Category: Guest Blogger

Guest Blogger ~ Millicent Eidson

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

Microscopic microbes that kill—those have been my life’s blood for forty years as a veterinary epidemiologist with state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now focused on communicating public health through creative writing, I’ve published ten shorter works and the first novel of my alphabetical series, “Anthracis: A Microbial Mystery.”

Epidemiologists used to joke that everyone thought we were skin doctors. Now in the age of COVID, much of the public is sick to death of public health pronouncements. But there are enough people who are fascinated by the science and inside story of how diseases are routed out and conquered. The West Wing immersed us in the personal and professional challenges for public servants in the White House. The MayaVerse provides a backstage pass to veterinarians in public rather than private practice.

Medical thrillers usually have physician pathologists as the heroes, but medical detectives can include veterinarians specializing in zoonoses, diseases transmitted from animals. “One Health” is the concept that humans, other species, and the environment are intricately intertwined. Ignoring one part places the others at peril.

The MayaVerse is the world of Dr. Maya Maguire, a young veterinary epidemiologist starting her first assignment as part of the CDC shock troops called Epidemic Intelligence Service Officers. I had the honor of beginning my own public health career as an EIS Officer, and my creative writing is inspired by my mentors, peers, and successors. Maya is partially modeled on my daughter, adopted as an infant from China. She’s been a close collaborator at creating the story of a ‘fish out of water’ growing up Asian in the American Southwest.

The author Edward Abbey said that our definition of beauty is formed by the land imprinting our brains during childhood. I bless my good fortune for growing up in Arizona. No place on earth is more spectacular to me than the Sonoran desert.

With climate change scorching the earth and increasing asthma-inducing wildfires, my retirement home is along the gorgeous shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont. However, the Southwest still has my soul and is the initial setting for the MayaVerse. In the second novel “Borrelia” to be published June, 2022, Maya’s investigations into this squiggly spirochete will take her to Europe, and the fifteen years of her life until “Zika” will take us all on a worldwide adventure.

Shorter works, many available for free at HOME (drmayamaguire.com), provide some prequels and side stories for lively secondary characters. Those who sign up for my Reader list will be emailed the e-book and pdf versions of my award-winning short play “Monuments,” which dramatizes a fictional encounter in Santa Fe’s Plaza inspired by real-life controversy over its phallic monument.

 “Anthracis” is published wide so available through bookstores, libraries, and multiple online sources including Amazon. Links for the e-book, paperback, hardcover, and large print versions are available at ANTHRACIS (drmayamaguire.com). Please join me on this grand adventure through the microbial world!

Anthracis: A Microbial Mystery

In the hottest summer on record, the spectacular southwestern desert is alive with Bacillus anthracis spores. Maya Maguire, new veterinarian with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, battles the largest anthrax outbreak in U.S. history.

Despite lingering trauma from a childhood accident, Maya’s confidence builds with a supportive team of passionate physician Manolo Miranda and enigmatic veterinarian Dave Schwartz.

But Homeland Security and the FBI are suspicious when spores match Dave’s home Texas Triangle of Death. If Maya can’t find the source, thousands may perish. Anthracis takes us to the front lines with scientists betting their lives on the investigation outcome.

Buy Links: https://drmayamaguire.com/anthracis

MILLICENT EIDSON is the author of the alphabetical Maya Maguire microbial mystery series. The MayaVerse at https://drmayamaguire.com includes prequels, “El Chinche” in Danse Macabre and “What’s Within” in Fiction on the Web, and a side story, “Pérdida” in El Portal Literary Journal. Author awards include Best Play in Synkroniciti and Honorable Mention from the Arizona Mystery Writers.

Dr. Eidson’s work as a public health veterinarian and epidemiologist began with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and continued at the New Mexico and New York state health departments. She is a public health faculty member at the University at Albany and the University of Vermont.

Millicent discusses her first novel “Anthracis: A Microbial Mystery” at Microbial Mystery Author Dr Millicent Eidson on Big Blend Radio – YouTube.

She can be found on Twitter, @EidsonMillicent, and Instagram, @drmayamaguire.

Guest Blogger ~ C L Bee

~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

THE GHOSTLY AND PARADISE TAXI – Book 1 in the 3 book series The Ghostly And Paradise Taxi is a mystery with no predictability, essentially a book for our time when no one knows whether they will survive another day.

From the first chapter with the heading “Remembrances of time past and present” the mystery of this cross genre Kindle eBook begins.  The unnamed  “he and she” are having a conversation, but I drop a few clues the reader can pick up when “she” indicates that finally, she’s written the first paragraph of the book she has always wanted to write.  And “he” asks whether she will use her pseudonym. Another clue for the reader to pick up comes when she asks him to read the first paragraph.  And the title of “her” book is the same as the title of this book.

The process of writing an intriguing mystery involves knowing how to plot a step by step  to parts of the puzzle.  For my book to have its twists and turns, early on in the writing, I keep a time line file in my head until I get the sense of how to move the plot and characters toward the denouement.  Sometimes I use a time line that is part of the chapter heading.  I want flawed characters to write about, because I am offering the reader a view of humanity, and as we know, no one is perfect.  In writing the book I’d like to read, I have to plot a way to move my characters toward a life changing experience, in other words, their epiphany, but some of us never learn, and those are the characters I want to receive a punishment apropos to their malicious intent. 

I know readers will enjoy solving my mystery along with me when I also wonder what happens next.  For me, writing is like tending the grapes in a vineyard.  To make certain my words are conveying the story, it’s like making fine wine, I know my story ends when all the pieces complete the puzzle, then I’m ready to send my manuscript to my publisher.   For years I wrote for editors who edited writers to “put a coat of polish” on the contents of their magazine or newspaper.  I wrote a popular monthly column entitled “Travel Agent Spotlight” for a travel industry magazine, but for the two years I had written the column, I couldn’t find one word that I wrote.  I finally told the Editor that I would send her a summary.  She told me to keep handing in my copy as usual, but I had an idea for a book, and I quit. 

Now, I’d like you to read my book, here is the Amazon Kindle url: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PYL8NDT?asin=B09PYL8NDT&revisionId=d39fd049&format=1&depth=1

As a bonus for the readers of Ladies of Mystery’s blog, you can read this book for free. 

My publisher is Kindle exclusive, and  Daccord Press plans to offer a free Kindle ebook promotion, the website is: 

https://www.daccordpress.com/

Use the link on the right of the Daccord Press website for the email contact, but if you are reading this blog, here it is:  mailto:daccordpress@yahoo.com  Ask to be on the email list and leave your email contact.  Daccord Press will send out an email to you with the “day” or “days” you can take advantage of this offer, all you have to do is put the url of the book:  

Claim your free Kindle ebook, if you don’t have a Kindle, download to your computer.

CL Bee is a former freelance writer who worked overseas and was based in Paris, France. Now she’s back in the USA and writing the fiction she didn’t publish during those years when she was freelancing.  CL Bee is currently at work on her first eBook, The Ghostly and Paradise Taxi Book 1, in the series The Ghostly and Paradise Taxi, published by Daccord Press, an indie small press.

Guest Blogger ~ Melissa Yi

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

War and Drink by Melissa Yi

“I could make Hope a custom gin.” —Nathalie Gamache, artisan distiller and board-certified gynecologist

Nathalie’s offer to create a gin for my main character, Dr. Hope Sze, delighted me. I’m an emergency doctor myself, and when we met online through a physician group, I felt that Nathalie understands Hope’s courage and fears as a resident doctor who solves crimes.

In honour of a custom gin, though, I’d have to focus on alcohol in my next medical thriller. And I hardly drink!

However, I was soon fascinated by the history of booze and crime. I began reading Frenchie, the story of a Quebec man who joined Al Capone’s gang in Chicago for 8 years.

I discovered that Montreal, the main site of my Hope Sze series, was a vacation magnet during Prohibition, as Americans flowed north for “giggle water” (liquor), jazz, and “pro skirts” (prostitutes in 1920’s slang). Unfortunately, buildings from the era were destroyed to make way for new construction.

Luckily, la Maison de Bootlegger is still standing in Charlevoix, Quebec. This building was a speakeasy, a place where they illegally sold alcohol, so you had to “speak easy,” or softly, about its location. Now it’s a restaurant with a nightly rock and roll show. Make your dinner reservations early so you can get the tour. I enjoyed tiptoeing into hidden rooms, observing hidden booze shelves, and creeping through a secret passageway in Elvis Presley’s footsteps.

Seriously, Elvis was here. He even left his signature!

Much further east, at the Age of Sail Museum in Nova Scotia, I noted the Family Temperance Pledge in their Bible and realized that of course the Maritime provinces, right on the sea, would sail liquor to the U.S. I read later that the income was a boon to Nova Scotia fishermen, suffering from a regional recession in the 1920’s. But as the Temperance movement pointed out, that money came at a social cost: alcoholics beat their families and spent their money on drink instead of food.

So there was no shortage of writing inspiration for me, both in terms of liquor and of crime. But how could I weave it all together in my novel, White Lightning? Especially when I took a side journey researching 19th century England, how could I draw it all together into a thriller featuring my thoroughly 21st century heroine, Hope Sze?

The solution: more research.

Hope visits the Rumrunner’s Rest, a Prohibition inn inspired by la Maison de Bootlegger, but in Windsor, where 75 percent of alcohol flowed across the Detroit River onto U.S. soil. To maximize the chaos, Hope also has to navigate a con filled with people dressed up like fictional villains from the The Wicked Witch of the West to Children of the Corn.

I literally played with the historical elements: I wrote the 19th Century portion first as a play called “The Climbing Boy” in a playwriting class at George Brown College, which was turned into a Lego stop action movie at the digital Winnipeg Fringe. I folded “The Climbing Boy” into White Lightning thanks to some inspiration from author Simone St. James.

In other words, in White Lightning, I tried to capture the glamour as well as the murder and treachery of Prohibition.

As William Faulkner pointed out, “War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”

So let’s raise a glass and grab a book as we turn the page on a new year!

White Lightning

Hope Sze Medical Mystery Book 9

Prohibition and Predators. 

Hope Sze escapes for a romantic weekend away at the Rumrunner’s Rest, a Roaring Twenties inn once celebrated both for Prohibition’s best alcohol and the smoothest jazz bands north of the Detroit River.

Then a convention of fictional villains overrun the tavern, her friend glimpses a ghost, and Hope uncovers a grisly surprise in the fireplace that may be related to Al Capone.

Tonight, unless Hope unravels a century’s worth of clues, death will collect several more lives. Including the one she holds most dear.

Buy links: https://windtreepress.com/portfolio/white-lightning/

Direct links: https://books2read.com/whitelightningyi

amazon.com short https://amzn.to/3n5kuIl

Melissa Yi, also known as Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes, studied emergency medicine at McGill University in Montreal. She was so shocked by the patients crammed into the waiting area, and the examining rooms without running water, that she began to contemplate murder. And so she created Dr. Hope Sze, the resident who could save lives and fight crime.  Her most recent crime novel, White Lightning, is already up for many awards. She appeared on CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning and recently had so many print interviews that an addiction services counsellor said, “I see you in the newspaper more often than I see you in the emergency room.”

Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes applied to medical school mostly because she wanted to save lives, but also because she’s nosy. Medicine is a fascinating and frustrating window into other people’s lives. She shares her sometimes painful, occasionally hilarious stories in The Medical Post, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and in her essay collections The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World, FIfty Shades of Grey’s Anatomy, and Broken Bones.

Website: http://www.melissayuaninnes.com/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/dr_sassy

Facebook: 

https://www.facebook.com/MelissaYiYuanInnes/

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/melissa-yi

Goodreads: goodreads.com/author/show/4600856.Melissa_Yuan_Innes

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MelissaYuanInnes

Instagram: https://instagram.com/melissa.yuaninnes

Author central: amazon.com/author/myi

Pinterest: https://pinterest.com/melissayi_

TikTok: @myi_books

Guest Blogger ~ Julie Weston

~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

The Nellie Burns and Moonshine Mystery series began one full moon night. My husband and I had visited Galena Lodge in south central Idaho, near where we live, for a full moon dinner. On our way back down from this mountain pass between the Boulder Mountains and the Sawtooth Mountains, we stopped at Last Chance Ranch. My husband is a photographer and he longed to take a photograph of this ranch in the moonlight and snow. No lights were lit, so we climbed through the fence, he carrying his large format camera, tripod, and other camera gear. As he set up the camera to take the photograph, I watched the house and decided there could be a dead body in there. And lo, my Moon series of books began.

My protagonist is a young woman photographer who comes west from Chicago in the early 1920s. She yearns to be an artistic landscape photographer. Photographing Moonshadows (the name of the first book in the series) is high on her list. In addition to my husband, I have a line of photographers in my family on my maternal side, who came first to Idaho in the 1870s on their way to Oregon via wagon train. They stopped in Boise and never left Idaho. My grandmother and mother were born there, and I grew up in North Idaho in a mining town. The photographers in my family were named Burns. In early North Idaho, a woman photographer arrived from Chicago. Her name was Nellie Stockbridge. And lo, I had my first character: Nellie Burns.

Author in a mine near where she grew up.

Other characters turned up almost immediately: Rosy Kipling, a retired miner from Hailey (our hometown now); Charlie Asteguigoiri, the Basque sheriff for the county; Goldie Bock, the owner of a rooming house in Ketchum; a Chinese mother and son; a sheep rancher, and other persons of interest. Nellie and her photographs help solve the mystery of the dead man at the ranch, along with Moonshine, a black Labrador dog, that Nellie adopts. He becomes her constant companion. And lo, I have a sidekick.

The second and third books in the series live in Idaho—in the Stanley Basin (Basque Moon) and in Craters of the Moon (Moonscape). Each time the landscapes become characters as well, partly because of my heritage and partly because I live here after having practiced law in Seattle for many years. My books have each won honors, including Basque Moon, which was a WILLA winner in historical fiction.

My latest book, MINERS’ MOON, coming out in December, 2021, grew out of my mining town of Kellogg. I descended the mines a while ago, and all I did and learned then became the basis for this newest book. Rosy, Charlie, and Nell get tangled up in two investigations: a mine explosion where several miners are killed, and bootlegging the federal revenuers seek to stop.

Idaho has so many wonderful and strange places and history, I see no end to my Nellie Burns and Moonshine series.

Miner’s Moon

Crime photographer Nellie Burns and Basque Sheriff Charlie Asteguigoiri travel from central to northern Idaho to investigate bootlegging and possible complicit town officials. A suspicious mine explosion pulls them into a second investigation. Retired miner Rosy Kipling joins them, bringing Nell’s black Lab Moonshine.

While Charlie roams the backcountry in search of illegal stills, Nell questions survivors of the explosion and a madam. Rosy descends the principal mine to listen and pry. The two investigations lead all three to discover secrets and lies—from “soda drink” parlors, local brothels, worker hints deep in the mine shafts—that have deadly consequences. Predictably, Nellie gets in over her head. A rock burst seals off Charlie and Rosy in a mine collapse. Moonshine plays an instrumental role, and Nellie tries to rise to the occasion in spite of her debilitating fear. All four long to return to their high desert home, but cannot until they lay bare the crimes before their luck runs out.

Buy Links:

Indiebound:  https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781432888046

Amazon:   https://www.amazon.com/Miners-Nellie-Burns-Moonshine-Mystery/dp/1432888048/ 

Five Star Publishing:  gale.orders@cengage.com

Julie Weston’s publications include mysteries set in Idaho in the 1920s, a memoir of place about Kellogg, Idaho, where she grew up; and a coffee table book with her photographer husband, Gerry Morrison. Essays and Stories have appeared in a variety of journals, including The Threepenny Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, IDAHO magazine and others.

Awards for Weston include the WILLA Award for Historical Fiction, Story Circle Finalist award for Moonshadows, Foreword Bronze Award for Mystery and Honorable Mention for her memoir in the 2009 Idaho Book of the Year Award, among others.

Social Media:

Facebook: Julie Weston and JulieWestonAuthor

Instagram: westmorjw

Email: westmorjw@aol.com, juliewweston@gmail.com

www.julieweston.com

www.bigwoodbooks.com

Guest Blogger ~ Thonie Hevron

~ patyjag ~ 6 Comments

Be Careful What You Wish For
I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a pencil. I remember getting a 5th grade class assignment during a mythology segment. We were to write a myth. I wrote a story, “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” All I remember now is the main character was up a tree in a jungle, hiding from a leopard prowling around beneath him. The character had a bucket of black paint and was shaking with fear, so much that he dribbled paint on the animal. I got an A+.

Years later, I still wrote but rarely completed a work of fiction. I’d written procedural manuals for work. I’d spent two decades in law enforcement in Northern California, mostly Sonoma County. By 1994, my husband and I were planning our retirement—still years away, in the Eastern Sierras. We were tired of the traffic and congestion of the Bay Area and wanted a more peaceful setting. When my firefighter husband suffered a career-ending injury, we stepped up plans to retire. Until I qualified to retire, I accepted a job as a dispatcher at a small police department. In less than a year in the Sierras I found myself so homesick that even the catastrophic floods of 1996-97 in my old neighborhood made me want to be back in Sonoma County. I’d worked three previous floods and missed helping during the disasters.

One night on a quiet graveyard shift, seeking a bit of consolation, I scratched out a description of a Russian River (Sonoma County) home I saw in a magazine. The seed of a story germinated, and I wrote the story. That tale became By Force or Fear, the Nick and Meredith Mysteries, about a Sheriff’s detective Meredith Ryan (and her partner Nick Reyes) stalked by an influential judge.

Since my husband and I moved back in 2004, I’ve written and published a total of four books—all set mainly in Sonoma County. If I dare simplify my goal for writing these stories, it’s to humanize the people behind the badge. By the time I retired, I had thirty-five years of service as a civilian law enforcement employee. I worked as a Parking Enforcement Officer (yes, meter maid), Dispatcher, Records Supervisor and Community Service Officer. I’d known scores of police officers, male and female, sheriff’s deputies, FBI, ATF and other alphabet soup agencies. My observations over the years varied with the faces that I saw—some decent, dedicated officials who wanted to make a positive difference in people’s lives. Others not so much, but the vast majority came to work every day with commitment. I wanted to write about them and do my part to discourage the “Die Hard” stereotype. Thus, Nick and Meredith were born.

I know I’d have picked up a pencil sooner or later in my life. But I’m darn certain that homesickness played a huge part in jump-starting my writing. Be careful what you wish for—you might get something entirely different and better!

In this fast-paced story, sheriff’s detective Meredith Ryan surprises an intruder leaning over her baby’s crib in the middle of the night. Unable to catch him, she launches a dangerous journey to protect her family. The death of her father the next day leads her to look into his past where she discovers her father was involved in a robbery and homicide many years ago. Working through a web of deceit and mystery, she discovers the robbery and homicide are connected to the mysterious man in her nursery. With Nick, her husband, they unravel her father’s involvement in the robbery/homicide. The loot from the robbery has been long sought by competing crime rivals who are trying to use her family as bargaining chips. Meredith and Nick must find the truth in the next 24 hours before the criminals close in on her family.

Buy links: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08ZJW2YRR

Thonie Hevron’s law enforcement experience is the inspiration for suspense novels based on the lives behind the badge. A Sonoma County resident for over thirty years, she lives in the historic Northern California Town of Petaluma with her husband and two dogs and a cat. Dressage and travel are her real-life passions outside of family and writing.

Her four thrillers, By Force or Fear, Intent to Hold, With Malice Aforethought and newly released Felony Murder Rule are award winners at the Public Safety Writers Association Writers (PSWA) Writers Contest in 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2021. All books are available in bookstores and on Amazon.com.

Website: www.thoniehevron.com

Facebook: ThonieHevronAuthor page