Category: mystery

A Love Letter to Libraries

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 4 Comments

By Margaret Lucke

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borges, author

A public library is an amazing place. You can choose a book or a DVD and take it home–for free. If you need a computer, you can use one there–for free. You can attend a concert, or hear an author speak, or take a child to listen to stories–all for free.

A library offers a wealth of education and entertainment at no charge. As it happens, though, it costs a lot of money to do that.

“A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.”
Henry Ward Beecher, social reformer

Friends of the Library 25th Anniversary celebration

I’m on the board of my local Friends of the Library, which recently celebrated a milestone—our 25th anniversary. The library staff and another library support group honored the occasion by throwing us a wonderful party.

For nearly four decades, my town had no public library. It was the second largest city in California without one. When the state’s voters approved a bond for library funding in the late 1990s, local leaders decide to apply for some of that money. Some civic-minded folks got together and set up the Friends group to demonstrate to potential funders that building a library here had strong community support.

Hercules Public Library

There was a huge celebration when our beautiful new library opened in 2006. Our Friends group was proud to present to a check for $25,000, raised by sales of used books donated by the community, for the Opening Day Collection.

The enthusiasm continues. The library gets close to 25,000 visitors every quarter. Last year more than 10,400 people attended nearly 326 free programs, and patrons checked out 86,400 books and other materials. In many ways the library has brought the community together and become its heart.

Some people would have you think that in this era of Internet access and high-tech gadgets, public libraries are obsolete. Not so. They are well used though, sadly, not always well funded. The Friends are doing our bit help. To date, we’ve raised $350,000 to expand our library’s collections and support its programs.

“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”
Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist

Andrew Carnegie portrait

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), one of the richest men in the world in his time, was a big believer in libraries. At age 12 he emigrated with his family from Scotland to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh. Though the move ended his formal schooling, he was much impressed by a local businessman who, every Saturday, opened his personal library so workers could borrow books, thus allowing Carnegie to continue his education.

Carnegie vowed if ever he had any surplus wealth he would use it in lending books to others. Years later, he made good on that promise by giving some $56 million (a lot of money in those days) to build 2,509 public libraries worldwide, including 1,679 in the United States. He shaped the concept of public libraries in this country. If you have one in your community, you have Carnegie to thank.

“The best thing about the library is that it is available not only to me, but to everyone. It does not discriminate.”
David Horowitz, political writer

Libraries are among the most democratic of our institutions. The access they provide to computers, books, films, and music is invaluable, not only to individuals but to our society. Libraries bring people together. They enlighten and inspire. They open the doors to the world.

Some years ago I was hired by two Bay Area library systems to write the documents that would present their new strategic plans to their communities. Both of the planning task forces grappled with how to define the audiences they served. One opted to list the possibilities: “The Library welcomes all members of the community regardless of culture, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, or socioeconomic status.” The other wrestled with the question for a while until one member said: “Doesn’t ‘everyone’ mean everyone?” So their statement simply says: “The library systems … promote[s] learning and enjoyment for everyone.”

Everyone is welcome. How many of our institutions can make this claim?

“Libraries are places where the imagination begins.”
Heather Barbieri, author

Have you been to your local library lately? I urge you to pay a visit and see all that it has to offer. While you’re there, check out some books, because funding is often based in part on circulation numbers. Join your Friends group. Make a donation. Vote for tax or bond measures that will secure its funding. Your library deserves your support.

“Libraries are a public good and a civic responsibility. They are about our future as much as they are our past.”
Andrew Lopez, university librarian

The Gotta Write A Blog Blues

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 1 Comment

by Janis Patterson


Don’t get me wrong – I love blogging. It’s wonderful to be able to chat with readers and fans and people who get lost on the internet. What I don’t like is schedules. Each time I check my calendar – and every blog and everything else I do is ruthlessly noted on my calendar – I swear this time I will get my next blog done well in time, pre-schedule it and the announcement to be sent in a timely manner and have no worries or last minute rushes.


Then Life happens. You know what I mean. All the writing gurus say that if you are a writer (or want to be a writer) writing should always come before anything other than dangerous illness or death. Well, that makes a good talking point for writing teachers to use to encourage you, but in practical life it’s not much good. Things come up that you didn’t expect. Things that are not life-threatening, but which really do need to be handled. Then there’s laundry, and cooking, and cleaning, and marketing, and…


And your time for writing gets shorter and shorter.


Now there are those who say writing is not done just at the keyboard, that no matter what your hands are doing your brain can still be plotting, so that time spent at the keyboard is really just transcribing. While that is true to a point, it can also be dangerous. Once I was driving from Dallas to Ft. Smith, Arkansas. While I drove I tried to work out a really knotty plotting problem on my work in progress. When I finally had it worked out I had no idea of where I was. Turns out it was Missouri, and I had a lot of backtracking to do. So one does need to be careful when using this technique.
Back to blogs. Blogs are short. Blogs are fairly localized in focus – in my case, a subject that can be wrangled by hook or by crook to the world of writing. The only trouble is, you have to have a reasonably cogent premise, or something informative, or at least interesting to say. Otherwise all you’re doing is stringing words in a line and hoping they say something at least minimally interesting.


Like this post. Well, negative examples can be a teaching tool too!


Before I go I must share that my new anthology (shared with the fabulous Sandy Steen, Penny Richards and James Gaskin) releases on June 14th and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon. It’s called The July Fourth Murders and features four different wars and four murders on the Fourth of July, written by four authors. My part is World War One. It’s a nifty book! Go take a look.

Guest Blogger ~Joanne McLaughlin

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

Repeat That Name, Please  

            Identity is a big deal in my novels. Maybe it has something to do with all the Superman comic books I read in the barbershop while my dad was having his hair cut. Lots of identity stuff in those stories, secret and otherwise. Midwestern farm boy or big-city newspaper reporter? Mild-mannered, bespectacled guy or visitor from another planet able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?  

            Names—specifically, who we are versus the person we allow the world to see—are a common thread in my first four published novels, three darkly romantic vampire tales and a thriller. Vampires reinvent themselves from century to century; the rest of us sometimes do, though over shorter lifetimes. And, of course, in literature and in life, often all we know of a person at first is the name presented to us.

            In my fifth novel, A Poetic Puzzle, one name sets my protagonist, M. Irene “Mimi” Jones—an under-recognized, under-employed poet/English literature professor—on a mission. It’s the name she shares with internationally acclaimed poet Mary Irene Jones, who has vanished, but not before sending Mimi a cache of her heretofore unpublished manuscripts. Is the timing of these two events a coincidence? Are the manuscripts clues of some sort? And if so, why entrust them to Mimi, of all people? The same-name thing must be significant, right?

            I should mention here that the house Mimi lives in is one she inherited from yet another Mary Irene Jones, the paternal grandmother for whom she was named.

            About that: The name Mary Irene Jones is what prompted me to write A Poetic Puzzle.

            You see, my own father’s mother was a Mary Irene Jones, too, before she married my grandfather. She didn’t disappear, per se, but I never got to know her. My dad scarcely did—he was only nine years old when she died in 1931 of what was apparently characterized as “women’s trouble.” My mother suspected that meant some sort of reproductive or breast cancer. I’m not sure anyone now living would know. My father was the family’s youngest child; he, his older brother, and his two older sisters are gone now.

            I look like my father, as does my son. Both of them more closely resemble George McLaughlin, Mary Irene’s husband, my paternal grandfather. But in the lone photograph I have of her, I can see myself.

            That photo, actually a picture of a photograph, may be the only one that still exists. I don’t know whether she had siblings whose children or grandchildren might have family photo albums. I have never had close ties to my McLaughlin relatives, let alone any Jones descendants who might be her family. Judging from her husband’s birth year, I think this Mary Irene was born in the United States in the late 19th century, but I don’t know when or where. I know she married a man from northeastern Pennsylvania and ended up living in Philadelphia, but I don’t know the circumstances. Except for the year, I don’t know the date of her death or where she was buried.

            That sepia-tone image of my grandmother sits next to my laptop as I write this. I’ve studied it endlessly, searching for clues beyond the obvious. In it, she has dark hair, brown, I suppose, since my father and I and at least one of his sisters had dark brown hair. She has a long face not unlike mine—my late Aunt Vera, whom I resemble a bit, had the same long face.

            Pince-nez eyeglasses sit on my grandmother’s nose—maybe she was near-sighted the way I am. Her light-colored, lacy long-sleeved dress is cinched at the waist with a bow. And she is standing outdoors, with trees in the background. Holding her left hand is a small boy, maybe sandy-haired, maybe five years old. He is dressed for warm weather. My mother told me that she had been told that the boy was not my dad, but who offered that information, I don’t know.

            Were my grandmother and this boy, presumably her other son, standing in their backyard? Were they having a picnic in a park? Were her daughters—one older than the boy, one younger—playing away from the camera’s lens? Was my father an infant napping nearby?

            How my mother came to give me this photo, I don’t recall. Did my uncle’s wife, a distant cousin of Dad’s who married his brother, give it to my parents? My mother always suggested that particular aunt-by-marriage was the source of whatever McLaughlin family history we were aware of. Ancestry.com shows any number of second and third and more distant cousins with whom I share a bit of DNA, but because I have no details about my grandmother’s forebears, I can’t readily know which of these many cousins, if any, sprang from the same branch of the family tree she and I came from. Answers might lie at the bottom of a deep and daunting rabbit hole, to add another garden metaphor, or it might be a fruitless search.

            Truly, Mary Irene Jones McLaughlin is a mystery to me.

            Which got me thinking back in spring 2022: What if I immortalized her (sort of) in a mystery? What if, given that I knew little more than her name, that’s where my story began?

            I dropped her married name from the plot line, lest someone think this book was nonfiction. Also because, as names go, Mary and Jones are definitely common ones.

            As A Poetic Puzzle opens, the reader learns that the two Mary Irene Joneses not only have the same name, but also the same occupation, and are affiliated with the same small college in suburban Philadelphia. It soon becomes apparent, however, that what’s in a name is a confounding, confusing bit of business.

            Mimi Jones discovers much as she scrutinizes the pieces of A Poetic Puzzle, not the least of which is this:

            How well do we really know anyone?  

A Poetic Puzzle

Internationally acclaimed poet Mary Irene Jones has vanished—calls and texts unacknowledged, bank accounts emptied, car abandoned. But before she disappeared, she mailed never-published manuscripts to a lesser-known namesake poet, M. Irene “Mimi” Jones. Are the manuscripts clues only Mimi can decipher? And what about the handsome Philadelphia cop assigned to the case? He seems as intrigued by Mimi as by the missing celebrity poet. Talk about a person of interest…

Amazon.com: A Poetic Puzzle: A Mystery in 32 Pieces: 9781951967130: McLaughlin, Joanne: Books
A Poetic Puzzle – Kindle edition by McLaughlin, Joanne. Romance Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Joanne McLaughlin began telling stories in second grade, creating superhero fan fiction in the Philadelphia rowhouse where she grew up. She has worked for public media and newspapers in Philadelphia, upstate New York, and northeastern Ohio, involved in award-winning coverage of topics from politics and public health to fashion and financial markets, as well as Pulitzer Prize-finalist architecture criticism and a Peabody Award-nominated podcast. For several years, she also served as vice president of a firm that managed and booked blues musicians. Her novels include the romantic mystery A Poetic Puzzle; Chasing Ashes, a crime thriller; and Never Before Noon, Never Until Now, and Never More Human, a vampire trilogy. Her latest short fiction appears in Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Volume 1; the short stories Peppina’s Sweetheart and Grass and Granite are available on Amazon. Joanne is inspired by strong women like the ones who raised her, determined to meet challenges head on. Joannemclaughlin.net

Social media:
https://facebook.com/joannemclaugh

https:Instagram.com/joannemclaugh

@joannemclaughlin.bsky.social

Joanne McLaughlin (@joannemclaugh) / X

Joanne McLaughlin | LinkedIn

Dialog With June

~ Janet Dawson ~ 2 Comments

June. Summer. Warm weather. Pleasant days, starting early, daylight stretching into the evening.

Interestingly enough, June brings thoughts of D-Day—June 6, 1944—when the Allies sent a huge armada of soldiers and materiel across the English Channel to invade Nazi-occupied France. The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan’s riveting account of that day, is on my shelves, and I’ve read it multiple times. I also have the DVD of the epic (three and a half hours!) film, which I’ve watched over and over, usually on Memorial Day.

The movie is full of memorable dialog. Among my favorite scenes is one with actor Roddy McDowall, playing one of the many soldiers holed up on those ships, waiting for the orders to steam across the channel. It’s June 5, terrible weather, back-to-back storms giving the brass fits. The invasion has already been rescheduled several times.

Roddy’s not thinking about the weather, the wait or the battle to come. He looks into the distance. In a dreamy voice, he says:

June. Every June my old man used to take me camping up in the Blue Mountains. We’d hunt and fish all day long. And at night, we’d sleep out under the stars. Didn’t even need a blanket . . . June.

I love that. The dialog tells me a bit about the character, conveys something of his life before he got to this place and time, and contrasts starkly with his current circumstances. And it makes me think about some of the camping trips I’ve experienced. I’ll bet I’m not the only one.

Granted, movies are different from novels. I recall other examples of memorable dialog from books that wound up in the movie as well. In Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” And there’s True Grit by Charles Portis. When irascible Sheriff Rooster Cogburn tells outlaw Lucky Ned Pepper that he’s planning to arrest him, the outlaw responds: “That’s bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”

Dialog is one of many tools that we writers have in our skill set. Writing this blog got me thinking of dialog from my own books. Three of them come to mind, all with a line of dialog starting the book.

The first chapter of The Sacrificial Daughter begins in care manager Kay Dexter’s office, with a prospective client who says, “I’m at my wit’s end.” Beyond what she’s saying, her facial expressions, her demeanor and small physical actions show the character’s stress from dealing with her elderly mother.

In Bit Player, detective Jeri Howard is in a movie memorabilia shop, looking at an old poster. She says, “Grandma said John Barrymore made a pass at her.” I certainly hope that makes the reader want to turn the page and find out what comes next. For Jeri’s grandmother was an actress who played small parts in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Jeri is about to find out that Grandma was interviewed by police concerning an unsolved Tinseltown murder.

My most recent Jeri Howard novel is The Things We Keep. This book starts with Jeri standing on a street corner, looking at a down-at-heals Victorian house. She says, “It looks haunted.” She’s right. What happens next shows that the ghosts of past crimes are indeed in evidence. For example, those bones hidden away in an old footlocker. Haunted, indeed.

Guest Blogger~ Zaida Alfaro

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

The Hidden Track: A Miami Music Mystery, is the third and final book of the Miami Music Mystery series, and it serves as a culmination of everything the series has been building towards. In this final installment, readers are taken on one last thrilling ride through the vibrant music scene of Miami, with a mystery that not only ties up the story arcs of our beloved characters but also brings resolution to the long-standing questions and tensions that have been simmering throughout the series.

The book follows the same characters we’ve grown attached to, but with deeper layers of growth and development. They’ve come a long way from the first book, with their personal lives and relationships more complex and interwoven into the unfolding mystery. In The Hidden Track, the stakes are higher than ever. The main character, Vy, faces a challenge that requires not only solving a crime but confronting personal demons, facing difficult decisions, and navigating the delicate balance between their musical passion and the dangers that come with it.

What sets this book apart is the sense of closure it provides, while also giving readers the chance to reflect on the themes that have been consistent throughout the series—loyalty, trust, and the power of music to heal and connect. The music itself is integral to the story, not only as a backdrop but as a vehicle for the plot, with song lyrics and performances playing key roles in solving the mystery. Music is a language of its own, and in this book, the hidden track symbolizes the final piece of the puzzle, something that’s been waiting to be discovered all along.

Wrapping up the Miami Music Mystery series has been an emotional and reflective journey. After working on these characters and storylines for over five years, it feels surreal to finally bring everything to a close. There’s a mix of happiness and sadness—happiness in knowing I completed the vision I set out for the series, but also sadness in letting go of the world and characters I’ve spent so much time with.

The process of tying up loose ends in the final book was both challenging and rewarding. Every subplot needed resolution, and I wanted to make sure the characters’ growth and the mysteries were satisfying to readers. There were moments of doubt, especially with the last few chapters, but pushing through and seeing it all come together was worth every bit of effort.

What’s also been important for me is knowing the story has reached its natural conclusion. While it’s bittersweet to say goodbye to Miami, its music scene, and the characters who’ve made it so special, I’m proud of what I’ve created and the way everything has come full circle.

I feel a sense of accomplishment, but I also look forward to exploring new projects. There’s a mixture of pride in the series’ completion and excitement about what comes next. It’s been a chapter of my life that I will always cherish, and I’m grateful for the readers who have been part of the journey.

THE HIDDEN TRACK

Vy has finally hit her high note. After years of clawing her way through the ruthless music industry, dodging dangerous rivals, and surviving murderous encounters, her dreams of stardom are within reach. With a record deal secured and her debut single climbing the charts, Vy is ready to shoot her first music video—a moment she’s been rehearsing in her mind for as long as she can remember.

But as always in Vy’s life, nothing stays in tune. As tensions crescendo and chaos threatens to drown her out, Vy must find a way to keep her creative vision intact. All the while, shadows from her past echo through her mind—could there be someone still out there, determined to see her career hit its final note?

As Vy’s close-knit band of friends and collaborators face their own personal trials, the stakes have never been higher. Has Vy’s murderous melody finally ended, or is there still danger lurking in the final verse? In the end, will Vy get the happily ever after she’s fought so hard for, or is there a hidden track playing a haunting melody, waiting to pull her back into the shadows?

Buy link: https://linktr.ee/Zaidamusic

The vibrant city of Miami, Florida, serves as the heartbeat of the Miami Music Mystery series—a city I deeply cherish, having been born and raised there. Like the series’ protagonist, Vy, I am a singer-songwriter and Grammy-considered independent artist, with a profound passion for music and literature. 

Years ago, I discovered cozy mysteries and was immediately captivated by their engaging, intriguing, and often humorous storylines. Inspired by these works, I decided to merge my love of music with my newfound passion for storytelling. This led to the creation of my debut novel, The Last Note: A Miami Music Mystery. 

Following its success, I continued Vy’s story In the Key of Dead: A Miami Music Mystery. Drawing from my own life experiences, I wove elements like phobias, dream sequences, and quirky personalities into the narrative—all grounded in truth. Through these novels, I aimed to share my love for Miami, its rich Cuban culture, my family, and the world of music. 

Now, with the release of The Hidden Track, the final book in the Miami Music Mystery series, I’ve brought Vy’s journey to a thrilling conclusion. This latest installment delves deeper into the city’s vibrant backdrop and Vy’s evolving story, tying together the mysteries, challenges, and triumphs that have defined her journey. 

I hope readers feel the same passion for Miami, music, and storytelling that I’ve poured into these novels. It’s been a joy to bring this series to life and share a piece of my world with you. 

Zaidamusic.com

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