Hope, or, Why we love a good #mystery #series

December 21, 2015 ~ janegorman ~ 2 Comments

At this time of year, it seems perfectly reasonable to write about hope. We gather with family and friends, cuddle up in front of a cozy fire, laugh, talk — and read, of course! As the song says, “we’ll conspire, as we dream by the fire, to face unafraid, the plans that we made …”

books

I’ve been thinking about plans and hope. Not my plans (or my hopes) but those of Adam Kaminski, the hero in the Adam Kaminski mystery series.

Adam has dreams. Or at least he did. Until his view of the world was shattered through one cruel, heartless act. That devastation changed his dreams and changed his life course. He left teaching to join the Philadelphia Police Department, intent on chasing down the bad guys who posed a threat to the safety of the people he loved and cared for.

My job as author is to force Adam to face his lost dreams, to help him strive for his lost hope. It’s not easy! Sometimes it’s so much easier to let him sit back, take life as it comes, watch from the sidelines even. But that wouldn’t make for very interesting reading.

In any mystery, the detective, whether amateur or professional, must throw himself into the path of danger. She must face her fears, thwart the villain. And in each book, that’s exactly what happens. But the attraction of a series is that other story, the longer story arc that the character follows over multiple books.

For Adam Kaminski, that longer story sends him on a quest to find the truth about his family legacy and to find the hope that he lost, the hope that led him to be a teacher in the first place.

Whenever I’m tempted to make life easy for Adam, to let him zip through a case, solve the murder in front of him without delving too deeply into other mysteries, I remind myself of his dream. I owe him. He needs me to let him dig deeper, to send him to unknown places, so that he can find the answers he needs, the faith in humanity that will give him back his hope.

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Links to all available retailers for the Adam Kaminski mystery series can be found at my website.

Ax-murderess or Victim by Paty Jager

December 14, 2015December 12, 2015 ~ patyjag ~ 7 Comments

paty shadow (1) I recently ran across a story in the local paper written by an Oregon State University Professor. He brought to light the first female murderer in Oregon’s territorial prison. Her story is interesting to my mystery writer mind. Back when she took an ax to her husband, they didn’t take spousal abuse into consideration for a woman’s actions. But this story lends itself well to several directions a mystery writer could take it.

Charity Lamb and her husband traveled to Oregon Territory in 1852 via the Oregon Trail. They had five children ages, nineteen to a newborn baby. The Oregon Territory at that time had few woman and the family was busy trying to build a house and starting crops.

The husband on several occasions had punched, kicked, and thrown a hammer at Charity leaving a large gash on her forehead.

The nineteen-year-old daughter fancied she was in love with a drifter. The man was also smitten with the daughter and showed Charity kindness. Mr. Lamb refused to allow the two to marry and forbid the daughter to converse with the man when he left the area. Charity helped her daughter write and mail letters to the man. Mr. Lamb caught Charity with one of the letters and told her he would kill her before he’d let her leave.

A day later as he was leaving to go hunting, Mr. Lamb turned at the gate, drew up his rifle, and aimed it at Charity. One of the children noticed and he turned the barrel, shooting into a tree. That day Charity and the daughter planned a way to murder Mr. Lamb. That night as they all sat down to dinner, Charity excused herself and walked back in with an ax and hit Mr. Lamb twice with it, making a two inch cut in his skull. Mr. Lamb wasn’t dead. Charity and her daughter fled to the neighbors and a doctor took care of Mr. Lamb until he died a week later. But not before telling everyone he didn’t mistreat his wife.

Charity and her daughter were looked upon as ruthless women, until the children were put on the stand and told of the abuse Mr. Lamb had given their mother. The daughter’s trial was first. She was acquitted. But at that time the courts couldn’t figure out how to try Charity. It was self-defense but not really as the man was sitting at the table not attacking her when she axed him. Which made it seem like insanity, but they found her sane.

And so, Charity Lamb received second-degree murder with life in prison. She was the only woman at the territorial prison. Years later she was sent to the insane asylum where she lived out the rest of her sentence, dying in 1879.

From this story I see spousal abuse as a means for someone to murder and in the case of the daughter she wanted to be with her love. Two good reasons to kill, well for a character in a murder mystery not in real life. But it does happen in real life, so using these premises in a book, would work in the reader’s mind.

What do you think? Would a story like Charity’s be plausible or unbelievable in a book today?

Website

Writing into the Sunset

What Fresh Hell is This?

November 4, 2015 ~ jlsimpsonauthor ~ 1 Comment

You might think that the life of an author is all glamour and thrills, but you’d be wrong. I am looking down the barrel of a deadline and I am just not ready. My editor has already put the date back a month for me but I am still struggling. Book 3 in my series was going great guns. Things were happening, balls were in the air, juggling was going on. Nothing was going to stop me, until I got to the middle of the book. The nice shiny new was gone. The end seemed to be way too far to go. The plot was beyond my comprehension and I wanted to join my heroine in a large glass of wine.

So what do you do when you don’t want to do what you are supposed to be doing? You find something more interesting. My more interesting involved all sorts of things. Starting a diet, cooking (and if any of you knew me you’d know just how much I wanted to avoid writing if I was hanging out in the kitchen with a cook book), I started jogging again, and I decided to learn book marketing.

Can you guess which one had me running back to my half written manuscript? Yep, marketing. I’ve been buried in books on marketing, online videos, I have been wrestling with Amazon to add keywords to my books so that people can find them.

I am now in the midst of a course on how to advertise on Facebook. That is an exercise in frustration if ever there was one. I spent one evening wrestling with the Power Editor on Facebook creating an advert and nothing worked. The things I created kept disappearing. My stress levels were at maximum and the next morning I had an appointment with my doctor to get my blood pressure checked. I was shocked that it was normal because I felt like my head was going to explode.

Anyway, despite my best efforts, I am yet to crack marketing but it’s all good. For some unknown reason, whilst I was banging about screwing up everything I touched trying to give my first book away to a US audience, it took off in the UK and peaked at number two on the best sellers list in its genre. How or why that happened is still a mystery. Did someone somewhere talk it up online? Did Amazon decide to wind me up by emailing hundreds of people suggesting that they download it?

I wish I knew so that I could try and do it again. Meanwhile I have a photo of my computer screen showing how well it did and I will continue battling away trying to get a grip on book marketing. So, if you haven’t read my book…and there are millions of you…feel free to take tiptoe over to Amazon and download a copy. I need all the help I can get with this book selling lark.

You can download it at Amazon.

Guest Blogger – Lea Wait

August 29, 2015June 8, 2015 ~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

Old houses have always fascinated me.

I’ve lived in old houses – in fact, I’ve never lived in a home or apartment built after 1920. I’ve even bought old homes that needed a lot of love (and money) to give them amenities like plumbing and heat.

The house I live in now was built in 1774 on an island in a Maine river. In 1832 it was moved across the frozen river and pulled up a steep hill to where it is today. My family has only owned this home since the mid-1950s, but I often think of the people who lived here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I’ve actually included them in some of my historical novels.

The history of the house itself was the basis for Shadows on the Coast of Maine, the second in my Shadows Antique Print Mystery series. (And – no – the mystery is fictional. We didn’t find THAT when we uncovered the original fireplace.)

I’ve loved the homes I’ve lived in. But I’ve always had a special fascination for old deserted, dilapidated, houses.

Victorian farmhouses crumbling next to their barns on land that’s now fallow. Elegant mansions that became too expensive to heat, or too easy to tax, that were abandoned, perhaps eventually to become office buildings, or apartments, or turned into nursing homes or bed and breakfasts. Or, sadly and too often, bulldozed to make way for more modern, more cost-effective, buildings.

I love books centered around mysterious houses, too. I can’t resist books by authors like Mary Stewart and Daphne du Maurier and Kate Morton. I love mysteries by Linda Fairstein because, although they’re not exactly about large houses, they do incorporate the hidden history of famous New York City landmarks.

I even dream of immense houses full of rooms. I dream of walking through corridors and planning how I’m going to fix up the rooms for people in my family, or for people who are homeless. The houses in my dreams are always in poor condition, but I know they can be brought back to life. The empty rooms can become a home.

I’ve been having dreams like that since I was a child. (Any psychoanalysts out there?)

So it probably isn’t a surprise that my latest book is about – guess what? A large nineteenth century estate on the coast of Maine that, in 1970, was the place a teenaged girl died.

No one has lived in the house for years.

No question. It’s my kind of house.

Lea’s latest book is THREADS OF EVIDENCE. The old Gardner estate in Haven Harbor, Maine been deserted for years. Folks in town thought it should be torn down. But now a famous Hollywood actress has bought it. Does she have a special reason to come to Haven Harbor? The small village is full of old secrets. When needlepointer Angie Curtis is asked to restore a series of old needlepoint pictures found in the Gardener house, she finds clues that may lead to discovering what really happened in 1970, when seventeen-year-old Jasmine Gardener died there.

Amazon link:

http://www. amazon.com/Threads-Evidence-&pebp=1433544126655&perid=OTJPND2814N6ZJ8AS7F1

Lea Wait writes the Shadows Antique Print mystery series, the Mainely Needlepoint series, and historical novels for young people. As a single parent she adopted her four daughters from different Asian countries. She’s now the grandmother of eight, and lives on the coast of Maine with her husband, artist Bob Thomas, and their black cat, Shadow. To learn more about Lea and her books, see http://www.leawait.com and friend her on Facebook and Goodreads.

Guest Blogger – Lois Winston

July 25, 2015July 20, 2015 ~ patyjag ~ 10 Comments

Jim Phelps, Bill Cosby, and Atticus Finch

I’ve been thinking a lot about heroes lately, both real and fictional. I need heroes. The world needs heroes. Heroes help us make sense of the senseless and give us hope because they’re willing to take a stand to do what’s right in order to make the world a better place for all of us.

However, lately some of my heroes have been letting me down. It started with the reboot of Mission Impossible back in 1996. Anyone who remembers the television show from 1966-1973 knows that Jim Phelps was one of the good guys, a man who risked his life for the greater good of mankind. Then the first movie comes along and turns Jim into a bad guy. After that I never watched another movie in the franchise. No way could I accept Jim Phelps as a villain.

In 1984 The Cosby Show debuted, and Bill Cosby became America’s dad. My kids grew up watching that show. Bill Cosby lived part-time a few blocks from us. We admired the man not only for the character he portrayed on TV but for the real person and the good he did. I want to believe he’s innocent of the charges made against him, but the overwhelming evidence and his own words given in a deposition seem to prove otherwise. America’s dad has been shown to have a dark side. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement; I’m outraged.

And now it turns out that Atticus Finch is a racist. I won’t be reading Go Set a Watchman because I don’t want my image of that just and honorable man from To Kill a Mockingbird tainted by this older, hateful version of the character. I’m not the only one. Social media is aghast and atwitter over this unexpected and unwelcome reinvention of one of America’s fictional heroes.

So I began to wonder, do authors make a solemn pact with their readers, and what happens when they break that agreement? In many instances, they disappoint their fans. Readers expect a certain experience when they pick up a book from an author they’ve come to enjoy, especially when the book is part of a series. Authors who have killed off beloved characters or in some other way disappointed their readership have experienced unwelcome vocal backlash.

The fifth novel in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series is now available. I haven’t turned Anastasia into a villain, nor have I bumped off any beloved characters in the book. However, I have introduced a plot twist that I hope readers will enjoy. I want to live up to my readers’ expectations. I never want to disappoint them, and I hope I haven’t with this new installment.

A Stitch to Die For

An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, Book 5

The adventures of reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack continue in A Stitch to Die For, the 5th book in the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series by USA Today bestselling author Lois Winston.

Ever since her husband died and left her in debt equal to the gross national product of Uzbekistan, magazine crafts editor and reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack has stumbled across one dead body after another—but always in work-related settings. When a killer targets the elderly nasty neighbor who lives across the street from her, murder strikes too close to home. Couple that with a series of unsettling events days before Halloween, and Anastasia begins to wonder if someone is sending her a deadly message.

Buy Links

Paperback http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1940795303/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1940795303&linkCode=as2&tag=loiswins-20&linkId=LBEMP6U7TVMCBQMT

Kindle http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010M9U5Q2/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B010M9U5Q2&linkCode=as2&tag=loiswins-20&linkId=ZRX4XIA2N5VX6ARK

Nook

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-stitch-to-die-for-lois-winston/1122259040?ean=2940150965928

iTunes

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/a-stitch-to-die-for/id1014678389?mt=11

Kobo

https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/a-stitch-to-die-for

Google Play

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Lois_Winston_A_Stitch_to_Die_For?id=XZEbCgAAQBAJ&hl=en

(Other books in the series include Assault With a Deadly Glue Gun, Death by Killer Mop Doll, Revenge of the Crafty Corpse, and three mini-mysteries: Crewel Intentions, Mosaic Mayhem, and Patchwork Peril.)

Bio: USA Today bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and non-fiction under her own name and her Emma Carlyle pen name. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Visit Lois/Emma at www.loiswinston.com and Anastasia at the Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers blog, www.anastasiapollack.blogspot.com. Follow everyone on Tsu at www.tsu.co/loiswinston, on Pinterest at www.pinterest.com/anasleuth, and onTwitter @anasleuth. Sign up for her newsletter at https://www.MyAuthorBiz.com/ENewsletter.php?acct=LW2467152513