Launch day thanks

Launch day has been fun, which shows me you don’t have to do a signing or an online party. Just put the word out there. Thanks to all who have reposted my notices, sent congrats and good wishes. I hope you all read the interview by fictional Anastasia Pollock (Lois Winston’s wonderful and zany crafting mystery person) with my fictional Kate Chamber of the Blue Plate Café. Frankly I thought Kate whined a bit about me when Anastasia asked how her life has changed, what she expected next, and so on. But read it for yourself at http://anastasiapollack.blogspot.com/

The Blue Plate Café Mysteries came about because my family and I used to visit Charles and Reva Ogilvie, now both gone, who had Arc Ridge Guest Ranch near Ben Wheeler, in East Texas. It was ritual for us to eat at The Shed, a down-home café in Edom, where chicken-fried steak is always on the menu and the Saturday night feature is fried catfish. My kids and I loved those meals, as much for the idea and tradition as for the food, though the latter was pretty good—and though I haven’t been there in years, I hear it’s still good today.

In the seventies and eighties, when my kids were young, Edom was an unusual town for east Texas—a craft center. You could browse shops owned by a jeweler, a painter, a leather craftsman, a silversmith, a couple of potters—and then rub elbows with the artists at lunch or supper at The Shed. But it wasn’t all artsy—local farmers and ranchers were regulars, and on Sundays the after-church crowd hit the café.

When I was searching for a new series and knew I wanted it to have to do with food, I hit on the idea of using The Shed as my model. Reva was gone by then, and I thought it might amuse Charles to be part of planning the series—I never did figure out if it did or not really interest him. I invented the fictional town of Wheeler, to avoid using either Ben Wheeler, which has become a tourist town in its own right, or Edom, which survives nicely today. Of course, someone immediately pointed out that the real Wheeler, Texas is in the Panhandle. Well, sorry folks—remember about fictional license.

In my books Kate Chambers, a paralegal in Dallas, inherits the restaurant, with her “difficult” twin sister Donna, when their grandmother is murdered—read the first in the series, Murder at the Blue Plate Café. Of course, that, too, is fictional license—I have no idea who owns the café and once I talked to a manager who proved to be quite temporary. But the town of Wheeler has taken hold of my mind.

In this new book, Kate’s trouble antennae go up when Dallas developer Silas Fletcher sees endless real estate opportunities in Wheeler, if only he can “grow” the town. Kate Chambers likes her hometown just the way it is, thank you very much, without big box and chain stores. When Fletcher tries to capitalize on a thirty-year-old unsolved murder, Kate knows she must fight for her town, and she uses historic preservation of the old bus depot as one of her weapons. A suspicious death and a new murder make her also fight for her own life.

Hope you enjoy. Ho hum, I’m going to sleep.