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Guest Blogger ~ Mollie Hunt

~ patyjag ~ 9 Comments

Ten years, ten Crazy Cat Lady mysteries.

Ten years ago, my high school best friend said to me, “Let’s publish your book.” She was an editor. I was a writer, unpublished even though I’d recently completed my ninth fiction manuscript. I’d been trying the query route, but I never had the patience to carry it through. When I finished a book, I’d send out a frenzy of query letters to everyone in the marketplace manual but then get tired of waiting for that one good response and start another book. Writing books fascinated me; trying to pitch them did not.

I’d completed three mysteries, a thriller, and three and a half sci-fantasies when on a trip to Mazatlán Mexico, I began something new. With the warm breeze off the Pacific Ocean and the sound of marimbas playing in my ears, I penned the first chapters of a cat-themed cozy featuring a cat shelter volunteer. This one felt different; even then I knew it could be a series.

That story, Cats’ Eyes, was the one my friend the editor said we should publish, and we did.

After Cats’ Eyes came Copy Cats and then Cat’s Paw. The Crazy Cat Lady Cozy Mysteries found its voice and established its living characters. I kept coming up with new things for my shelter volunteer Lynley Cannon to do and new crimes that only she could solve. Her varying clowder of cats helped in their catly way, along with her octogenarian mom, her teenage granddaughter, her shelter buddy, and a hunky humane investigator. When I sat down at the computer, the stories would write themselves.

And now, ten years later.

I’m about to publish a new Crazy Cat Lady mystery, Cat House, and this one is special for a few reasons. It’s the tenth in the series, ten being a milestone. It takes place in my own neighborhood, and though the exact locations are fictional, anyone familiar with the Hawthorne district of Southeast Portland, Oregon will be able to visualize some of the features. And if you’ve read any of my series, you know I incorporate cat information into each story and include cat facts and snippets at the beginning of each chapter. Like my character Lynley Cannon, I am an devoted cat person, a volunteer, and an advocate for all cats. If my stories can not only entertain but teach something about cats, I’ve achieved my objective.

In Cat House, I’ve incorporated a secondary storyline involving a cat being treated for Feline Infectious Peritonitis. Up until recently FIP has nearly always been fatal to the unfortunate cats and kittens who contract it, but now there is a cure. Sadly, however, the drug to treat FIP isn’t approved in the United States, so sufferers have to look elsewhere. To get this storyline right, I needed to do quite a bit of research, and not just the internet kind. I reached out to a friend who had successfully treated an FIP kitten with “black market” drugs she obtained through an online group. I also learned of FIP crusader Peter Cohen and his cat advocate work. I was able to interview Peter and find out a whole lot more about why we can’t get this lifesaving drug in the US.

I included Peter’s interview as an afterword in Cat House. My new book may be cozy fiction and light reading for those who like cats, mysteries, and happy endings, but the reader might just learn something along the way.

Right now you can pre-order Cat House for its release on October 29th. Link to Pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGSXLYTP

Cat House

Book 10 in the Crazy Cat Lady Cozy Mystery Series

This Halloween, the cats are hiding, and the monsters don’t wear costumes.

Young men from the Portland-Seattle area are going missing. It’s just another sad headline to Lynley Cannon—until she starts her new cat sitting job for an enigmatic neighbor.

An off-limits room, a suspicious phone message involving drugs, and the sudden appearance of a missing man’s cat arouse Lynley’s suspicion, but how far can she go before the consequences of her cat-like curiosity turn deadly?

https://www.amazon.com/House-Crazy-Lady-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B0CGSXLYTP

Cat Writer Mollie Hunt is the award-winning author of two cozy series, the Crazy Cat Lady Mysteries and the Tenth Life Mysteries. Her Cat Seasons Sci-Fantasy Tetralogy features extraordinary cats saving the world. Mollie also released a cat-themed COVID memoir. In her spare time, she pens a bit of cat poetry as well.

Mollie is a member of the Oregon Writers’ Colony, Sisters in Crime, the Cat Writers’ Association, Willamette Writers, and Northwest Independent Writers Association (NIWA). She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and a varying number of cats.

You can find Mollie Hunt, Cat Writer on her blogsite: https://molliehuntcatwriter.com/

Follow Mollie’s Amazon Page: http://www.amazon.com/author/molliehunt

Facebook Author Page: http://www.facebook.com/MollieHuntCatWriter/

Guest Blogger ~ Deni Starr

~ patyjag

My interest in mysteries may stem from my sister’s attempt on my life when I was young, re-enacted in this photo by my father some time later. Knowing my father, he probably did ten takes of this before he got one he was satisfied with.

            I have a series put out by Silverleaf Publishing which has co-protagonists Sean O’Conner a retired boxer and his friend- then business partner then wife, Cindy Matasar, FBI trained private investigator. By book five, “Down for the Count” they are engaged and running their own private investigative service, Sean providing the money and muscle, Cindy the expertise.

            The plot for “Down for the Count” originated because I was watching a documentary, “Spotlight” about how the Boston Globe exposed child abuse by local Catholic priests and I thought this subject would be a good back story for a mystery, so I did an intensive amount of research on the history of the problem and the legal proceedings in America. I was surprised to learn that celibacy has nothing to do with it. That had been my original assumption.

            In my book, I tried to very hard to be fair, and being a former public defender who believes in presumption of innocence, the priest in my book (spoiler alert) proves to not be guilty of abusing a boy. I tried to balance that out with real victims so as to not give the impression that its common for children to lie about having been victimized, and include both unfair prejudices against priests and some documented bigotry on the part of priests, hoping to cover all the angles. Several of the books I read were by priests who want the church to fix this problem, as well as one book by a woman who was abused as a child, became a nun, and now leads a SNAP (victims of priests) support group. I also added current events since during the time that I wrote this book, there were a number of articles about a formal Seattle archbishop being accused, and a meeting of the American Bishops on this subject and some of the changes they made to address it. There was also a spate of articles regarding a dispute between a cardinal and Pope Francis because the cardinal in question felt the problem would be solved if Pope Francis would kick out all the gay priests, and there were claims that suspected offenders were being moved around so claims against them could be ignored. It was a change for me to see current newspaper articles on my subject since my former subjects have been World War I, World War II, and Victorian England. I did the research of World War II for book four of the series, “Saved by the Bell” because the villain (and I have no idea why I did this) belonged to the Arrow Cross after the Nazi’s invaded Hungary, so I checked out that history and learned about the Gold Train- a train loaded with loot stolen from Jewish Hungarians that the SS tried to sneak out of Hungary when it looked like the Russians were going to win. That train was captured by Allies and the goods redistributed, but there is also believed to have been a similar attempt made in Poland with the “Ghost Train” which so far, no one has found, which I’m thinking of using as a subject for another book.

DOWN FOR THE COUNT

Very reluctantly, retired boxer Sean O’Conner and former public defender investigator Cindy Matasar now running their own investigation firm, agree to look into charges of sexual abuse on behalf of a priest accused of molesting a little boy. Sean hates the idea, but his brother, Father John, knows Father Damien and is confident there is something wrong with the allegations. Sean has his fingers crossed that it’s a simple case of mistaken identity. No such luck

            Sean and Cindy set about interviewing men who had been in the Catholic Youth Boxing Program as boys, and other priests who coached in the program, or who will vouch for Father Damien. Just when they think they’ve locked in evidence to exonerate the ninety-year-old defendant, they receive a mysteries missive that heads them in the other direction and just when they think they got that sorted out, Father Damien is found dead in what Sean thinks a clear-cut case of suicide, an admission of guilt, but which the Church insists was an accident.

            Dogging their footsteps and filing professional complaints against them, are the investigators who are in-house with the law firm hired by the Church’s insurance company who are investigating the rest of the allegations against all the other named priests. They are supposed to be on the same team, but professional jealous is causing more than just friction. When Sean figures out that Father Damien’s death was neither suicide nor accident but murder, his rivals take credit for the discovery, leading to yet more complications and additional deaths.

            Now Sean and Cindy are in a race against time to find out who is responsible before the killer discovers that they are the one’s finding all the clues, and gets to them first.  

Buy link:

https://a.co/d/gS0tum3

Deni Starr, a native Portlander and fourth generation Oregonian, a fact she intends to mention prominently should she ever run for office, started devoting her time to writing novels after out-growing the practice of law. She has five novels published by Silverleaf Publishing featuring her ex-professional boxer, Sean O’Conner and his professional investigator friend, Cindy Matasar who investigate boxing themed mysteries set in contemporary Portland. They are “Below the Belt” “Sucker-Punched”, “Throwing in the Towel.”, “Saved by the Bell”, and “Down for the The Count”. She also has “Murder by the Sea” by Launchpoint Press

            The author attended Occidental College in Los Angeles and graduated with Honors and Special Distinction majoring in English with an emphasis on creative writing and journalism. The Author then attended Willamette Law School in Salem, Oregon, and practiced law while also obtaining her black belt in Wu Ying Tao karate. Her law practice emphasized representing women victims of gender crimes, appellate law, and indigent criminal defense. She also has a background in private investigation.

            She lives in Portland with her two dogs, Ekaterina Vitalia Dementiava, and Alexandretta Elena Dementiava, and her two cats, Mad Max and Mocha.

Denistarrmysteries.com

Deni Starr Author- FB

Guest Blogger ~ Suzanne Baginskie

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

How Entering a Contest Advanced My Goal to Authorship

Readers and writers are always interested in how I started writing my first romantic suspense book and developed it into a series. After nineteen years of submitting and selling short mystery and romance fiction, I entered a Harlequin Romantic Suspense novel contest in 2018. Their guidelines asked for a blurb and a synopsis. I literally had to devise a fictional story plot! Challenged, I sat at my desk and created Dangerous Charade in less than two weeks. I submitted my idea and waited for the results.

When the email for round one arrived, fifty novel premises were accepted and one of them was mine. I’d made it in. Now the next request required three written chapters. Time of the essence, I thought of nothing else. I fleshed-out the characters, added the crime and suspense, and weaved in romantic affairs of the heart. I worked hard, rewrote, and polished them again, and when the due date arrived, I hit send.

Three weeks later I heard the news, my entry made it in along with twenty-four other writers. Their last instructions asked for the full novel. Competition was stiff. We had a month, but time flew by fast as life got in the way. It wasn’t easy, but I applied myself and soon wrote: The End. I submitted my manuscript and hoped for the best.

In the meantime, I started another book and patiently waited. The day that final emailed response appeared in my inbox, I held my breath and clicked it opened. The message brought both good and bad news, I’d made it into the last ten entries but only one novel could win, and it wasn’t mine. Rejection hurt, but I had completed my first novel.

When COVID-19 reared its ugly head for the second year in 2021, I saw a call out for romance novels from a traditional publisher, Magnolia Blossom Publishing. I immediately revised and submitted Dangerous Charade. A couple of weeks later, I was offered a contract through a Zoom video call. When they asked me for a series name book two was half finished. It had a different set of characters and crime, but I used the same FBI agents premise. The terrible danger these partners faced together trying to catch criminals and stay alive allowed an emotional relationship to blossom between them. So, I chose FBI and the second word Affairs for the title. It hinted at the hazards of working undercover and affairs of their hearts. Thus, the FBI Affairs Series was born.

I continued the theme and completed Dangerous Revenge-Book two, and Dangerous Innocence-Book three. Each of my novels introduce you to new FBI protagonists who are involved in bizarre criminal situations. They can be read in or out of order, as each novel is a standalone.

Entering that contest in 2018 advanced my goal for authorship. Thankfully, it pointed me in the direction of writing characters who thrived on dangerous ventures, took ultimate risks, and in the end fell in love along the way. Check out my FBI Affairs Series.

Suzanne Baginskie

Dangerous Charade

Book one of the FBI Affairs Series

When an undercover sting in a Las Vegas Casino goes wrong, FBI Agent Noelle Farrell’s cover is blown, and someone wants revenge. Noelle’s sent to Florida under the Witness Protection Program where she runs into her old partner, Agent Kyle Rivers. A man she worked closely with and admired. Kyle’s mourning his father. He failed to keep him safe from a deadly stalker. Deep in hiding, someone targets Noelle. She fears for her safety. Noelle leans into her faith and struggles to keep her independence. Kyle vows to protect Noelle, unaware she has a secret—one her assailants already know. 

Buy Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JPCX2CX

Suzanne Baginskie and her husband, Al, left New Jersey and relocated to the west central coast of Florida. She’s been writing ever since her mother gifted her a five year diary for her eighth birthday. Unknowingly, her mother’s inspirational nudge helped the writer inside her emerge. She recently retired from a law firm as a paralegal-office manager. Now she writes daily spinning tales of romantic suspense that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. She starts each day with a four mile walk and meditates on her current writing project. A voracious reader, she supports her local library association as a friend. She loves traveling, especially on cruise ships. Most sea days on board, you’ll find her plotting stories outside on the deck gazing at the ocean. Currently, she is working on her fourth book in the series.

Website: http://www.suzannebaginskie.com

Dealing with a Tough Topic

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

My latest WIP- Work In Progress-came about from two separate things my parents told me at different times. My mom was a nurse at a clinic. She commented that there were too many teenage pregnancies in the county. And years later my dad made the comment about a deacon of a church who cheated people and slept with other men’s wives.

Fast forward to now and my overactive imagination putting those two things together to come up with a murder mystery set in a small community where the pastor of a church “teaches” young women how to be good wives.

I have a secondary character whose point of view is shared in the book. She is a midwife who has brought the pastor’s offspring into the world after he sexually assaulted the teenagers and young women. The midwife tried to get the police to do something, but the charismatic pastor shined a bad light on her, and they wouldn’t listen. She is trying to keep the women’s names out of it knowing how many families and lives will be torn apart should it come out. At the same time, she wishes something would happen to the man.

And it does.

I am halfway through this book and my newest critique partner quit on me after saying the story was too dark and she didn’t like the way my main character Gabriel Hawke was acting.

Whoa!

The new CP thought I wrote cozy mystery like her. I never said I wrote cozy and had thought she would have looked up my books. I tried to look up hers, but she is a new writer. She has been giving me good thoughts and information coming into the series at book 11. But her last comments made me sit back and think about how the story is being portrayed. She said I was doing a good job with the midwife. She liked her attitude and how she was going about helping a suspect and keeping the victims from being brought public. But Hawke was too insensitive.

I have readers who say they love Hawke. I don’t want them to not like him after reading this book. Thinking long and hard about what she’d said, I realized, I was portraying the midwife how I would want someone hiding my secrets to be and I am portraying Hawke as a person out for revenge.

Stepping back, I roll things around in my head.

I know that the revenge comes from things that have happened in my past. Things I would love to have Rosa, the midwife, keep secret if she knew. But I’m instilling my revenge for being a victim into my Hawke character. While he does champion the underdog and will find justice even for a nasty piece of work as the victim, he needs to be more sensitive to the dead pastor’s victims.

And so, I spent all of last week with printed pages of my manuscript, going through and moving scenes, adding more scenes with Hawke learning from Rosa and his partner about how the victims of this man’s assaults have justice now that he is dead but need help to heal and not be put in the headlines of the local paper.  Or brought in for questioning about something that can no longer be punished.

I have to override Hawke’s need to put the last piece of the puzzle in the right place. And my need for revenge.

And though I wish my CP was willing to keep working with me, she did me a major favor by telling me how she felt about the story and my characters.

Guest Blogger ~ Valerie Nieman

~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

Accidentally on purpose

            I sort of backed into writing mysteries.

            It’s not that I didn’t love them, at least the darker, creepier kind. Thanks to a home library of classics, I read Poe as a child and so gained acquaintance with the morbid, the gothic, and the methods of detection at a tender age. Later, I encountered Sherlock Holmes, through Basil Rathbone films and the original stories.

            But while I reveled in the clues and conundrums, I never thought I could write a mystery. How to get those clues in? How to twist a satisfactory plot?

            I first approached the genre with a novel called Blood Clay, which had the death of a child in the opening chapters but no mystery about the cause. It was a crime novel, and a study of the stranger in community, but not a whodunit.

            When I wrote To the Bones, the mystery was there from the start. A man wakes up in a pit of bones. Why is he there? Who did it? What happens when he manages to get out? Still, I didn’t think I was writing a classic mystery—more of an Appalachian folk horror novel with an environmental twist. The biggest mystery was not the man in the mine crack, but the murder of a river.

            I was lured into writing In the Lonely Backwater by the powerful voice of the main character. As soon as Maggie voiced the opening lines, I knew that I was in for a ride. And gradually the mystery, or mysteries, emerged and became clearer. I had to do a good bit of rewriting to weave in various elements, but when is that not the case?

            And Maggie herself? Well, there is a lot of her in me, or me in her, more than the usual self-identification of creator with characters. I grew up in the country and was a similarly solitary girl wandering the woods, toting around my Golden Guides to identify the rocks, insects, plants that I gathered on my treks.

            I can trace her devotion to Linnaeus and the delights of classification to my own memory of a fine high school biology teacher, and then reading the Fred Chappell story “Linnaeus Forgets,” that reawakened my interest in the Father of Taxonomy. My research, other than continued woods-wandering, included time spent at the University of North Carolina libraries with a 19th-century translation of A Tour in Lapland, Linnaeus’s fascinating diary of his early explorations and a book that comes into Maggie’s hands at a critical point.

            While the death of her beautiful cousin Charisse and the search for her killer form the backbone of the plot, the story is really a character study of a teenager struggling to shape her own life. As Chappell said in his review, “The heart of the mystery is at last (Maggie’s) own heart.”

            And the next? Maybe Maggie has more trouble….

All seventeen-year-old Maggie Warshauer wants is to leave her stifled life in Filliyaw Creek behind and head to college. An outsider at school and uncertain of her own sexual identity, Maggie longs to start again somewhere new. Inspired by a long-dead biologist’s journals, scientific-minded Maggie spends her days sailing, exploring, and categorizing life around her. But when her beautiful cousin Charisse disappears on prom night and is found dead at the marina where Maggie lives, Maggie’s plans begin to unravel. A mysterious stranger begins stalking her and a local detective on the case leaves her struggling to hold on to her secrets—her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s abandonment, a boyfriend who may or may not exist, and her own actions on prom night. As the detective gets closer to finding the truth, and Maggie’s stalker is closing in, she is forced to comes to terms with the one person who might hold the answers—herself.

Buy Links:

https://www.regalhousepublishing.com

Bookshop – https://bookshop.org/shop/ValerieNieman

B&N – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/in-the-lonely-backwater-valerie-nieman/1139962914

Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Valerie+nieman&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss

Valerie Nieman has been a reporter, farmer, sailor, teacher, and always a walker. She is the author of In the Lonely Backwater and four earlier novels, and books of short fiction and poetry. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she has held state and NEA fellowships.

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/valerienieman1/

Twitter – https://twitter.com/valnieman

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/valnieman/

Website – http://www.valnieman.com

Linked in – https://www.linkedin.com/in/valnieman/

Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/529629.Valerie_Nieman