Tidings of Comfort and Joy: Old Books

~ Janet Dawson ~ 6 Comments

I have a lot of books. I love to read. I suppose that’s why I became a writer. I want to tell the stories as well as read them.

No, I haven’t read all the books on my shelves. I enjoy the anticipation and the possibilities of reading them, someday.

Yes, I’ve read many of my books. There are old favorites I read over and over. With the advent of the internet, I discovered I can buy books that I read long ago, for the pleasure of having those books on my shelves, whether originally written for children or adults.

The recent airing of Ken Burns’s The American Revolution has me thinking of that era. However, the American Revolution novel on my shelves takes place in England. The Reb and the Redcoats, written by Constance Savery, was published in 1961. Charlotte Darrington, her brothers Joseph and George, and her little sister Kitty live in a manor house with their mother and their grandparents. Their father, a British officer, is fighting in the colonies. Uncle Laurence, also an officer, has recently returned from the war. The Reb—Randal Everard Baltimore—is a prisoner of war billeted with the family, a 15-year-old boy who was captured aboard a ship while carrying war dispatches from America to France. He’s escaped several times and is now kept under lock and key. A friendship grows between the Reb and Charlotte. It’s a fascinating book, letting the reader glimpse the Revolution from the point of view of English loyalists. I highly recommend it.

A longtime favorite by Phyllis Whitney also sits on my shelves, a book that early on fed my fascination with Japan. Whitney was born in Japan and spent her early years in Asia. The book I love is Secret of the Samurai Sword, published in 1958. Celia and Stephen Bronson arrive in Kyoto to spend the summer with their grandmother, a writer. They soon learn that the ghost of an old-time samurai supposedly haunts the garden. The artist who lives across the street, Gentaro Sato, is sure that it’s the spirit of one of his ancestors. Sato doesn’t like Americans. He’s determined that his Nisei granddaughter, Sumiko, who has come from America with her mother to stay with him, will conform to Japanese tradition, whether she likes it or not. Stephen and Sumiko’s cousin Hiro camp out in the garden, determined to see the ghost, but the figure disappears. It’s left to Celia to find out the truth.

Anya Seton wrote two books that sit on my shelves, read and reread. One I discovered because it was in a Readers Digest Condensed Book. It’s Devilwater, which is a fascinating look at the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and the American frontier in the intervening period, when one of the characters travels to Williamsburg and points beyond. The other Seton book that I frequently revisit is Avalon, set against the background of Anglo-Saxon England, with Vikings expanding their influence to Iceland and Greenland. Both the Seton books are grand historical novels, the kind of books I love, rich with characters, story and details.

I’ll finish this short list of books that bring me comfort and joy with one that I’ve read so many times I swear I have it memorized. My mother had a copy on her shelves, and I first read it way back in my junior high school years. I was dismayed when she loaned it to someone who never returned it—an unpardonable sin, in my opinion.

The book is Désirée, by Annemarie Selinko. Published in 1951, the book takes the form of a diary written by Désirée Clary, the daughter of a silk merchant from Marseille. The book begins in 1794, some five years after the start of the French Revolution, and the naïve 14-year-old has just met an upstart named Napoleon who professes to love her, though he throws her over for a more advantageous marriage with Josephine. Through the course of this historical novel, we get a fascinating picture of France during and after the Revolution, with Napoleon’s reign and his wars thrown in for good measure. And through the years, Désirée observes it all and finds a man who truly loves her.

Ah, books, so many books, so many possibilities—and so many pleasures!

Grit, Grits, or Gritty? by Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 7 Comments

The meaning of the word grit when used to described a person states “courage and resolve; strength of character.” At least, that’s what the Oxford Dictionary says. I like to think I have grit. But I don’t like the word so much. Grit. Naw. Not a great word.

Now grits. I can get behind grits. And often do. Back to the Oxford Dictionary: “A dish of coarsely ground corn kernels boiled in water or milk.” I like my grits in the morning with bacon and eggs. I like cheesy grits. I like buttery grits. Some people like their grits plain, just a little salt and pepper. I can do that, although I really prefer them with lots of butter or cheese. Whoops! I think I said that.

Moving on to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary on the word gritty. When applied to a person it means “Having strong qualities of tough uncompromising realism. A gritty novel.” Unfortunately, I don’t write gritty. I write cozy. I rarely read gritty, either. I like happy endings or at the very least, ones with justice. And I don’t like too much suffering, especially with an animal. If a novel gets too gritty for me (or a movie) I give it a toss. I try to protect myself.

I didn’t used to be like that, but I learned my lesson the hard way. After reading The Pawnbroker at sixteen years old, I didn’t sleep for three nights. I cried all the time. It’s the story of a WWII concentration camp survivor and it was beyond tough to read. In my teens, this book taught me that I don’t have the “4th wall” that most people do. I was traumatized by the book but in a way, it was a good thing. If I had any childish illusions about sadism, concentration camps, and human suffering, this book dispelled them. It also turned me into an adult overnight. I have never been the same after reading it. That is the power of a novel. That is the power of the written word.

Now in all fairness, The Pawnbroker was beyond gritty. But I find the older I get, the more precious life becomes. The more I respect goodness, kindness, and generosity of spirit. I’ve also been through enough gritty things in my own life that I don’t want to spend time reading about other’s grittiness. Plus, if I want to be scared out of my wits, despondent, or depressed I have but to turn on the six o’clock news or step on a scale.

So, I think I’ve covered the three words, grit, grits, and gritty. And give me grits every time.

Guest Blogger ~ MM Desch

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

Why I Wrote an LGBTQ (Medical Thriller) Mystery

Every mystery writer knows that moment when life hands you a story, though mine arrived with the bureaucratic charm of a DEA agent on an ordinary afternoon in my Phoenix psychiatric practice. I suppose I should have expected it, having recently qualified to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid addiction treatment. The universe has peculiar timing, particularly when you’re drawn to the psychological complexities of LGBTQ characters navigating medical mysteries. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent years watching people navigate the collision between who they are and who the world expects them to be, and writing LGBTQ characters in medical crises lets me excavate those psychological fault lines in ways that feel necessary, especially these days.

The agent’s unannounced inspection was routine, professional, even cordial once I explained that I hadn’t actually used this newfound prescribing capability yet. But as we sat in my office, surrounded by the everyday detritus of psychiatric practice, tissues strategically placed, diplomas asserting competence, that one plant I somehow hadn’t killed, my writer’s mind began its familiar excavation. What if I had been prescribing buprenorphine? What if some had gone missing? What if someone in this very building was orchestrating a diversion scheme with the methodical precision of a chess master?

That afternoon planted the seed for Tangled Darkness, though it would marinate in my subconscious for years before finally demanding to be written.

The premise crystallized when I combined that DEA visit with my experiences serving on Arizona’s Medical Board committee for impaired physicians. I’d witnessed how addiction could transform brilliant medical minds into ethical contortionists—people trained to heal suddenly finding themselves entangled in webs of their own making. The stories I heard were psychological case studies in how desperate circumstances can rewrite even the most carefully constructed moral code.

But the real catalyst emerged from a pattern I’d observed: the more ethical and scrupulous a physician was, the more vulnerable they became to exploitation. Their conscientiousness could be weaponized against them with surgical precision. This paradox fascinated me, the idea that integrity could become a liability. What if someone filed a false complaint against an innocent psychiatrist? What if that psychiatrist harbored a secret history that made the accusation both plausible and devastating?

Enter Dr. Leslie Schoen, my protagonist. She’s ethical, competent, and living with the transparency that recovery demands—her wife Izzy knows about her journey with alcoholism, and they’ve built their relationship on that foundation of honesty. Which makes the secret she’s now carrying so much more corrosive. When a Medical Board complaint lands alleging that Leslie has stolen opiates from her clinic, she can’t bring herself to tell Izzy, not when her wife is pregnant, not when the accusation feels like a knife twisted in the wound of her recovery. The irony is exquisite in its cruelty: her very status as someone in recovery makes the false allegation both plausible and devastating.

The murder element emerged from a simple question: In a medical practice where controlled substances represent both healing and profit, what happens when someone knows too much? I envisioned Damon Grady, a medical assistant caught between loyalty and desperation—his death would need to be clinically precise yet psychologically revealing, appearing as an overdose while carrying deeper implications about betrayal and survival.

My years in addiction psychiatry taught me that buprenorphine occupies a uniquely precarious position in the opioid crisis. It’s medication that can save lives when used properly, yet because it is another opioid, it’s valuable currency on the street. This duality—medicine as both salvation and commodity—became the engine driving my plot. The very safeguards designed to prevent diversion could be manipulated by someone who understood the system from within.

Portland provided the perfect setting after my relocation from Phoenix. Here was a city where medical marijuana dispensaries operated alongside prestigious medical centers, where progressive healthcare coexisted with the ongoing addiction crises. This backdrop felt like the perfect petri dish for the story I wanted to tell—where cutting-edge addiction treatment coexisted with people dying from overdoses three blocks away.

What made the premise truly compelling was layering in the psychological complexity I’d observed throughout my career. The most dangerous people I’ve encountered in clinical practice aren’t the ones wearing their pathology like a neon sign—they’re the ones whose choices feel both inexplicable and inevitable. I wanted characters who would make readers squirm with recognition, the kind of people you might defend at a dinner party right up until you learn what they’ve done.

The investigation structure allowed me to explore how medical professionals react under scrutiny. Having participated in peer reviews and committee investigations, I understood the unique terror of having your professional reputation questioned. That fear could drive even innocent people to make choices that would haunt them forever.

Writing Tangled Darkness became an exercise in precision—every scenario needed to be plausible enough that medical professionals would nod in recognition yet twisted enough to keep readers guessing. The drug diversion scheme had to be sophisticated enough to temporarily succeed but flawed enough for a determined psychiatrist to unravel. Because even the most brilliant criminals are ultimately human, and humans make mistakes—often the kind that reveal exactly who they are when nobody’s supposed to be watching.

The deeper I dove into the story, the more I realized I wasn’t just writing about prescription drug diversion or murder. I was exploring how systems designed to help us can be corrupted, how past traumas shape present choices, and how the pursuit of truth sometimes requires risking everything we’ve built. It’s a psychological-medical thriller doubling as an LGBTQ mystery. Many would say all of the above.

That cordial DEA agent who visited my Phoenix office had no idea he was launching a debut novel. But then again, the most compelling stories often begin with an ordinary moment—a routine inspection, a casual question. Sometimes the best plots are just waiting there in the everyday machinery of our lives, disguised as paperwork.

TANGLED DARKNESS

When Dr. Leslie Schoen becomes a suspect in her clinic assistant’s murder, she investigates a dangerous web of opiate drug theft while protecting her pregnant wife and confronting her own haunted past. Racing against time to clear her name, she discovers everyone has secrets—and someone in her inner circle is willing to kill to keep them hidden.

Buy link: https://books2read.com/u/bwgvYO

MM Desch brings over three decades as a practicing psychiatrist to her debut psychological thriller, TANGLED DARKNESS (Rowan Prose Publishing). With a passion for telling realistic stories about the veiled realm of psychiatric practice, Desch blends high crime and suspense with her real-world knowledge of addiction medicine. She and her wife live in Portland, Oregon, USA.

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The Magic of Families

~ dzchurch ~ 2 Comments

From the first Thanksgiving to this…there is magic in our past, and in families who share their stories across that long linen-covered table filled with the food of our nation. As Americans, we often mourn the loss of the nuclear family, but that loss is as old as this country. Those who came first left the safety of a more settled world for the new. And boom! (That’s my version of a nuclear explosion.) They didn’t all stay put; some moved, east to west century after century, connecting, shifting and moving on.

The magic that links us is in the details.

My husband’s family (both sides) came to America shortly after the Mayflower landed. You can call them early adopters, or people seeking religious freedom, either works. Though one group was from the Netherlands and the other from Great Britain, they both left the Netherlands for Massachusetts on the same boat. I have visions of them, one group in their wooden shoes and pointy white hats, the other in their black-and-white Puritan best, huddled in steerage, having a golly-really conversation about Puritanism. Neither group took to it. Those from England stayed in the Bay Colonies before heading south to Rhode Island, then to New Jersey, and finally to Pennsylvania.

The Nederlanders migrated to what became Johnson County, Indiana, where they farmed and became Presbyterians, producing many ministers. Then, almost three hundred years later, the offspring of these immigrants met in Syria, one as a missionary, the other teaching, and, well. Think of the time they could have saved if the two families had married into each other on the way to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

More magic

My father’s mother’s family were Cumberland gappers and verified DARers (yes, they’re in the book). The Alsace-Lorrainian farmers on the other side arrived in the 1830s. Reports handed down through the family drum, which has proven quite accurate, and, with a family bible as evidence, claim that one of those pesky people who keep marrying into families (you know the sort) also hung out in Johnson County, Indiana and married into my father’s line.

If the evidentiary bible is correct, that family sported a Low Countries surname, not dissimilar to that of my husband’s mother’s family.

So, did my husband’s relatives and mine coffee clatch back in Johnson County before each packed up and moved further west? My family to Illinois (is that really west?), my husband’s to Oregon, back when, though a state, it was pretty frontier-ish.

Ruminate on this: How do two people, one from Oregon and one from Pennsylvania, whose families shared passage on the same boat to the New World in the 1600s, end up in Syria about a day after Lawrence of Arabia left and marry each other? And how does their offspring end up marrying a woman in California whose family roosted in Johnson County, Indiana, in the 1800s, when one was born on the East Coast and the other in Illinois?

Gabble away over your turkey

You might discover connections to your past that lead to a future. I urge you to remember, as you write your next tale, nothing is too weird or coincidental when it comes to a family’s past (translation: the duck might be somebody’s uncle).

Happy Thanksgiving. Lots of Turkey. And hugs to all.

Update: For those of you who worried about my lost file. I found it!!!!!! And restored it!!!!! And the book, ‘The Orleans Lady’, is being beta-read right now!!!!

For more about me and my books, go to https://dzchurch.com, where you can sign up for my newsletter and find juicy facts about all my books, including The Wanee Mysteries and The Cooper Quartet. You might even find yourself clicking through to buy one or two, or, heck, all.

EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE

~ Kimila Kay ~ 4 Comments

Hello, Ladies ~

As Thanksgiving approaches, I find myself reminiscing about last year’s holiday, which was the last family celebration I had with my sister, Lori, and uncle, Terry. Of course, we never truly know when we’ll be called home, but I sensed at the time that it would be their last holiday season here on earth.

Every effort was made to enjoy all the trappings and food that come with Thanksgiving and Christmas. We cooked, laughed, and took lots of pictures to capture the special moments.

As I put up my authentic, fake Christmas tree today, a pang of nostalgia pricked my heart knowing I will most likely never trapse through the woods in search of the perfect Noble tree. Large family holiday gatherings are now a thing of the past with the loss of my sister and uncle.

My mini-melancholy vacation was interrupted when one of my Beta readers called with input on “Chaos in Cabo.”

“I loved this book, Kimila,” she said. “I think this is the best book you’ve written so far. I loved all of the emotional turmoil your main characters faced. Their struggles brought them to life, and I couldn’t wait to see how they worked through their issues.”

I choose Beta readers who I know will always be honest with me. I appreciate being told what is wrong with a character or storyline. Knowing where the problems are helps me rewrite the book and bring everything into a better light.

When I finished “Chaos in Cabo,” I didn’t think it was very good. I attributed my concerns to the fact that the book had been written in starts and stops due to the rough journeys of my sister and uncle. Every time I stopped working on the book, I would lose track of the character arcs and storyline. When I was able to get back to writing, I’d have to read from the beginning to reintroduce myself to the story and find my rhythm.

I’ve never suffered from writer’s block, but the weight of my family’s struggles kept me off balance. And then there are those emotions … sadness, anger, confusion, hopelessness … and many more.

Had my emotions bled into my writing? Did the upheaval in my life thread its way into my characters’ lives? Could it be I had channeled my cornucopia of feelings into my story?

“Chaos in Cabo” had three Beta readers, and I was anxious to hear what the other two had to say. When my next reader texted to see if I could talk about the book, I said I’d call her from my car. “No,” she texted, “I want you to focus on what I have to say, so call when you can listen.”

Alarm bells went off, but I called as soon as I could. Her first words were, “This is the best book yet! The characters were so interesting, I didn’t want their stories to end.”

The conversation continued and was similar to what my first Beta reader said. Imagine my delight when I received the same fabulous feedback from Beta reader number three.

I think as writers we bring parts of ourselves and our lives into the stories we write. Maybe it’s a favorite childhood memory that we have a character share with readers. Or a broken heart served up at the hands of a partner who cheated or left without a valid reason. Then there’s the void left in your life when someone dies.

In “Chaos in Cabo,” my heroine, Detective Socorro Cortés, enlists the help of her former fiancé to solve the murder of his niece’s boyfriend. While trying to solve a murder that she thinks is linked to a scam calling crew, she has to deal with another ex who is trying to win her back. Oh, the emotional rollercoaster she rides!

Lieutenant Amado Peña just wants to help his niece and leave Cabo San Lucas as soon as possible. He knows he can’t risk having Coco break his heart again. But when he’s drawn into her efforts to solve two crimes she believes are connected, he finds himself also wondering whether he still has feelings for Socorro Cortés. Can a broken heart learn to love again?

Alida Burton has two goals in life: to remove abusive men from the planet. And to make as much money as possible from unsuspecting marks. Given her cruel treatment at the hands of previous males, Alida has no intentions of falling in love—ever—until she meets Antonio Ruiz. Could it be that even someone as damaged as Alida can overcome her hatred and trust a man?

The wonderful feedback from my Beta readers has reminded me that even the hardest times in our lives can produce small blessings. “Chaos in Cabo” might have taken longer than my normal timeline to write, but I’m thankful that my emotional baggage allowed me to create unforgettable characters with stories that readers don’t want to end.

Ladies ~ I hope your Thanksgiving holiday brings much joy and many blessings. Gobble, Gobble!!!