published because I didn’t know enough yet to revise properly. In the years to come, I eventually became what I am today—a writing coach and instructor, author of several published novels, and an optioned screenwriter.

These days I write using “plot points” and “scene design” and “hooks” and other technical writerly tools. When I plan a novel or short story, I start with the Central Question. It must start with the word “Will” and stick to one topic. “Will Ava accomplish/solve WHAT by the end?” Of course she’ll solve the mystery, but I try to build in an adjacent concern that must be solved.

My first published novel, Spirit Lake, a romantic suspense, came out around the year 2000 when electronic books were small disks you read on a computer. I was a pioneer, part of the publishing revolution. Back then, such authors were discriminated against for not publishing “real” books. Hard to believe now!

As years went by, I wrote “cozy” romantic mystery novellas—short novels—in my Mischief in Moonstone series, set near Superior, Wisconsin.

Those are now re-issued for Kindle and paperback by Writers Exchange E-Publishing, a new Australian publisher. The books include the Halloween novella, When the Dead People Brought a Dish-to-Pass, and the Christmas novella, When Rudolph Was Kidnapped. I’ve written a screenplay based on the latter.

My Fudge Shop Mystery series came about when a literary agent was looking for somebody to write about chocolate in Door County, Wisconsin—known as the Cape Cod of the Midwest. The peninsular county jutting into Lake Michigan has the most lighthouses of any county in the United States—11. A lighthouse indeed entered into a murder plot in one of my books. I’ve now written six novels in that cozy series, including this season’s Holly Jolly Fudge Folly.

A “cozy mystery” always focuses on a small community. Violence, sex, and politics are kept off the page. Cozies focus on humor, adventure, respect, family and friends, and often pets and good food. My key characters include a trouble-making but lovable grandpa who has to have his coffee strong and laced with Belgian chocolate, and an American Water Spaniel named Lucky Harbor who loves cheese crackers. That breed of dog was developed in Wisconsin.

My protagonist, Ava Oosterling, is Belgian—like me. She was also raised on a farm, hers in Door County—part of a region with the biggest rural population of Belgian immigrants in the United States.

My books contain recipes for Belgian items such as Belgian booyah—a harvest soup made outdoors in big barrels over wood fires in autumn. My recipe is in Hot Fudge Frame-Up.

In Holly Jolly Fudge Folly the quest is on for a new recipe to please Santa and his elves. In the story, Ava Oosterlings’ best friend is getting married, but not before Ava’s grandpa gets accused of murder. That jeopardizes his prized role as Santa in the holiday parade and his ability to walk Ava’s friend down the aisle. The new novel contains my recipe for Holly Jolly Fudge.

Thank you for letting me introduce myself and my writing life. I love hearing from readers and fellow writers through my website, or Facebook, or through the Blackbird Writers group where I also blog. Best wishes for your holiday season!

Christine DeSmet’s books are available in paperback and ebook formats through her publisher (Writers Exchange E-Publishing), through Amazon, or through Christine’s website at this link: https://christinedesmet.com/books/how-to-buy/

Because Christine doesn’t have the cover or buy link yet for Holly Jolly Fudge Folly, here is another Holiday mystery from Christine: From her Mischief in Moonstone Series:

When Rudolph was Kidnapped

A cozy holiday mystery with a stocking full of tender romance! When her pet reindeer, Rudolph, is stolen from the live animal holiday display, first-grade teacher Crystal Hagan has a big problem: Her students fear Christmas will be canceled. The prime suspect is a man who lives in the mansion known as the “North Pole.” And to her shock, Peter LeBarron admits to kidnapping Rudolph and won’t give him back without some romantic negotiations. Book 1 of the Mischief in Moonstone Mystery Series

Buy link: https://www.amazon.com/Mischief-Moonstone-Novella-Rudolph-Kidnapped/dp/B08WJP893S

Christine DeSmet writes the Fudge Shop Mystery Series including the Fall 2022 release called Holly Jolly Fudge Folly. She’s also authored the Mischief in Moonstone Series (novellas). She is an award-winning, optioned screenwriter. Her new book projects include children’s picture books. Christine is a long-time writing coach and developmental editor—skills honed while creating and leading programs as a Distinguished Faculty Associate at University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies. Her memberships: Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrations. Christine was raised on a dairy-and-hog farm in southwestern Wisconsin. She loves any art that includes cows. https://christinedesmet.com/ and Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/christine.desmet.357.

Guest Blogger ~ Terri Benson

November 5, 2022November 5, 2022 ~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

I’ve written two historical romances, and read a lot of them growing up, but I also enjoyed mysteries. Somewhere along the line, I picked up a Clive Cussler novel with Dirk Pitt and his classic cars. While the Dirk Pitts stories themselves generally didn’t focus on the cars, there was one mentioned in every book and photos were usually on the back cover. Those books rekindled my interest in the beautiful old cars. I generally go for the pre-1950s cars, not the later muscle cars – a fact that causes some discussion between myself and my husband.

There are quite a few car shows around the Four Corners region where I live, and some of the larger auction houses like Barrett-Jackson and Mecum hold events in Denver, Las Vegas, and Scottsdale – all within a reasonable weekend trip for me. I get my ideas for the cars in my books at these shows, as well as perusing online catalogues, websites, and blogs. Once I have a car in mind, the story seems to come from that.

I’m a bit odd in when I’m starting a book, I almost always come up with the title first, based on the car, or in the case of Pickup Artist, a Marmon-Herrington pickup I saw in Vegas several years ago. If you read the book (and I hope you do!) you’ll find the title has more than one meaning, which is always my goal.

My main character, Renni Delacroix, is a young, pretty, female classic car restorer, who has had to fight her way into the industry for those specific reasons. Her unusual background growing up with a widowed great uncle and his middle-aged son, both of whom were involved in circle track and stock car racing, gave her far more experience with car bodies and engines than most men twice her age. That experience has allowed her to become a top-ten restorer, but it’s left her with a hefty chip on her shoulder after spending years proving herself over and over. She has another, more unusual skill, which gives her even more grief – when she touches a car, she starts to see its history in her dreams. It can be helpful in her chosen career, but has been hard on past relationships, not to mention making her the butt of jokes during her college years and beyond.

Her gift (or curse as she sees it) exposes an old mystery in each book, but doesn’t help much in solving said mystery, or contemporary mysteries she’s involved in. Often, as in The Pickup Artist, those past and present mysteries, separated by decades, end up being related. An eclectic cast of characters (and I mean that literally), both help and hinder Renni with their meddling and advice.

The Pickup Artist

Classic car restorer Renni Delacroix has a unique gift, one kept carefully hidden: when she touches a car, she sees its history. Focused on building her business in the small town of Rampart, Colorado, she hides the truth of her psychic ability.

But when a Marmon pickup is delivered, visions of terrified women jolt her clean off the old truck. She has no choice but to come forward, especially since one the of the women was her best friend, murdered six months earlier. Rennie explains what she sees to Detective Matt Brody. Skeptical, he’s surprised to find evidence the Marmon belonged to a serial killer known as the Rocky Mountain High Killer.

While battling Brody’s suspicions, and her growing attraction to him, Renni uses skills honed hunting down classic parts to unearth the killer. But will she be able to give their identity to Brody before she loses everything,– her job, her home…even her life?

Buy links

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-pickup-artist-terri-benson/1140930664

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Pickup-Artist-Audiobook/B09XHSYFBC

A life-long writer, Terri is traditionally and self-published in novel length, plus nearly a hundred articles and short stories published – many award winning. She’s a member of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, Sisters in Crime, and Rocky Mountain Mystery Writers, presents workshops at writer’s conferences, and teaches night classes at Western Colorado Community College. Terri spends her non-writing time working at a non-profit, camping, jeeping, and dirt biking with her junior-high-school sweetheart/husband of 40+ years and a succession of Brittany spaniels. You can find more information on her at https://www.terribensonwriter.com/

Social Media Links

https://www.facebook.com/Terri-Benson-Writer-105857887430017/

https://www.facebook.com/terri.benson.104

Guest Blogger ~ Jane Tesh

October 31, 2022September 27, 2022 ~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

Turn On the Ghost Light

I had been with Poisoned Pen Press since 2004. When the company was bought by Sourcebooks, Sourcebooks did not want to continue either series even though I had many more books to go. As you can imagine, this was a blow, but I was still a Poisoned Pen author and they would accept a standalone. So I got to work.

This was more of a challenge than I thought. I had been writing my two series since 1995 and loved all those characters. To start over with a new cast was daunting. What would I write about? Where could I set this story? What was something I knew about that I could have fun with?

The answer to that was community theater. I’ve been in community theater productions for over forty years, so I have a lot of experience to drawn upon. Talk about drama. It is definitely in the theater, especially amateur theater with long-standing feuds and clashing egos. And there is a boatload of superstitions to play with. Now I just needed some characters.

As soon as I have the right name, I have a character. This happens all the time, and I can’t explain it. I name them, and there they are. So I thought of the name Theodosia “Teddy” Ballard. She told me her neighbor’s cat accidentally burned down her apartment building. She missed her latest job interview, a job she really didn’t want. Her dear grandmother who raised her was going into a retirement facility, and her scheming cousin had taken grandmother’s house. She didn’t have a job or a place to live.

So I thought of the name of her best friend and actor, Will Selms. When Will arrived, he had the perfect solution. Paula Norwood, stage manager at the local community theater, had recently fallen down the costume loft stairs and died from her injuries. The show desperately needed a stage manager. Teddy could have the job and live in the cottage behind the theater. Problem solved.

Only Teddy doesn’t know the first thing about being a stage manager. But along with the reader, she learns all about the theater. And of course, every theater is haunted, and before long, Teddy makes the acquaintance of George, the theater ghost. George saw Paula fall and tells Teddy it was not an accident. She decides to solve the mystery.

Something very unexpected happened during the writing of this book. Teddy and Will started to have a typical love scene when Teddy said to me, “I don’t really want this.” To my surprise, I didn’t want it, either. That’s when I realized I had never wanted it. And then, like Teddy, I found a word for this feeling. Asexual. This opened a whole new part of Teddy’s character and gave me a chance to work through what had puzzled me practically my whole life.

Ghost Light

Theodosia “Teddy” Ballard knows nothing about community theater, but when the stage manager for “Little Shop of Horrors” takes a tragic header down the costume-loft stairs, she agrees to fill in for the sake of her actor friend, Will. Teddy takes the superstitions and swelled heads of The Stage in stride—till she meets George Clancy Everhart, the theater ghost, who informs her that the previous stage manager was murdered and demands that she find the killer. Both investigation and rehearsals are complicated when she makes a surprising discovery about her relationship with Will—and learns that George has his own dramatic agenda.

https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Light-Jane-Tesh/dp/1939113563

Jane Tesh, a retired media specialist, lives in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, Andy Griffith’s home town, the real Mayberry. She is the author of the Madeline Maclin Mysteries, featuring former beauty queen, Madeline “Mac” Maclin and her reformed con man husband, Jerry Fairweather, and the Grace Street Mystery Series, featuring struggling PI David Randall, his psychic friend, Camden, and an array of tenants who move in and out of Cam’s boarding house at 302 Grace Street. Ghost Light is her first standalone mystery and the first to feature an asexual heroine. She has also published five fantasy novels. When she isn’t writing, Jane plays the piano and conducts the orchestra for productions at the Andy Griffith Playhouse.

Visit Jane’s website at www.janetesh.com and her Facebook page, www.facebook.com/GraceStreetMysterySeries

Guest Blogger ~ Laura Kelly Robb

October 29, 2022September 13, 2022 ~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

Behind the Book – Discovering the Florida Highwaymen

By Laura Kelly Robb

Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, lived her last years in Fort Pierce, a beach town on the Atlantic coast of Florida. She lived for a while on a houseboat and later in a modest cement block rental house. A visitor can see the makeshift desk and black Underwood typewriter Hurston used for her last pieces.

Through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, I traveled to Fort Pierce to learn more about Hurston’s life through a week-long seminar led by Professor Heather Russell. She told us the story of how Hurston had fallen out of favor with many critics until Alice Walker resuscitated her legacy of novels, stories, and African American folklore.

While in Fort Pierce, cultural ambassadors from the African American community helped us understand other aspects of the town’s history. The Florida Highwaymen, they said, had gone a long way toward putting the town on the map. I had never heard of those artists, but our guides forgave my ignorance and led us to a gallery run by James Gibson, one of the Highwaymen. Sitting on a stool, as casually as if he were telling us about dinner the night before, he spun tales of his companions in art, the twenty-five men and one woman, who made up the official list of Florida Highwaymen.

They knew each other, some from long contact, some only by sight, and some were blood relatives. They were eager to get out of the sweltering fields and as far away from the punishing orange harvests as possible. Hope came in the form of post-war prosperity, air-conditioning, and a wave of middle-class tourists. Black and white, the vacationers were driving the length of Florida. The Highwaymen’s images of sunsets, palm trees, and scudding clouds were the perfect souvenir.

From the mid-1950’s until the early ‘80’s, the loose group of self-taught artists produced, by conservative estimate, over 100,000 paintings. Sold out of the back of a car, sometimes on the side of the highway, for a bargain price of twenty-five dollars, the paintings traveled with their new owners all over the fifty states. Al Black, a prolific painter and also the lead salesman, could sell water to a whale they said. Money was made; oranges were not picked. James Gibson smiled and called them the best of years.

After the seminar, the story of the Florida Highwaymen stayed tucked away but not forgotten. I read reports of the uptick in interest and I saw episodes of Antiques Roadshow where the art experts valued Highwaymen paintings from $5,000 up to $10,000. I wondered how art professionals dealt with a body of work as large as the one generated in Fort Pierce.

That question serves as a starting point for my mystery, The Laguna Shores Research Club (TouchPoint Press, September 14, 2022), featuring an art cataloguer, an art collector, and an ambitious museum curator in St. Augustine. The protagonist, Laila, believes her chance to get ahead in the art world lies in protecting the Florida Highwaymen. When her friend and fellow researcher turns up dead, Laila is the one who needs protection.

The Laguna Shores Research Club

Laila Harrow knows the best way to track down anything—or anybody—is to ask Billie Farmer. As the brains of the Laguna Shores Research Club, Billie teaches fellow members how to reach into the ether and pluck out facts.

Counting on Billie’s guidance, Laila promises the St. Augustine Museum a catalogue of Florida Highwaymen paintings that will catapult her standing in the art world. But when Billie dies suddenly, Laila is forced to pull herself out of the darkness to think like Billie and follow the facts.

Fact: Billie’s good health makes the diagnosis of a heart attack unlikely.
Fact: Her actions the night of her death hint at a looming threat.
Fact: Her condo has been turned upside down, her computer and phone missing.

With support from her friends and family, Laila vows to get to the bottom of Billie’s death. Then one last piece of information comes to light.

Fact: Laila is at the center of a dangerous game.

Amazon Paperback and Kindle

Barnes&Noble and Nook

Laura grew up in New York, the fifth of six daughters. She earned a BA from the University of Toronto and went to work in Vigo, Spain. She lived in a small village and studied part-time at the University of Santiago. Returning to the US, she taught Spanish and History for Seattle Schools. She began to submit short stories and write novels while getting coaching at an Iowa Writers Workshop summer session. She now writes full-time, with a sequel to The Research Club expected in 2023. With her husband Paul, she lives in St. Simons, Georgia and takes breaks from the heat in Friday Harbor, Washington near her three adult children.

www.LauraKellyRobb.com

Twitter: @LauraKellyRobb

Instagram: @BookHardy and LauraKellyRobb_Author