Guest Blogger ~ Lori Robbins

~ patyjag ~ 7 Comments

It is never too late to be what you might have been. George Eliot

Central to my identity as a writer is that I’m a serial late-bloomer. This pattern began when I was a teenager and decided to ignore conventional wisdom that dictated dancers had to begin training at a very young age. The result of my quixotic effort was a ten-year career onstage that defied the odds. Success as a dancer, of course, meant that I didn’t attend college until long after my peers got their degrees and began their grown-up lives. Luckily, the New York City public university system welcomes nontraditional students like me, and I graduated from Hunter College shortly before giving birth to my third child.

The habit of late starts didn’t end there. I was the oldest beginning teacher at my first job and didn’t publish my first book until the youngest of my six kids graduated high school. This personal history may explain why I love reading and writing stories about people who reinvent themselves. There are many examples of writers who find their voice later in life, but my favorite is Frank McCourt, who published Angela’s Ashes at 66 after spending much of his adult life as a high school teacher. As a former high school English teacher, the trajectory of his career has particular resonance for me.

Reinvention is a central theme in my books as well as my life. I write two mystery series and am in the process of writing a standalone thriller. Series often feature protagonists who deliver a comforting sameness. Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot investigate different crimes but those endeavors don’t materially change who they are. My characters, however, aren’t the same people at the end of the book as they are in the beginning.

The On Pointe series is set in a New York City ballet company and features a ballerina on the wrong side of thirty with two surgically reconstructed knees and an uncertain future. What I didn’t want was an ingenue who triumphantly overcomes obstacles and in the end, becomes a star. Leah is more complex than that. She defies expectations, both fictional and factual. Yes, she’s embroiled in a murder mystery, but the stakes are higher for her than they would be for someone at the start of her career.  Those challenges make her observant, wary, and more than a little cynical. In other words, the perfect amateur sleuth.

The Master Class mysteries leap across the Hudson River to suburban New Jersey and feature an English teacher who also is at a crossroads in her life. Although this marks her as different from someone like Miss Marple, she does share that redoubtable amateur detective’s skill in analyzing personality, means, and motive. Miss Marple draws upon her experiences in the tiny town of St. Mary Mead but Liz Hopewell’s expertise is in literature. It’s her superpower, and she uses it to untangle mysteries when concrete, forensic evidence fails to provide answers. I love puzzles and had a lot of fun integrating clues from books into the narrative. Every chapter title includes a reference to a famous poem or book that might help the reader solve the mystery. Or, it could be a red herring. Teasing out truth from lies is at the heart of these books.

Work is central to the identity of both protagonists. It’s how they define themselves and how others define them. And yet, both rebel against those easy labels to forge an identity filled with the possibilities of what might be next.

Me too.

Study Guide for Murder: A Master Class Mystery

Murder has no place in Liz Hopewell’s perfect suburban life. She left her complicated past behind when she moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey, and she’s determined to forget the violence that shadowed her early years. As an English teacher, wife, and mother, Liz now confines her fascination with dark themes and complicated topics to classroom discussions about Frankenstein and Hamlet. But violence follows her from the mean streets of her childhood home to the manicured lawns of suburbia when Elliot Tumbleson’s head has an unfortunate and deadly encounter with a golf club. Her golf club.

A second murder, a case of mistaken identity, and a rollicking trip back to Brooklyn all point to one prime suspect in each crime. Liz embarks upon a double investigation of homicides past and present, using her gift for literary theory to unearth clues that she finds as compelling as forensic evidence. But the killers, like her students, don’t always read to the end.

Amazon Buy Link: Study Guide for Murder

Lori Robbins writes the On Pointe and Master Class mystery series and is a contributor to The Secret Ingredient: A Mystery Writers Cookbook. She won two Silver Falchions, the Indie Award for Best Mystery, and second place in the Daphne du Maurier Award for Mystery and Suspense. Her short stories include “Leading Ladies”which received an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Best American Mystery and Suspense anthology. A former dancer, Lori performed with Ballet Hispanico and the St. Louis Ballet, but it was her commercial work, for Pavlova Perfume and Macy’s, that paid the bills. After ten very lean years onstage she became an English teacher and now writes full-time.

Her experiences as a dancer, teacher, writer, and mother of six have made her an expert in the homicidal tendencies everyday life inspires.

You can find her at lorirobbins.com

https://www.lorirobbins.com/

https://linktr.ee/lorirobbinsmysteries

https://www.instagram.com/lorirobbinsmysteries/

https://www.facebook.com/lorirobbinsauthor/

https://twitter.com/lorirobbins99

https://www.bookbub.com/profile/lori-robbins

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16007362.Lori_Robbins

Mother/Daughter Characters By Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 6 Comments

Friends and readers ask me where I find my characters, especially the women. I can’t buy them from Walmart, although I did purchase a nifty shower cap there the other day. Even Amazon doesn’t have such a product. I suspect I could buy a new husband on Amazon, should mine start acting up. But characters? Unfortunately, no. So, I tend to draw traits from women around me.

A lot of people suspect the protagonist in the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, Lee Alvarez, is based on me. Nope. Many of Lee’s character facets are actually lifted from my mother. Even her name. While Mom wasn’t christened Lee, she’d taken the name at an early age and when I was born, gave it to me as a middle name. Heather Lee Haven. I dropped the Lee, myself, because I feel that spoken in toto, I sound a bit like a rest home. “You, too, can enjoy your golden days at the Heather Lee Haven.”

But back to my characters. I wanted the protagonist, Lee Alvarez, to be bright, beautiful, quick-witted, spirited, savvy, and a huge lover of life. My mom was all those things. Insecurity was the other side of the coin for her. I never quite knew why my mother had these feelings of insecurity; sometimes people just do. Nonetheless, I handed this dichotomy off to my protagonist. It has a certain charm about it i.e., someone who has everything going for them but is constantly on the lookout for Life’s banana peel.

With Lee, however, I give several reasons for her insecurity. One, since being a small child, she wanted nothing more than to be a professional ballerina but could not make the cut. Mediocre is mediocre. The second reason is having the “perfect” mother.  Step forward Lila Hamilton Alvarez, mother and CEO of the family-owned detective agency, Discretionary Inquiries.

Lila is a cool, aristocratic blonde who wears confidence like a crown on a head that’s never had a bad hair day. As a backstory, this Palo Alto blueblood married a Mexican immigrant, Roberto Alvarez, a scholarship student she met at Stanford U. This marriage surprised no one as he was her equal in every way and theirs was the love affair of the century. A running thread in the series is Lila’s inability to recover from his recent and unexpected death. Their daughter, Lee, takes after her father, even to her dark hair and twilight-blue eyes. But most of the things Lila found irresistible in Roberto, she finds annoying in Lee. They have an edgy relationship, as neither understands the other. But genuine affection is there, and they keep on trying. That’s the key to everything, as we know. Keep moving forward, keep trying.

Don’t let this get around the neighborhood, but I based Lila’s character on two people, my mother-in-law and my then boss. Both were highly intelligent women who liked to put you in your place even before you entered the room. I have a certain amount of sympathy for these real-life women – they were not always well liked – but they serve the strained relationship between the mother/daughter Alvarez women well.

Moving on to the Persephone Cole Vintage Mysteries. Percy Cole, the protagonist, is also a PI. Unlike Lee, who sits at a desk wearing designer clothes and sipping a latte, Percy’s a where-the-rubber-meets-the-road sleuth. She’s also a unique kind of woman, one I’d not tackled before. I had been challenged by my writing instructor to come up with a non-conforming female protagonist. Thus, Persephone Cole was born, and I love her. She’s self-assured and sharp, and by no means the average beauty or thinker of the time. Or of any time.

At five foot eleven in her stocking feet and, for lack of a better word, zaftig, Percy is as physically big, if not bigger, than the average man of the time. She handles herself like a champ. She even takes boxing lessons at the local Y should the occasion arise when she needs to slug a villain. My redheaded, green-eyed gumshoe functions in the 1940s man’s world better than many a man and it all comes naturally to her. As for most other 40s women, they may be helping the war effort by temporarily taking a man’s job on the home front, but they know their place is in the kitchen when the war is over. In Percy’s mind, her place is wherever she wants it to be. What softens this steamroller of a woman is a wicked sense of humor, and being the single mother of an eight-year-old boy, Oliver, a child who gives her life meaning.

Her mother, Lamentation Cole, understands her daughter even better than Percy does herself. Indeed, Mother, as she’s called, has a deep understanding of all three of her children and their father. She has a gift for always honing in on the truth and you will never fool her. Mother is reminiscent of a walking dandelion, being five foot eight, weighing maybe a hundred and ten pounds, topped off by long, wild white hair. She may have many of the characteristics of ZaSu Pitts, a well-known comedic actress of the time, but no one who knows her, especially Percy, underestimates Mother’s astuteness or that she is the glue that holds the family together.

The Alvarez Family Murder Mystery series is based in today’s Palo Alto, California, and the Persephone Cole Vintage Mysteries take place in 1940’s Manhattan. They are for the most part humorous. Although you’d never know it by this post. But in order to be funny, truly funny, you often have to base your humor on sadness or loss, confusion or misunderstanding, and sometimes downright anger. But in both these series, there is familial love which rushes in when all else fails.

My job as a fiction writer is to shine a light on the truth. And my truth is that family is what keeps us going. I believe there are two ways to have a family. Some you are born into. Others you create through love, respect, and honor.

As a side note, on September 1st Bewitched, Bothered, and Beheaded was awarded the Readers’ Favorite Bronze for Best Fiction Mystery Sleuth, 2024. That would be Lee. And she couldn’t have done it without her mother, Lila’s, help!

Time and Characters—Fixed and Fluid

~ Janet Dawson ~ 11 Comments

Jeri Howard is aging a lot slower than I am. She was in her early thirties when I wrote and published Kindred Crimes, the first book in my long-running series, in 1990. Last year, I published the fourteenth book, The Things We Keep. By now Jeri is in her late thirties.

As for me, well, we won’t talk about how old I am, but it’s been a while since I graduated from college. I admit to the aches and pains of what I prefer to call upper middle age.

Jeri is a private investigator in Oakland, California. Way back when, she used paper maps to find her way from place to place and worked on a dual disk drive computer with floppy disks. Remember those? I do! Jeri was always looking for a pay phone when she needed to make calls.

How things have changed. These days, she relies on her smart phone to make calls and get her where she needs to go. She still gumshoes around and talks to people in person, so she can read facial expressions and body language. The internet has been a great help in her detective work. Using the technology available to her, she researches online. In The Things We Keep, she uses a missing persons database as well as online copies of old newspaper articles to get information about the people who inhabit the book, past and present. And that cell phone comes in handy when she needs to take photos or record an interview with a witness.

I recall Sue Grafton, whose book A is for Alibi was published in 1982. Through 25 books, Grafton made the decision to leave her character Kinsey Milhone fixed in time, in the 1980s. She didn’t have to deal with the world progressing and tech marvels like smart phones and the internet.

I chose to go another way. That means I ignore the fact that the Jeri books are getting a bit long in the tooth. It seems that readers don’t mind. Jeri is as popular as she ever was, discovering new readers via ebooks. I’m happy to report that they want more. Thank goodness for that! Note to readers—the plot for the next Jeri Howard case is currently bubbling in my head, waiting to get out.

My series featuring protagonist Jill McLeod is a different matter. Jill is a young woman in her twenties who works as a Zephyrette, or train hostess, on the streamliner train known as the California Zephyr. I’m talking about the original that ran from 1949 through early 1970, not the Amtrak version of the train. These are historical mysteries, set in a particular time. The first in the series, Death Rides the Zephyr, takes place in December 1952 and by the time Death Above the Line rolls down the tracks, it’s October 1953. So, less than a year has passed in Jill’s life.

There are advantages to a series that’s fixed in time. I don’t have to worry that a reader will notice that the books have aged. They’re supposed to be historical. I concern myself with researching what was going on in a particular month in 1953, so I can drop in details that give the flavor of life in the fifties. That includes the books Jill is reading, the music she listens to, and the movies she sees.

My third series takes place in the present day and it features Kay Dexter. She’s in her fifties and has her own business, working as a geriatric care manager, one who assists families with care of older adults, usually aging parents. Kay puts in her first appearance in The Sacrificial Daughter. I figure Kay is not aging as fast as I am either. Like the Jeri books, Kay operates in the contemporary world, so she’s using the technology that implies.

As always, it will be a challenge to keep writing contemporary stories without letting the ages of characters, and events, get in the way.

Guest Blogger ~ Lorie Lewis Ham

~ patyjag ~ 10 Comments

The Birth of My Main Character Roxi Carlucci

By Lorie Lewis Ham

The main character in my latest book, One of You, the second book in my Tower District Mystery series, had a bit of a journey before discovering where she belonged. Here is her story.

In the early 2000s, I wrote a mystery series that featured a gospel-singing amateur sleuth named Alexandra Walters. She lived in a fictional version of my hometown of Reedley called Donlyn. While writing the final book in the series, The Final Note, which came out in 2010, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next.

There is a character named Stephen Carlucci who has been with me from the very beginning. He has never had a series of his own, but he has been present in every book I’ve written. So when my last series ended I set him up to move on as well since Alex ended up with someone else and not him. The original plan was for him to move to the coast of California near Santa Cruz where his cousin Roxi Carlucci lived. First, though, I had to create Roxi.

I had decided to write a new series featuring Roxi set in a fictional town on the coast of California called Ayr. She ran a pocket pet animal rescue (hamsters, guinea pigs, pet rats) and wrote children’s books. When I first came up with this idea there weren’t any animal rescue cozies that I was aware of and it was a world I knew well having run an animal rescue for several years. It seemed like a perfect idea. I introduced Roxi in The Final Note, even including some chapters from her point of view. Done with the intention of immediately starting her series after that.

Alex had been too much like me, so I wanted Roxi to be different. I started by making her tall—I am not quite five feet. She is also braver than I am, and far more outspoken. By making her Stephen’s cousin, she automatically had a darker side as they come from a Mafia family, even though they both chose different paths. Roxi also knows how to use a sword—something I have since started learning myself.

When I finally tried to sit down and write the first book with Roxi, it just wasn’t working. I kept trying, but suddenly now the cozy mystery world was being flooded with animal rescue mysteries so it also no longer felt unique. Perhaps I wasn’t able to write it because it just wasn’t the right series for Roxi. The world I created for her just didn’t work. But since I’d already created Roxi, I didn’t want to let her go. So what was I to do with her?

While I was pondering that question, I was also creating my online magazine called Kings River Life (KRL), and that began taking up a lot of my time. But it also ended up leading to the answer to my dilemma with Roxi. While half of KRL covers mystery, the other half is all local (I live in the San Joaquin Valley of California near Fresno). We cover local arts and entertainment, food, and animal rescue, among other things. One day while in Fresno’s arts and entertainment district to review a play it dawned on me that this area would make a great setting for a mystery series! This district is called The Tower District! Hence the Tower District Mysteries came to be.

Roxi however, lived on the coast of California so I had to figure out how to get her to the Tower District. I decided that I would have her lose her book contract, and have her roommate get married and move out, leaving Roxi without a way to pay her mortgage. Mean I know, but sometimes it just has to be done.

I also decided that after being dumped by Alex, her cousin Stephen moved to the Tower District and he just “happened” to have a spare room that Roxi could stay in while figuring out the rest of her life. So Roxi closed her rescue, packed up her life, and moved to the Tower District. She may not have been thrilled at first about leaving behind a lovely coastal town for the summer heat of Fresno, but by book 2, One of You, she is settling in nicely and discovering that living in the Tower District isn’t so bad. She’s made friends, started an entertainment podcast, and she is even helping to put on a big mystery event called Mysteryfest during Halloween at the local bookstore.

As to the rest of how she came to be, well oddly enough Roxi shares a lot of my interests, even if she isn’t as much like me as Alex was. Just a different assortment of them than Alex did—with a few exceptions like Frank Sinatra—come on she’s Italian!

I hope you will want to get to know Roxi in the first two books in this series, One of Us and One or You, and that you will come to like her as much as I do.

Lorie has a Giveaway of an ebook copy of One of You or One of Us winner’s choice. Just leave a comment and she’ll pick a winner

With her life on the California Coast behind her, Roxi Carlucci is beginning to feel at home in the Tower District—the cultural oasis of Fresno, CA—where she now lives with her cousin P.I. Stephen Carlucci, her pet rat Merlin, a Pit Bull named Watson, and a black cat named Dan. She has a new entertainment podcast, works as a part-time P.I., and is helping local bookstore owner Clark Halliwell put on the first-ever Tower Halloween Mysteryfest! The brutal summer heat is gone and has been replaced by the dense tule fog—perfect for Halloween!

She just wishes everyone would stop calling her the “Jessica Fletcher” of the Tower District simply because she found a dead body when she first arrived. But when one of the Mysteryfest authors is found dead, she fears she jinxed herself! The Carlucci’s are hired to find the killer before they strike again. Will Mysteryfest turn into a murder fest? How is the local gossip website back, and what does it know about the death of Roxi’s parents?

Buy links-

Ebook amazon https://tinyurl.com/83befuae

Amazon print https://tinyurl.com/tb79uukj

Barnes and Noble.com ebook https://tinyurl.com/4trwukbb

Barnes and Noble.com print https://tinyurl.com/yf3kyhxj

Kobo https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/one-of-you-3

Universal Buy Link https://books2read.com/u/m0eWAy

Lorie Lewis Ham lives in Reedley, California and has been writing ever since she was a child. Her first song and poem were published when she was 13, and she has gone on to publish many articles, short stories, and poems throughout the years, as well as write for a local newspaper, and publish 7 mystery novels. For the past 14 years, Lorie has been the editor-in-chief and publisher of Kings River Life Magazine, and she produces Mysteryrat’s Maze Podcast, where you can hear an excerpt of her book One of Us, the first in a new series called The Tower District Mysteries. Book 2, One of You, was released in June of 2024. You can learn more about Lorie and her writing on her website mysteryrat.com and find her on Facebook, BookBub, Goodreads, and Instagram @krlmagazine & @lorielewishamauthor.

Guest Blogger ~ Marla White

~ patyjag ~ 7 Comments

Why I Write the Un-Cozy Genre

Any time someone asks “why do you write mysteries” I tell them because it’s the only way to kill someone who irritates me and not go to jail.

And I tend to stick to cozy mysteries because I don’t want to have to learn cop procedures. Just kidding. I still do a lot of research on cop jargon, weapons, and crimes, but I like to focus on what makes characters tick more than the policy and protocols. I leave that to the more procedural driven writers because those are the kind of details you cannot get wrong and still maintain your readers’ trust.

First, let’s establish that most people define a cozy mystery as a book set in a small town. In “Framed for Murder”, the setting of Pine Cove is heavily influenced by the actual town of Idyllwild, California. Neighbors know each other, they have a dog for a mayor, and there’s only two major streets. To me, there’s something comforting about characters living in a place where nothing truly bad happens (unless you count the dead person who usually is universally disliked anyway) and often there’s a spark of romance. It’s a nice break from real life.

One of the first books I read as a kid was a Nancy Drew mystery, so detectives out of uniform who can make up the rules as they go along have always been appealing. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, Robert Parker’s Spenser, and of course the great Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum all get to solve crimes but bend a few laws along the way. Dick Francis’ mysteries were a huge influence as well. My first full-length novel from The Wild Rose Press, “Cause for Elimination,” has a cop as one of the main characters, but there’s also Emily Conners, professional horse trainer and part-time snoop. Besides, once you throw a little romance in there, it’s reasonable that some rules get broken. Plus, his partner is a snarky, lovable jerk who refuses to draw inside the lines anyway, so problem solved!

Which brings me to the “un-cozy” part of the story. One reviewer loved “Framed for Murder” but commented that they’d call it an un-cozy because my characters go beyond the sure steadiness of a Miss Marple. For instance, my characters’ lives are screwed up long before they find the body In the Pine Cove books, the main character Mel O’Rourke faces a fear of heights, learns how to run an aging B&B, deals with her eccentric grandmother, and solves a murder. The stakes for Mel aren’t just life or death, although there’s that too; she struggles with her identity as she has to start her life over.

In truth, I’m one of those idiots that writes in multiple genres. The idea of self-discovery is a common theme throughout all of them, whether it’s after losing a job, a cheating boyfriend, or the world as you knew it. It’s when characters are at their most vulnerable but also the most interesting. It’s one thing to know at the end of a cozy the killer will be caught, that’s kind of a given. But as a writer, I love the journey of writing a book where I have no idea what’s next for my characters beyond solving the core plot problem until I’ve outlined all the way to ‘The End’.

Old enemies become allies to unravel a deadly mystery. 

Mel O’Rourke used to be a cop before a life-changing injury forced her to turn in her badge. Now she leads a relatively peaceful life running a B & B in the quirky mountain town of Pine Cove. That is, until her old frenemy, the charismatic cat burglar Poppy Phillips, shows up, claiming she’s been framed for murder. While she’s no saint, Mel knows she’d never kill anyone and sets out to prove Poppy’s innocence.

The situation gets complicated, however, when the ruggedly handsome Deputy Sheriff Gregg Marks flirts with Mel, bringing him dangerously close to the criminal she’s hiding. And just when her friendship with café owner Jackson Thibodeaux blossoms into something more, he’s offered the opportunity of a lifetime in New Orleans. Should she encourage him to go, or ask him to stay? Who knew romance could be just as hard to solve as murder?

Buy Links

Amazon – https://bit.ly/43Uwj96

Barnes and Noble – https://bit.ly/3TKdPDu

Apple Books – https://books.apple.com/us/book/framed-for-murder/id6483932566

GoodReads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211106987-framed-for-murder

AllAuthor – https://allauthor.com/book/87348/framed-for-murder-a-pine-cove-mystery/

Books2Read – books2read.com/u/4Djgor  

Book Bub-https://www.bookbub.com/books/framed-for-murder-by-marla-a-white

Marla White is an award-winning novelist who prefers killing people who annoy her on paper rather than in real life. Her first full-length mystery novel, “Cause for Elimination,” placed in several contests including Killer Nashville, The RONE Awards, The Reader’s Favorite, and finishing second in the Orange County Romance Writers for Romantic Suspense. Originally from Oklahoma, she lived in a lot of other states before settling down in Los Angeles to work in the television industry.  She currently teaches at UCLA Extension and gives seminars about the art of script coverage. When she’s not working on the next book, she’s hiking, cheering on the LA Kings, or discovering new craft cocktails (to, you know, drown her sorrows over the Kings #GKG).  

Social Media Links

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/TheScriptFixer

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

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

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@marlaw825

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21467766.Marla_A_White

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/marla-a-white

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3MHIzkB

Substack: https://substack.com/@marlawhite?utm_source=edit-profile-page