Category: Guest Blogger

Guest Blogger ~ Mike Nemeth

~ patyjag

Why Does a Nice boy from Wisconsin Write Murder Mysteries?

The simple answer is: I grew up reading detective stories, from John D. MacDonald to Ross Macdonald to Eric Ambler. I admired the intricate plotting that kept me guessing as their stories unfolded. Later, I discovered Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, a prolific writer of tales about ex-cons and petty thieves looking to strike it rich with their next caper and usually failing miserably. You may know Dutch by the many movie adaptations of his novels including, Be Cool, Get Shorty, Fire in the Hole, Killshot, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, 3:10 to Yuma, Cat Chaser, 52 Pickup, Hombre, The Big Bounce, Stick, Mr. Majestyk, and Freaky Deaky. As much as I enjoyed Dutch’s stories, I was influenced most by his cinematic style. He never got in the way of his characters and let them tell their stories through dialog and action scenes.

The second reason I write murder mysteries is that the genre allows the writer to fold in subplots from other genres that become clues in the solution to the murder. In most of my novels an unexpected love story comes from out of nowhere and smacks the protagonist upside the head, the sort of romance that causes the protagonist to wake up and pay attention. Such is the case in The Two Lives of Eddie Kovacs. Eddie, a grieving widower, goes undercover to solve suspicious deaths at a luxury condo complex and runs into Madeleine, a wealthy widow who awakens long-dormant feelings in Eddie but is also the key to the mystery. She becomes the focal point for Eddie’s decisions about the case, his desire for redemption, and his future.

My third reason for writing murder mysteries is that a good story must contain high stakes for the protagonist and few stakes are higher or more enticing than murder. And two murders are better than one. In The Two Lives of Eddie Kovacs, the unsolved murder of Eddie’s investigative partner during his stint in the Army has haunted him for decades. Eddie has always wondered if he had inadvertently set his partner up for the crime. When another murder occurs at the condo complex during his surreptitious investigation, Eddie begins to connect the dots and sees the truth.

And finally, the murder mystery genre allows for an underlying theme that isn’t preachy and doesn’t detract from the pleasure of solving a complicated crime. In The Two Lives of Eddie Kovacs, the solution to the murders calls into question the boundary between personal freedom and the encroachment of the law. This question is a dilemma for Eddie as he grapples with love, his integrity as a lawman, and his desire for redemption.

Murder mysteries are such fun!

Propelled by two murder cases, separated by decades, The Two Lives of Eddie Kovacs is, at its heart, a provocative and suspenseful love story that explores the unbreakable connection between the past and the present, and the boundary between personal freedom and the law.

Eddie Kovacs is tormented by his experience in Vietnam when he derailed an illegal CIA plot, and deflated over his forced retirement as a DA’s investigator. When the sheriff of Chatham County, Georgia offers him an undercover assignment, Eddie jumps at the chance to end his career in a blaze of glory. His assignment is to solve the riddle of suspicious deaths at a luxury condo complex on Tybee Island before the DEA exposes the scandal that would dash the sheriff’s political ambitions.

Eddie has spent his life looking over his shoulder for the vengeful CIA agents who have tirelessly pursued him. As he investigates the deaths, he discovers that a former agent has remained vigilant for fifty years and is in the building, stalking Eddie. To make matters worse, Eddie is a grieving widower irresistibly drawn to a resident named Madeleine, and his infatuation feels like infidelity, not to mention a betrayal of his badge. In a race with the DEA and hunted by the CIA, Eddie lays a trap for his suspect and discovers Madeleine’s darkest secret—a secret that forces Eddie to choose between love and redemption.

The Two Lives of Eddie Kovacs can be found on Amazon at amzn.to/3CVzMY4 (that’s Bit.Ly short form link).

It is also in the Ingram system and can be ordered at any bookstore or online from Ingram. 

Mike Nemeth is the author of Defiled, which became an Amazon bestseller, The Undiscovered Country, which won the Beverly Hills Book Award for Southern Fiction and the Augusta Literary Festival’s Frank Yerby Award for Fiction, and Parker’s Choice, which has won a Firebird Award for Thrillers, and American Fiction Awards for Romantic Mystery and Diverse & Multicultural Mystery. Creative Loafing named Mike Atlanta’s Best Local Author for 2018.

The recurring theme of Mike’s novels is that morality and legality are two different things. The stories are romances tucked inside mysteries.

https://mikenemethauthor.com/

Guest Blogger ~ Claudia Riess

~ patyjag ~ 9 Comments

Choosing to write an art history mystery series came relatively late in my career, but the seed was planted very early in childhood, and was as much a part of the natural course of events as learning to read and being read to—Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, Alice in Wonderland—and being told laugh-out-loud stories, ad-libbed by my father, about a little girl named Jeanie, clearly my alias, and her adventures with her anonymous daddy, clearly my own.  And like bedtime stories, my introduction to art—my association with art—was, and is, bound up with family, adventure, safe harbor. 

It began with outings to museums.  We lived in Brooklyn, and a couple of the great ones were a short subway ride away.  The Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick, the Brooklyn Museum.  Typically, these outings were followed by take-out Chinese food and talks around the kitchen table about what we had seen that day.  We talked about the different ways painters saw the world; debated about which perspective better described the real world—and what the real world really was.  Color and light?  Shape and dimension?  And what about imagination? Created imagery.  Distorted reality.  Ideas about the relative nature of beauty and truth were woven into these conversations, and all the while we were savoring our chicken chow mein and fried rice with lobster sauce.

It stands to reason that my idea of the art world was a romanticized one, but by the time I’d written a few rom-com-like novels and murder mysteries and was considering writing an art suspense novel, I’d learned a lot more about its seamier side.  How the price of art is virtually uncontrolled, dependent on the whims of collectors and dealers and the transient tastes and fads of the times.  How art is ransomed, forged, used to launder money, stolen then sold on the black market.  In short, that the art world is where the most sublime of human instincts collide with its basest.  What a great amalgam for fiction!

I pitched the idea of my writing an art suspense novel to my brother, Jonathan, an art history professor at the University of Cincinnati, and he off-handedly suggested, “What about finding a lost study of Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina?”  As he enlarged on the subject, a conversation I’d had years ago popped into mind.  It was my first week at Vassar College, and I was out of my social depth, trying to hold my own with one of my classmates, a seasoned debutant.  I suppose the incident remained etched in memory because our life experiences were so disparate.  Especially vivid was the story of how her father’s sugar plantation in Cuba had been confiscated by Fidel Castro’s government.  It was this historical nugget that instantly dovetailed with my brother’s suggestion.  In that moment, the American sugar plantation owner became an art collector, and as he and a freshly materialized plantation manager and a lovely cook’s assistant hid out in a basement storeroom, the art collection was being hauled off by a band of wannabe Castro rebels looking to raise money to buy arms.

The imagekicked off the prologue to Stolen Light, Book 1 of my art history mystery series.  I’m a stickler for historical accuracy, and as a rule I take off from it, filling the gap with events that conform to its character, and therefore might have been.  Then, in a butterfly-effect maneuver, I fast-forward to the present and drop a pair of resourceful lovers into the challenging set of circumstances that has developed—multiple murders included—and see if the sleuthing duo can sort it out. 

For example, the impetus for Knight Light, Book 3 in the series, came from two quotes.  From the painter Marcel Duchamp: “Not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists.”  From World Chess Champion, Alexander Alekhine: “Chess for me is not a game, but an art.”  From there, I discovered that the two had actually been team-mates on the French chess team in the 1933 Chess Olympiad.  And that furthermore, Alekhine’s death in 1946 has been considered a cold case to this day.  My fiction, integrated with the facts, took off from there.

Dying for Monet, Book 5 and the most recent in the series, is structured with the same criteria, except this time a crucial plot-twisting component hog-ties me to a bare-boned blurb.  I’ve never felt more in danger of giving away the spoiler.  I’m okay discussing Claude Monet and the Impressionists; Paul Ruand-Durell, the renowned art dealer based in Paris, carrying on in London during the Franco-Prussian War; the art museums in London; the disappearance of a still life painting; a brutal murder.  Even the End Notes, where I mention books that were part of the research phase, omits a critical one whose title would blow it.  Luckily, I’ve got my two sleuthing protagonists, Erika and Harrison, about whose ever-evolving love story I could go on forever.

Book 6, the last in the series, is in the works.  Its plot is powered by the subject of artificial intelligence, boon and curse of the art world, depending on your definition of art or stake in its profits.  My fascination was doubly sparked by an episode of CNN’s “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper,” which focused on the Dead End Gallery in Amsterdam, the world’s first art gallery dealing solely in art generated by AI, and the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of Harold Cohen’s AARON, the world’s first AI program for art-making. These experiences raised questions regarding the genesis of inspiration, the act of creation, and the boundaries of ownership, all of which are potential harbingers of conflict, including the most deadly.

Dying for Monet

A gala evening auction at Laszlo’s, an upstart auction house in New York City, is in progress.  Without notice, a much sought-after Impressionist painting is withdrawn from the block.  Moments later, its broker is found dead at the foot of an imposing statue in Laszlo’s courtyard.

Amateur sleuths Erika Shawn, art magazine editor, and Harrison Wheatley, art history professor, are once again drawn into an investigation involving an art-related homicide, this time sharing an unnerving coincidence with violent crimes occurring abroad.

As Harrison searches for clues in the archives at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Erika is on a stakeout in Brooklyn Heights gathering information on the owner of the hijacked still life.  After Harrison experiences a disastrous encounter in London, he returns home, where he and Erika, along with a few of their usual cohorts, find themselves ever more deeply at odds with the movers and shakers on the dark side of fine arts commerce.

https://www.amazon.com/Dying-Monet-Art-History-Mystery/dp/1685126545

Claudia Riess is an award-winning author who has worked in the editorial departments of The New Yorker and Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and has edited several art history monographs.  Stolen Light, the first book in her art history mystery series, was chosen by Vassar’s Latin American history professor for distribution to the college’s people-to-people trips to Cuba.  To Kingdom Come, the fourth, will be added to the syllabus of a survey course on West and Central African Art at a prominent Midwestern university.  Claudia has written articles for Mystery Readers Journal, Women’s National Book Association, the Sisters in Crime Bloodletter, and Mystery Scene magazine.  She has been featured on a variety of podcasts, blogs and Zoom events.

claudiariessbooks.com.

https://www.facebook.com/ClaudiaRiessBooks

Guest Blogger ~ M.E. Proctor

~ patyjag ~ 6 Comments

The Detective Comes Calling

When I start working on a short story I never know much about the characters. I might have a place in mind—a bar on a beach, a path in the forest, an iced-over parking lot—or a line of text I woke up with, like this one that I used recently, curious to see where it would take me: Innocence doesn’t do it for me. Spoiler alert: somebody dies.

Most of my pieces unspool that way. Characters walk on stage, I get to know them, and things happen. Or nothing happens and the story goes asleep on my laptop, for a while or forever. That loose process works well for me, for short fiction.

A book is a very different animal.

If you write yourself in a corner in a short story the damage is minimal. You can shelve the draft, revisit it later and either find a solution or scrap it entirely. It’s disappointing but at worst you’ve only lost a few weeks. On the other hand, if you’re fifty thousand words into a book and hit a wall or run out of juice, it really hurts. The investment in time and the emotional commitment are substantial. Of course you can try to rescue the project. As Chandler said: In doubt, send in a guy with a gun. Sometimes it works, other times … Raise your hand if like me you’ve read books that feel like they’re limping to the finish line.

The pitfalls of winging it were very much in the back of my mind when I decided to sink my teeth into a crime novel. The problem is that I’m not a plotter. Detailing every beat of a story before sitting down to write it feels too much like a straitjacket. It sucks all the fun out of the project. Why bother to write it if I know everything, no surprises, from the get go? Still, I wanted to be better organized than usual. Start with an idea and develop a rough outline that could go the distance.

It was an excellent resolution.

It didn’t happen.

Because Declan Shaw threw me for a spin.

I was on the back porch, engaged in the creative exercise known as woolgathering, when a name popped into my head. Out of nowhere. Insistent. I’d never written anything, book or short story, that used the name of a character as a prompt. I was intrigued. Who the hell was this guy pitching a tent in my subconscious?

Names aren’t neutral. In life, we’re passive recipients—a gift from our parents. In fiction, the writers are in control. They can play with the mental images a name creates (Dickens mastered it). What does the name suggest about the character’s past, family, or cultural background? Smith evokes 1984 or The Matrix, Cadogan-Smith comes with horses and country estates, Smith-Underfoot might be a familyliving in Hobbiton.

Declan Shaw. What does it bring to mind? Irish heritage. He probably drinks whiskey and can tell a tale. Yes, I know, it’s a cliché. But seriously, with a name like that, what does he do for a living? I love antiheroes but I didn’t feel like spending an entire book with a hitman, Ken Follett did it so well in The Day of the Jackal, and, more recently, Rob Hart in Assassins Anonymous. So what? Reporter. I could see the byline, front page, above the fold. Then an insidious voice in my head whispered: Can you build a series around a journalist, how many cases can he cover, without stretching credibility? A series? The inner voice had to be kidding, there was no book #1 yet. It was ludicrous. But, but … I could smell the possibilities.

And that‘s how, right there, on my porch, Declan Shaw became a private detective.

The first scene I wrote had nothing to do with investigating. I pictured him as an eleven-year-old boy, standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs, looking up at his intimidating grandmother. She was a black-clad villain straight out of a comic book. I imagined the events that brought the kid to her place and the disastrous consequences that ensued. Readers won’t find any of that in Love You Till Tuesday, the first book in the series. Declan’s back story is in my back pocket and won’t come out until the time is right.

I forgot my resolution to outline and gave myself permission to improvise. The plan was to learn who my character was by writing him. It took a lot longer than I expected, three years, three manuscripts, a thousand pages, multiple false starts. None of that work made it into the book, but the effort was worth it. I knew Declan inside out. We were both ready to tackle Love You Till Tuesday. In some sort of orderly fashion.

My plot document looked like the output from a chaotic brainstorming session, a jumble of character sketches, a rough timeline, cryptic notes, dead ends and side stories. It was an unstructured and messy pseudo synopsis, with plenty of freedom between the lines to change almost everything. As I typed away, things changed indeed, and changed again after input from editors and beta readers, cuts and tightening up, but the original bones of the story remained. Until finally Declan Shaw made his official debut with his cigarillos, his cowboy boots, his good and flawed impulses, and his ironic take on the world. He’s good company. I’m keeping him.

Love You Till Tuesday – A Declan Shaw Mystery

The murder of jazz singer April Easton makes no sense, and yet she appears to have been targeted. Who ordered the hit and why? Steve Robledo, the Houston cop in charge of the investigation, has nothing to work with. Local P.I. Declan Shaw who spent the night with April has little to contribute. He’d just met her and she was asleep when he left.

The case seems doomed to remain unsolved, forever open, and quickly erased from the headlines. And it would be if Declan’s accidental connection with the murder didn’t have unexpected consequences.

The men responsible for April’s death are worried. Declan is known to be stubborn and resourceful. He must be watched. He might have to be stopped. He’s a risk the killers cannot afford. The stakes are high: a major trial with the death penalty written all over it.

Buy Links:

Love You Till Tuesday is available in eBook and paperback.

Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Love-You-Till-Tuesday-Proctor/dp/1956957707

From reviews:

If you think the crime fiction market has enough PIs, think again. Declan Shaw is the kind of PI this genre has been waiting for. Declan is a well-developed, complex and nuanced character, wrestling with his own internal conflicts as he investigates the murder of April Easton. Sharp, witty dialogue and a fast-pace make Love You Till Tuesday an engaging read—one of those books you can’t put down and keep reading late into the night. It is a fun, intense read from beginning to end and M.E. Proctor displays her incredible talent at creating a well-written and beautifully crafted book.

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. The first book in her Declan Shaw PI series, Love You Till Tuesday, is out from Shotgun Honey with a follow up scheduled for 2025. She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments. Her fiction has appeared in various crime anthologies and magazines like Vautrin, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly.

Social Links

Author Website: www.shawmystery.com

On Substack: https://meproctor.substack.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/martine.proctor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEProctor3 BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/meproctor.bsky.social

Guest Blogger ~ June Trop

~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

Meet Miriam bat Isaac

            I’ve modeled my heroine, Miriam bat Isaac, on the woman known as Maria Hebrea, who probably lived in Roman-occupied Alexandria (Egypt) during the first century CE. I encountered her work when taking a course on the Historical Development of Concepts in Chemistry.

Ordinarily chemistry is taught from the perspective of what we know now without delving into how the concepts evolved over the millennia. So, when the professor assigned a paper on a historically significant concept, I had no idea of a topic. That is, until in desperation, I went to the university library to roam the stacks.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened—did I bump into a bookcase while looking to the heavens for inspiration?—but a moment later, a weighty tome fell on my toe and opened to a page about Maria Hebrea. And so, I began to wonder how a Jewish woman from Ancient Alexandria became the legendary founder of Western alchemy and held her place for 1500 years as the most celebrated woman of the Western World.

Sixteenth Century Depiction of Maria Hebrea

 In the alchemical literature, Maria Hebrea is also referred to as Mary the Jewess or Miriam the Prophetess, sister of Moses. Like her, all alchemists wrote under the name of a deity, prophet, or philosopher from an earlier time to enhance the authenticity of their claims or shield themselves from persecution. Although the tradition among all the crafts and mystical cults was to guard the secrecy of their work, persecution was a real risk for alchemists, who could be accused of and summarily executed for conspiring to debase the emperor’s currency.

Accordingly, Maria Hebrea worked anonymously. Hundreds of years later, however, another alchemist, Zozimos of Panopolis, celebrated her contributions. And so, with just a little tweaking, I had enough information to resurrect the once famous Maria Hebrea and create Miriam bat Isaac, my sleuth extraordinaire.

Miriam bat Isaac’s Adventures

Published in paperback and e-book by Level Best Books in February 2024

Miriam bat Isaac has recorded her nail-biting adventures in novels, novelettes, and short stories. Her most recent volume, The Deadliest Returns, is a book of three novelettes about returning, whether it means going back or giving back. In the first, “The Bodyguard”, Miriam’s brother, a renowned gladiator, returns from the dead to serve as a bodyguard back home when his employer retires Alexandria.

In the second, “The Beggar”, an old man disguised as a matronly beggar, returns to Alexandria to learn the fate of the lovechild he was forced to leave behind to escape the wrath of Roman law. And in the third, “The Black Pearl,” Miriam, having come into possession of the cache of jewels heisted from the Temple of Artemis, sails to Ephesus to return the treasure. The prized gem, however, a uniquely lustrous black pearl, disappears. With the power to heal the brokenhearted and restore the health of the one possessing it, could the pearl’s mystical properties be the motive for murder?

If, like Miriam, you thrive on uncovering the guilty longings, secrets, lies, and evil deeds of others, then as Miriam’s deputy, you will have ample opportunity to indulge your fancies. So, escape the monotony of everyday life and plunge into that rousing world of adventure in three of her most daring exploits.

To purchase The Deadliest Returns from Amazon

For the e-book, click here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV4TTX3T

For the paperback, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Deadliest-Returns-Collection-Miriam-Novelettes/dp/1685125859

As an award-winning middle school science teacher, June used storytelling to capture her students’ imagination and interest in scientific concepts. Years later as a professor of teacher education, she focused her research on the practical knowledge teachers construct and communicate through storytelling. Her first book, From Lesson Plans to Power Struggles (Corwin Press, 2009), is based on new teachers’ stories about their first classroom experiences. 

Now associate professor emerita at the State University of New York, June devotes her time to writing The Miriam bat Isaac Mystery Series. Consisting of short stories, novelettes, and several books, some have won modest recognition, such as being named a finalist for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award. ​

June, an active member of the Mystery Writers of America, lives with her husband Paul Zuckerman, where she is breathlessly recording her plucky heroine’s next life-or-death exploit. She’d love a visit at www.JuneTrop.com or on her Facebook page, June Trop Author, https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044318365389, where she publishes a blog every Tuesday afternoon about writing, the history of science, or life in Roman Alexandria.

Guest Blogger ~ Midge Raymond & John Yunker

~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

The Devil’s in the Details: Eco-fiction in the mystery genre

When my husband, John Yunker, and I embarked on a four-day hiking trip in one of the most remote areas of the world, we had no idea we’d bring home the idea for a novel we would write together. (We also had no idea we would survive writing a murder mystery together.)

But though Devils Island is our first co-authored book, it’s not our first collaboration. In 2011, noticing a dearth of opportunities for authors writing environmental fiction, we co-founded Ashland Creek Press, a boutique publisher focused on books about the environment and animal protection. From the day we opened for submissions, we’ve received far more environmental novels than we could ever publish — and now, thirteen years later, “cli-fi” has become a genre of its own.

Both John and I have written our own novels about endangered species — John in The Tourist Trail, and me in My Last Continent and Floreana — and once we learned about the plight of Tasmanian devils in Australia, we knew we’d found our next project.

But we had to ask ourselves: Can a serious environmental topic like endangered species be addressed in a genre often considered “beach reading”? The answer we came up with is: Absolutely. And perhaps it’s even more effective than tackling such subjects in a more “literary” genre.

Here’s why: We’ve seen, over the years, as both writers and publishers, that readers can be wary of environmental books. When it comes to climate change and animal protection, the news out there can be difficult: the planet is heating up; species are disappearing. Readers like to read, in part, to escape to somewhere else — mentally and emotionally, even if not physically. So we aimed, with Devils Island, to write a story that offers a fun escape (a glamping trip in one of the most beautiful places in the world), while also sharing what makes the real-life island of the novel so important (it is part of the conservation effort to save Tasmanian devils).

Maria Island

What we learned during our journey to Maria Island, a tiny island off the coast of Tasmania, is that Tassie devils are being reintroduced there because it is so remote; it’s the one place offering them hope for survival from a contagious facial tumor disease. To give ourselves literary freedom, we call our fictional island Marbury, and we created Kerry, a naturalist-turned-guide who herself is escaping the tough world of rescue to lead tourists on a trip where she’ll get to feel the optimism of sharing a place of hope with travelers. (Little did she know one of her guests would go missing, and a storm would cut off all communication with the outside world.) The secrets and lies of the hikers — and the disappearance of one of them and the death of another — is the focus of the story, but along the way, we’ve snuck in myriad details that will teach readers about the amazing Tasmanian devils (among other creatures) and the efforts to protect them.

And this is where eco-fiction meets mystery — in the details. Locked-room and closed-room mysteries are nothing new to the genre, but by setting a suspense novel on an island where conservationists are rehabilitating an endangered species is a detail that goes a long way toward readers’ understanding of the issues. And while the human characters are center stage in Devils Island, an individual devil character plays a small but important role — and myriad other animals make appearances as well.

Mystery novels include plenty of red herrings — but these don’t have to be limited by human plot twists. We decided that one subplot of Devils Island would be all the more resonant if it was about another issue facing Australia, that of poaching and wildlife smuggling.

Maria Island Lagoon

And mystery writers never neglect setting — and this, too, can be effective in an eco-mystery. Nearly every part of the world is suffering the effects of climate change, from stronger hurricanes to increasing wildfires. In Devils Island, it wasn’t a stretch to conjure a storm that would cut off all contact between the hikers and the outside world. Alternatively, climate change can provide an atmospheric backdrop, as in Jane Harper’s bestseller The Dry, in which the tinder-dry farming community that has suffered from years of drought reveals the stress of the climate crisis on this community and ratchets up the tension in the story as well.

Characters, of course, propel stories forward — and they can also provide details of context and backstory for animals and the environment. In Devils Island, Kerry brings both naivete (this being her first time around as a lead guide) as well as expertise (she knows everything about devils and most of the wildlife from her former job). Another thing characters provide is conflict, and author Cher Fischer provided plenty of this in her eco-mystery Falling Into Green (published by Ashland Creek Press) in which ecopsychologist Esmeralda Green, a vegan with an electric car, falls in love with a carnivorous, Hummer-driving television reporter.

Mystery novels are all about figuring out who did what, and an eco-mystery is no exception. But adding details that reveal environmental issues, the plight of animals, and our changing world can create stories that are not only fun to read but make us think about our planet as well. 

Devil’s Island

On a remote island off the coast of Tasmania, an Australian wilderness guide embarks on a four-day hike with six guests—and arrives at their destination with only two.

Devils Island is home to abundant wildlife and is the ideal place to re-introduce endangered Tasmanian devils. It’s also a region where travelers can see firsthand the unspoiled drama of Australia’s wild places. For naturalist guide Kerry, the trip offers a respite from the grueling work of trying to save an endangered species. American college classmates Brooke and Jane have a chance to reconnect after years of estrangement. Two Australian couples hope to escape their big-city lives and enjoy the company of longtime friends.

When Jane disappears on the first night, the group assumes she has wandered too far in the stormy weather. Yet it turns out she has a secret connection to one of the other guests—and when another hiker is found dead in camp, the group finds itself isolated by the worsening storm and wondering who among them might be responsible.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Island-John-Yunker/dp/1608096149

Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/devils-island-midge-raymond/21171253?ean=9781608096145

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/devils-island-john-yunker/1144401474?ean=9781608096145

Oceanview Publishing: https://www.oceanviewpub.com/books/devils-island

Buy a signed copy: https://midgeandjohn.com/purchase.html

Devils Island is the debut collaboration by Midge Raymond and John Yunker. Midge is the author of the novels Floreana and My Last Continent and the award-winning short-story collection Forgetting English. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, and other publications. She earned a certificate in private investigation from the University of Washington. John is the author of the novel The Tourist Trail; editor of the Among Animals fiction series and a nonfiction anthology, Writing for Animals; and his plays have been produced or staged at such venues as the Oregon Contemporary Theatre, the Source Festival, the Centre Stage New Play Festival, and Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference.

Website: https://midgeandjohn.com/

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

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