Category: 5th

Guest Blogger ~ Kate Flora

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Adventures in Research: Hiring My Character a Lawyer

I was at my 50th law school reunion recently, sitting in a circle with a group of lawyers who’d dedicated themselves to public service, as we went around the room giving a brief description of our careers. My journey was different. As I told my classmates: I practiced law for a while and then turned to a life of crime. Crime writing, that is. My law background has been very helpful over the years, since crime writing often involves dealing with the police and the legal system. It was particularly useful when I was writing my first true crime, Finding Amy, since I could turn to my former colleagues in the Maine Attorney General’s office for information and advice.

Today’s post, though, is about a work of fiction. One of the places I look to for story ideas is newspapers. That’s where the plot for Teach Her a Lesson began. Reading a story about a teacher accused of sex with a student, I thought: What if I flip the script? What if it’s the student who is the wrong doer, a teenage boy obsessed with his teacher, and the teacher is innocent but no one believes her. That led me to the story of Alexis Jordan, a dedicated young teacher whose world is turned upside down when she’s accused of an affair with her student. Evan Palmer is the golden boy athlete. The boy who can do no wrong. And his story of the affair is frighteningly plausible. He knows way too much about her. Things he has no business knowing, like the color of her sheets.

What should Alexis do? After a meeting with the administration that made it clear they considered her guilty and weren’t willing to give her a fair hearing, she realized she needed a lawyer.

Despite my legal training, I didn’t know much about employment law or what my character, Alexis Jordan, needed to do to protect herself when her job was threatened, so I turned to my law school classmate, Elizabeth Rodgers, for advice. She was delighted—and amused—to be invited to represent an imaginary character. Over lunch, and through some emails back and forth, Liz became an excellent advisor on the steps Alexis should take to protect herself. Those conversations also led me to a strong secondary character in the book, Janice Trustman, who becomes Alexis’s lawyer.

Here’s a bit from Alexis’s first meeting with Trustman.

Trustman set down her pen and tented her hands. “You came to me for advice, right?”

Alexis nodded.

“So I’m going to give you some. We’ll be working closely together preparing you to defend yourself against Evan Palmer’s accusations. Right now, things are at an informal stage. They’re trying to conduct an investigation, you’re trying to protect yourself by exercising your rights under your contract. How will that play out? Well, you’ve already seen the first round.”

“What do you mean?”

“The meeting this morning. What happened? They caught you off guard and tried to get you to admit you’d done something wrong without telling you what the accusation was, right? Then, when you insisted on a hearing with a union representative present, what did they do?”

“Nothing.”

“Exactly. They’re letting you stew. Trying to make you lose your temper, make you anxious enough to lose your composure, hoping you’ll make mistakes, blurt things out, make it easy for them so they won’t have to conduct a full investigation.”

Trustman smiled wryly. “They don’t know much more about handling this than you do. The one thing Dr. Huston is better at is manipulating people. Manipulating you. Your job is to keep that from happening.”

“That’s so ugly. I guess I thought—”

“What? That all you’d have to do was invoke the rules and they’d play fair?” Trustman shook her head. “People only play by the rules when they have to. That’s why you’re here. Because you don’t believe they will be fair and you need a team on your side, too. To protect you when they play dirty. Isn’t that right?”

“I guess.” She felt sad. Flattened. Crushed. She’d come for help only to be told things were worse than she’d imagined.

As I wrote the story, I came to really like Janice Trustman. And she did a good job for Alexis, despite being tough on her, too.

Research for the book also involved sitting in high school classrooms and talking with teachers. But the scariest thing I did—so that I could accurately convey Alexis’s terror when it happened to her—was to get arrested. That’s a story for another time.

Teach Her a Lesson

What do you do when you’re accused of an unspeakable crime and know you’re innocent, but the evidence against you is so compelling?

After six years as a high school English teacher, Alexis Jordan thinks her biggest problems are a case of burnout and her suspicion that her husband is having an affair.

Then things take a sudden, unexpected turn that threatens to end her marriage, wreck her career, and destroy her life when the student she’s coaching for the school play makes a pass at her and she turns him down. Alexis doesn’t realize that he is obsessed with her and has been building toward this moment for months. Nor that when he’s rejected, he will set out to destroy her with his version of their “affair” which is terrifyingly plausible.

Buy Link: https://encirclepub.com/product/teach-her-a-lesson/

Kate Flora’s fascination with the darker side of human nature began in the Maine attorney general’s office, where she encountered everything from deadbeat dads to child abusers to discriminatory employers. This exposure ignited her curiosity about what drives people to cross moral and legal lines. The author of twenty-eight books including crime fiction, thrillers, true crime, memoir, and nonfiction, Flora’s been a finalist for awards including the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Silver Falchion, and Derringer. She has twice won the Maine Literary Award for crime fiction, taken home the Public Safety Writers Association award for nonfiction, and received lifetime achievement honors from both the New England Crime Bake and the Maine Crime Wave. Her website is: https://www.kateclarkflora.com She blogs with the Maine Crime Writers. https://mainecrimewriters.com

Guest Blogger ~Michelle (M.M.) Chouinard

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It all started in my car, outside a veterinary office during the pandemic.

You remember how it was back then, how you had to wait outside while your beloved pet disappeared into the bowels of the building, not sure which of the two of you was more freaked out about the separation. I knew it was going to be a long visit (it ended up being over four hours, but I digress) so I had a bunch of true-crime podcasts lined up and ready to go. I started with one about The Doodler, a San Francisco serial killer who’s never been caught. As I sank into the story, the references to places in San Francisco rankled my exposed emotional nerve endings—at that point it had been close to a year since I’d been able to go pretty much anywhere, and the mental images set off a strange form of homesickness. “I’m so tired of this,” I blurted out aloud. “When this pandemic is over, I’m going to go to every single place they mention in this podcast. I’m going to do my own little tour, like a serial-killer tour of San Francisco—”

 My brain stutter-stepped over the phrase. Not so much as a concept for an actual walking tour of San Francisco—although that would definitely be awesome and I’d go on that tour in a hot second—but as a concept for a book. How cool would it be to write about someone who gave true-crime tours? Someone who knew of all the most notorious crimes that had taken place in the City, and who used their extensive knowledge of true-crime cases to help solve murders that came their way?

As I waited for my sweet kitty to return to me, my mind raced on down those mental tracks. What sort of person would find themselves making a living giving serial-killer tours? What sort of ‘wound’—life trauma they were still working through—would draw them to such a profession and keep them stuck in that world? The answer came to me in a rush: someone related to a serial killer.

I’d seen more than one interview with parents, siblings, and children of serial killers, and had always wondered what it would be like to live with that legacy. How did people treat you when you were related to a serial killer? Did they assume you must have known what the killer was doing? Did they assume there must be something in you that could do the same thing since you share some portion their genes? And what would that do to your own psyche, to wonder about those shared genes? Was it easy to dismiss any possible similarities you shared with the killer, or did little doubts always linger at the back of your brain about what might be buried deep inside you?

And so Capri Sanzio, granddaughter of the fictional serial killer Overkill Bill, was born. Or rather, she was the granddaughter of the man who’d been convicted of the Overkill Bill murders, but who’d always protested his innocence. Separating her by a generation would allow me to explore how different people in the family had been impacted by Overkill Bill, and how they dealt with that relationship differently. In Capri’s case, since she never really knew her grandfather, she’d spend her life wondering whether he’d been telling the truth or really was a serial killer, and she’d be desperate to get those answers. Except that Capri’s father, the son of Overkill Bill, would forbid anyone from ever mentioning the name Overkill Bill in the house, because of the judgment and bullying he’d had to endure his whole life because of what his father had purportedly done. He just wanted peace, to be able to move on with his own life, and despite Capri’s obsession with knowing the truth, she loved her father dearly and didn’t want to hurt him. So, they’d be caught up in an uncomfortable detente where neither of them really got what they wanted and the generational trauma simmered under both of their surfaces.

Until something came along to boil that trauma right over the top—a series of new murders that copycatted Overkill Bill’s distinctive methods. To paraphrase Michael Connelly, the most interesting mysteries are the ones where the murders involved tap into whatever trauma the protagonist is trying to avoid dealing with; so of course Capri would become a suspect in the investigation of those new murders—I’d make sure of that by making one of the victims her ex mother-in-law—and she’d have to solve both the contemporary murders and the vintage Overkill Bill slaying in order to keep herself out of jail. But, by raking up the past, she’d have to risk fatally damaging her relationship with her father.

And with that, I was off to the races, and I’ve never looked back. Writing Capri has been one of the deepest, most interesting journeys I’ve taken with any of my characters, and I quickly fell in love with her. She’s flawed, she has self-doubts, and nobody would call her choices safe—but she’s passionate about the people she loves and about getting justice for victims who can’t get justice for themselves.

And, in the process, I get the perfect excuse to write up real stops on that awesome serial-killer tour of San Francisco that I promised myself in the vet parking lot that day. 

A Tour to Die For: 

In Michelle Chouinard’s A Tour to Die For, Capri Sanzio is back, giving a true crime tour her guests won’t soon forget. After all, a tour guide who specializes in serial killers knows better than most that San Francisco is a city with killer charm.

Capri Sanzio knows that when you give serial killer walking tours for a living, unexpected situations are more common than San Francisco’s famous fog. So, when one of her guests claims to see a woman being attacked during a tour, Capri remains unphased. The police search the apartment in question and find no evidence of anything amiss, so they chalk it up to a false report from a true crime fanatic looking to be a part of a case. And Capri thinks they might be right, since lately her tours have been attracting even more obsessives than usual—as it turns out, finding the actual serial killer who committed the “Overkill Bill” murders didn’t stop the constant questions about her grandfather’s supposed crimes, it only intensified them.

But Capri would never forgive herself if someone is in trouble and she walks away. Plus, something about the whole situation has every one of Capri’s investigative journalist instincts going haywire—why would someone lie about seeing an attack? So Capri starts to dig, and when her questions lead to a body, she finds herself at the center of another murder investigation.

Buy link: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/a-tour-to-die-for-9781250910011/

Michelle (M.M.) Chouinard is the Mary Higgins Clark Award nominated, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and San Francisco Chronicle bestselling author of The Serial-Killer Guide to San Francisco series, the Detective Jo Fournier thriller series, and the standalone psychological thriller The Vacation. She has a Ph.D in developmental psychology from Stanford University and was one of the founding faculty members of U.C. Merced. She enjoys caffeine in all forms, amateur genealogy, crafting, baking, and Halloween. She’s owned by three cats and a dog, and is held together by caffeine and dry shampoo. 

Website: http://www.mmchouinard.com

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/m_m_chouinard

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

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@m.m.chouinard?lang=en

Guest Blogger ~ DeAnna Drake

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When the Sidekick Steals the Story—and the Readers
by DeAnna Drake

Every mystery writer starts out knowing exactly who the main character is supposed to be.

We spend hours shaping her voice, refining her backstory, and placing her at the center of every twist and turn. She’s the one asking questions, following clues, and ultimately restoring order to a world that’s slipped just slightly out of balance.

What we don’t always expect is who our readers will fall in love with.

In my case, it wasn’t the sleuth. It was the cat.

Not just any cat, of course, but a talking cat.

When I first introduced a feline companion into my cozy mysteries, she was meant to be exactly that: a companion. A touch of charm. A quiet presence curled up nearby while the investigation unfolded. She added warmth, a hint of whimsy, and just enough personality to make the world feel a little kinder.

At least, that was the plan.

That first cat was Aneksi—an immortal talking kitten who once walked the halls of Cleopatra’s court before finding her way into the modern world. With her calm, observant nature and a perspective shaped by centuries of experience, she brought something unexpected to the Purr-fect Relic Cozy Mystery series from the very beginning.

Even then, I didn’t realize how important she would become.

Readers, however, had other ideas.

They wanted to know everything about her, and then some. It started with a few comments. Then emails. Then more emails that all circled back to the same question:

When would we be seeing more of her?

At first, I smiled and took it as a compliment. Of course they liked her. I liked her, too. But she had a role to play, and I thought I understood what that role was.

It turned out readers had a much bigger vision.

As the Purr-fect Relic series grew, so did Aneksi’s role. And then something happened that took both the story—and reader enthusiasm—to another level.

In the third book of the Purr-fect Relic series, Aneksi met her long-lost sister, Kheppy. The moment they shared the page, something shifted. Readers immediately connected with their dynamic—the contrast between Aneksi’s quiet wisdom and Kheppy’s sharper, more outspoken nature—and their enthusiasm for the pair sparked an idea I hadn’t anticipated.

A spin-off series.

Kheppy stepped into a starring role in the Laguna Bay Midlife Witch Cozy Mysteries, bringing her distinct personality—and her strong opinions—into a new setting filled with new characters and new mysteries to unravel.

And it all began with a cat I thought would stay in the background.

What I came to understand through this process was both surprising and, in hindsight, entirely natural.

As authors, we begin with a vision of the story we want to tell. We map out characters, arcs, and outcomes. We know who the hero is supposed to be and how the journey is meant to unfold.

But the best storytelling doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

When I started paying attention—really paying attention—to how readers were responding, something shifted. Their enthusiasm for Aneksi, their curiosity about her world, and their excitement when Kheppy entered the story opened doors I hadn’t even realized existed.

Following that thread didn’t just change the direction of the series. It changed the way I approached my cozy mysteries.

It made the stories richer, more layered, and more connected to the people reading them.

Just as importantly, it made a difference beyond the page. Reader engagement grew, and the connection between story and audience deepened in ways I hadn’t expected.

In the end, I came to understand something simple but powerful: paying attention to those reactions can reveal where a story wants to grow.

Sometimes the characters we think are supporting players are the ones carrying the story’s deepest spark.

I may have started the story, but listening to my readers helped it become something more.

Candy, Cauldrons, and a Corpse (Laguna Bay Midlife Witch Cozy Mystery Book 1)
by DeAnna Drake

A spellbinding Halloween cozy mystery with a talking cat, small-town secrets, and midlife magic.

Boo Boudreaux’s Halloween Boo-tique in quirky Laguna Bay has seen its share of trouble—but nothing like a rival shop stealing her customers and threatening her chance at the Top Haunt Window Contest.

When that rival turns up dead—face-down in a witch’s cauldron—all eyes turn to Boo.

With her reputation on the line, Boo must rely on her instincts, her loyal friends, and her opinionated talking cat to clear her name.

But as she digs deeper, Boo uncovers dark secrets beneath Laguna Bay’s sunny charm, and realizes some ghosts refuse to stay buried.

Can she unmask the killer before she becomes the next target?

BUY LINK: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVH89JXP

DeAnna Drake writes cozy mysteries powered by magical cats, tea, and a touch of whimsy. She is the author of the Purr-fect Relic Cozy Mysteries and the Laguna Bay Midlife Witch Cozy Mysteries, and enjoys sharing bonus scenes and cozy extras with her readers on Substack. https://deannadrake.substack.com

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/DeAnnaDrakeWrites

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/deannadrakeauthor

Guest Blogger ~ MM Desch

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Why I Wrote an LGBTQ (Medical Thriller) Mystery

Every mystery writer knows that moment when life hands you a story, though mine arrived with the bureaucratic charm of a DEA agent on an ordinary afternoon in my Phoenix psychiatric practice. I suppose I should have expected it, having recently qualified to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid addiction treatment. The universe has peculiar timing, particularly when you’re drawn to the psychological complexities of LGBTQ characters navigating medical mysteries. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent years watching people navigate the collision between who they are and who the world expects them to be, and writing LGBTQ characters in medical crises lets me excavate those psychological fault lines in ways that feel necessary, especially these days.

The agent’s unannounced inspection was routine, professional, even cordial once I explained that I hadn’t actually used this newfound prescribing capability yet. But as we sat in my office, surrounded by the everyday detritus of psychiatric practice, tissues strategically placed, diplomas asserting competence, that one plant I somehow hadn’t killed, my writer’s mind began its familiar excavation. What if I had been prescribing buprenorphine? What if some had gone missing? What if someone in this very building was orchestrating a diversion scheme with the methodical precision of a chess master?

That afternoon planted the seed for Tangled Darkness, though it would marinate in my subconscious for years before finally demanding to be written.

The premise crystallized when I combined that DEA visit with my experiences serving on Arizona’s Medical Board committee for impaired physicians. I’d witnessed how addiction could transform brilliant medical minds into ethical contortionists—people trained to heal suddenly finding themselves entangled in webs of their own making. The stories I heard were psychological case studies in how desperate circumstances can rewrite even the most carefully constructed moral code.

But the real catalyst emerged from a pattern I’d observed: the more ethical and scrupulous a physician was, the more vulnerable they became to exploitation. Their conscientiousness could be weaponized against them with surgical precision. This paradox fascinated me, the idea that integrity could become a liability. What if someone filed a false complaint against an innocent psychiatrist? What if that psychiatrist harbored a secret history that made the accusation both plausible and devastating?

Enter Dr. Leslie Schoen, my protagonist. She’s ethical, competent, and living with the transparency that recovery demands—her wife Izzy knows about her journey with alcoholism, and they’ve built their relationship on that foundation of honesty. Which makes the secret she’s now carrying so much more corrosive. When a Medical Board complaint lands alleging that Leslie has stolen opiates from her clinic, she can’t bring herself to tell Izzy, not when her wife is pregnant, not when the accusation feels like a knife twisted in the wound of her recovery. The irony is exquisite in its cruelty: her very status as someone in recovery makes the false allegation both plausible and devastating.

The murder element emerged from a simple question: In a medical practice where controlled substances represent both healing and profit, what happens when someone knows too much? I envisioned Damon Grady, a medical assistant caught between loyalty and desperation—his death would need to be clinically precise yet psychologically revealing, appearing as an overdose while carrying deeper implications about betrayal and survival.

My years in addiction psychiatry taught me that buprenorphine occupies a uniquely precarious position in the opioid crisis. It’s medication that can save lives when used properly, yet because it is another opioid, it’s valuable currency on the street. This duality—medicine as both salvation and commodity—became the engine driving my plot. The very safeguards designed to prevent diversion could be manipulated by someone who understood the system from within.

Portland provided the perfect setting after my relocation from Phoenix. Here was a city where medical marijuana dispensaries operated alongside prestigious medical centers, where progressive healthcare coexisted with the ongoing addiction crises. This backdrop felt like the perfect petri dish for the story I wanted to tell—where cutting-edge addiction treatment coexisted with people dying from overdoses three blocks away.

What made the premise truly compelling was layering in the psychological complexity I’d observed throughout my career. The most dangerous people I’ve encountered in clinical practice aren’t the ones wearing their pathology like a neon sign—they’re the ones whose choices feel both inexplicable and inevitable. I wanted characters who would make readers squirm with recognition, the kind of people you might defend at a dinner party right up until you learn what they’ve done.

The investigation structure allowed me to explore how medical professionals react under scrutiny. Having participated in peer reviews and committee investigations, I understood the unique terror of having your professional reputation questioned. That fear could drive even innocent people to make choices that would haunt them forever.

Writing Tangled Darkness became an exercise in precision—every scenario needed to be plausible enough that medical professionals would nod in recognition yet twisted enough to keep readers guessing. The drug diversion scheme had to be sophisticated enough to temporarily succeed but flawed enough for a determined psychiatrist to unravel. Because even the most brilliant criminals are ultimately human, and humans make mistakes—often the kind that reveal exactly who they are when nobody’s supposed to be watching.

The deeper I dove into the story, the more I realized I wasn’t just writing about prescription drug diversion or murder. I was exploring how systems designed to help us can be corrupted, how past traumas shape present choices, and how the pursuit of truth sometimes requires risking everything we’ve built. It’s a psychological-medical thriller doubling as an LGBTQ mystery. Many would say all of the above.

That cordial DEA agent who visited my Phoenix office had no idea he was launching a debut novel. But then again, the most compelling stories often begin with an ordinary moment—a routine inspection, a casual question. Sometimes the best plots are just waiting there in the everyday machinery of our lives, disguised as paperwork.

TANGLED DARKNESS

When Dr. Leslie Schoen becomes a suspect in her clinic assistant’s murder, she investigates a dangerous web of opiate drug theft while protecting her pregnant wife and confronting her own haunted past. Racing against time to clear her name, she discovers everyone has secrets—and someone in her inner circle is willing to kill to keep them hidden.

Buy link: https://books2read.com/u/bwgvYO

MM Desch brings over three decades as a practicing psychiatrist to her debut psychological thriller, TANGLED DARKNESS (Rowan Prose Publishing). With a passion for telling realistic stories about the veiled realm of psychiatric practice, Desch blends high crime and suspense with her real-world knowledge of addiction medicine. She and her wife live in Portland, Oregon, USA.

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Guest Blogger ~ Nancy Nau Sullivan

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Blanche, Nan, and Traveling Mayhem: The Blanche Murninghan Mystery Series

By Nancy Nau Sullivan

Blanche “Bang” Murninghan is a Florida island girl with a wandering heart. One challenge after another invades her idyllic way of life on the beach, and she’s off to far lands. 

In the second misadventure of the mystery series, Trouble Down Mexico Way, Blanche heads to Mexico City and gets caught up in a murder-for-art scheme. It starts with a visit to the Palacio Nacional and discovery of a “fake” mummy in the exhibit. Though she’s no expert in mummies, the skin looks fried. And it’s wearing a pink plastic barrette in its hair. The burning question, right off the bat, is: Why would a mummy be wearing such a piece of hair-ware? 

Blanche is supposed to be writing travel articles for her hometown newspaper, but the mission is immediately derailed. Her curiosity is like a door that begs to be opened. Once she begins this search for the origin of the “fake” mummy, Mexico City suddenly becomes a maze of twists and turns. The police have questions for her. The mummy has spoken with clues that lead Blanche and the authorities on a chase to unravel an obvious murder and the motive behind it.  

I thought up this mystery during the year I lived in Mexico—totally out of the fabric of imagination. Shortly after I arrived, I visited the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City where were displayed hundreds of ancient Mayan artifacts newly discovered in Mexico and Central America. The animated clay figures played ball (with skulls), the women squatted and cooked, the men hunted, the children leaped around with their smiling dog. A thousand-year-old dog. The exhibit also featured violent, colorful, and respectful rituals of death.

The celebration of Day of the Dead soon followed. Nothing is more colorful than the celebration of death in Mexico. From October 31 to November 6, depending on where you happen to be, the town plazas, homes, and shops are swept up in swaths of color, impromptu dancing and music in native dress, whole families out until midnight celebrating their deceased relatives. Their photos are posted on altars (ofrendas) carpeted with bright yellow and orange marigolds and celosias, and piled next are bread and wine and beer and, of course, tequila and mescal, all arranged on embroidered linen, ropes of flowers and handmade baskets, favorites that marked the family tradition together. Family members sit at the altars in the plazas and talk about their ancestors. It is solemn and raucous and lovely all at once, enough to make a newcomer fall completely in love with the culture.

Trouble Down Mexico Way spins off wildly from the adventure of my first days in Mexico City. But, as in all my mysteries, I celebrate the places I’ve lived, enjoyed, worked as a teacher. I like to add a folk tale in each book, history,  and the details of food and smells and color. I’ve always kept journals to refer to in the writing, but I don’t trust my spotty, unreadable notes—once written while sitting on a horse. I research the settings for months before writing to round out the historical context in each story. It can’t all be about murder. And in Blanche’s case in Mexico, it’s also about love when she meets Emilio Del Sierra, a handsome young doctor with a lot of patience and a talent for the guitar.

Before Mexico, the first book in the series was inspired by Anna Maria Island, Florida, the place I spent years with family. Saving Tuna Street—a finalist at Foreword Reviews for best INDIE mystery—meets environmental disaster and chicanery head on. After Trouble Down Mexico Way, Blanche goes to Vietnam, Ireland, and Argentina in a succession of books where she survives hair-raising capers. She always returns to her cabin on the beach where she manages to keep her feet on the ground. Well, sand. When curiosity comes knocking, she’s ready—with a little help from her friends—for more mayhem and misadventure.

Trouble Down Mexico Way

Trouble Down Mexico Way is the second stand-alone mystery in the Blanche Murninghan Mysteries.

Blanche “Bang” Murninghan is a part-time journalist with a penchant for walking the beach — and walking into trouble. In Saving Tuna Street, first in the cozy mystery series, she fends off developers and drug dealers in an attempt to save her beloved Santa Maria Island. But Blanche has feet of sand and a love of travel. The adventure continues in Trouble Down Mexico Way with a “fake” mummy and murder; in Vietnam Mission Improbable: Vietnam, Blanche helps a friend find her mother in that beautiful country. For the fourth misadventure, A Deathly Irish Secret, Blanche inherits a castle and more than she bargained for—a murder charge. She pulls out of that fracas, too. Lastly, she travels to Argentina with handsome hunk Emilio Del Sierra to save his relatives from Nazis on the pampa. Wherever she goes, she always returns to her cabin, the white sand and sunsets, and to her wonderful quirky family on the little Florida Gulf island. 

Link to book on amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Mexico-Blanche-Murninghan-Mystery/dp/1611533759

Link to book on Barnes & Noble

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/trouble-down-mexico-way-nancy-nau-sullivan-ms/1137370750

Link to Kobo

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/trouble-down-mexico-way

Kirkus Reviews says: “Blanche alone puts the bang in the book, and her debut should make readers sit up and notice. A welcome newcomer to the South Florida genre.”

A former newspaper journalist—and, presently, traveler–Nancy Nau Sullivan grew up in the Midwest but often stayed on Anna Maria Island, Florida. The setting inspired Saving Tuna Street, first in the Blanche Murninghan mystery series; the fifth installment, Hot Tango in Argentina, launched in April. Nancy’s memoir, The Last Cadillac, received two Eric Hoffer awards, and her novel, The Boys of Alpha Block, is based on her teaching at a boys’ prison. She’s taught in Argentina and Mexico and now writes and teaches part-time near the beautiful beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. Find Nancy at www.nancynausullivan.com.

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Day of the Dead photo from: www.freepik.com