Sleuthing in a canoe and on a motorcycle



Please welcome my Wednesday guest, Lesley Diehl. Lesley retired from her life as a professor of psychology and reclaimed her country roots by moving to a small cottage in the Butternut River Valley in upstate New York. In the winter she migrates to old Florida—cowboys, scrub palmetto, and open fields of grazing cattle, a place where spurs still jingle in the post office and gators make golf a contact sport. Back north, the shy ghost inhabiting the cottage serves as her literary muse. When not writing, she gardens, cooks and renovates the 1874 cottage with the help of her husband, two cats and, of course, Fred the ghost, who gives artistic direction to their work. She is author of several short stories and a number of mystery series including the microbrewing series (A Deadly Draught; Poisoned Pairings), a rural Florida mystery series (Dumpster Dying; Grilled, Chilled and Killed), A Secondhand Murder, the first in The Eve Appel mystery series and her most recent, Murder Is Academic. Please welcome Lesley as she tells us about her newest book.

 

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In keeping with the snooping amateur sleuths who populate my cozy mysteries, I’ve got a new woman who joins their ranks. In Murder Is Academic the setting is a small town in upstate New York, and the protagonist is Laura Murphy, psychology professor at the local college, a woman addicted to chocolate-covered donuts and something unexpected: solving murders. Don’t be fooled by her credentials. Despite all those degrees, she’s arrived at that point in her life when everything seems to be falling into place including her middle-aged body, sagging in ways she never anticipated when she was younger. What to do? The weather is fine, so Laura and Annie, her best friend decide that entering a fifty-mile canoe race might just be the thing for losing weight. The results are different from what they expected. Not only has Laura done little exercise other than lift her coffee cup to her lips, she’s not prepared for what she encounters on the water: the dead body of the college president. When she says yes to dinner with a Canadian biker, she finds herself and her date suspects in the murder.

Laura’s friend, the detective assigned the case, asks her to help him find out who on the small upstate New York college campus may be a killer. The murder appears to be wrapped up in some unsavory happenings on the lake where Laura lives. A fish kill and raw sewage seeping into the water along with the apparent drowning suicide of a faculty member complicate the hunt for the killer. So you see, college life for our professor is much more than grading exams, writing research papers of serious intellectual import, and swearing at her computer when something goes wrong on the internet. Yup, there’s this hunky biker dude and the possibility that she can outwit her detective friend in finding the killer. There is a downside to the joys of finding love later in life and chasing down clues to the murder, both slimming activities with fewer muscle aches than canoeing. Things can get personal, and they do. The killer makes a threatening phone call to Laura. With a tornado bearing down on the area and the killer intent upon silencing her, Laura’s sleuthing work may come too late to save her and her biker from a watery grave.

As you can guess, everything turns out well for Laura. Sleuthing replaces eating donuts, and riding on the back of a motorcycle results in much more than messed up hair. Another sassy gal takes on murder, gets thinner and falls in love. Laura Murphy defeats hot flashes and killers. There will be a sequel: Failure Is Fatal, in which Laura tackles bad frat boys.

Website: www.lesleyadiehl.com

Buy link: http://store.untreedreads.com/Books/UTR9781611879414 in all eformats

Amazon buy link http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JCV6XG8

 

 

 

 

 

A guest...and a new book

Please welcome Joyce LaVene, my Wednesday Guest. She and her husband, Jim Lavene, write award-winning, bestselling mystery fiction as themselves, J.J. Cook, and Ellie Grant. They have written and published more than 70 novels for Harlequin, Berkley, Amazon, and Gallery Books along with hundreds of non-fiction articles for national and regional publications. They live in rural North Carolina with their family. Visit them at www.joyceandjimlavene.com  and www.jjcook.net

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A new book is like a new baby. Everyone fawns over it, and fusses about it. If you’re lucky—there is more cooing than mudslinging at the parents. Its arrival is always exciting, full of promise and wonder. You can’t feel the birth pains anymore because you’re too overwhelmed by the glory of having done it. The end result is pretty much the only thing that gets most authors through the process.

Not surprisingly, since I’m here today, I have a new baby/book that came out at the beginning of January. The title is Playing with Fire. It’s the second book in the Sweet Pepper Fire Brigade Mysteries.

The protagonist is a little different than most cozy mystery readers are used to. Stella Griffin is a ten-year veteran firefighter from Chicago who comes to the small town of Sweet Pepper, Tennessee to jumpstart their new volunteer fire brigade. She’s strong, professional, and able to lead her small band of men and women in and out of danger. She doesn’t plan to stay after the fire brigade is up and running.

Then she meets Eric.

Eric Gamlyn is the former Sweet Pepper fire chief. He was killed in a fire forty years ago and ended up back at the log cabin he built. He’s been there ever since. His main source of enjoyment has been frightening away people who want to live in his cabin, and watching the Little Pigeon River run by his deck. When Stella shows up, the situation changes. He wants her to stay in Sweet Pepper and rebuild his fire brigade.

And he finds out that he didn’t really die in the silo fire he thought had claimed his life. His bones were found in the walls of the firehouse he’d built, along with his badge and his uniform.

Stella and Eric met for the first time in That Old Flame of Mine, book one in the series. Hero’s Journey is a novella between the two books that tells the story of the fire brigade’s mascot, a Dalmatian named Hero. He’s training to be a rescue dog so he can work with the team.

In Playing with Fire, Stella has to make a decision about staying in Sweet Pepper or going home to Chicago. Her job there won’t be on hold forever. Her parents come to Sweet Pepper to convince her that she shouldn’t stay. But Stella is determined to figure out what really happened to Eric, no matter what it takes. She’s also more than halfway in love with the small mountain town. It’s not an easy decision. She knows she’ll never be fire chief at home, another factor that weighs in Sweet Pepper’s favor.

And there’s the Pepper Festival. It’s the town’s yearly celebration of all things pepper. Sweet Pepper gets its name from growing, packaging, and selling the hottest, sweetest peppers in the world. The festival is three days of pepper-eating contests, pepper-recipe contests, pepper hats, and pepper games.

A lot of research went into creating Sweet Pepper, which is close to the Smoky Mountains National

Park, Pigeon Forge, and Sevierville. Even more research went into what it would take to set up a small volunteer group. Writing about fighting fires was easier. There are firefighters in my family, both volunteers, and professionals in Chicago. Creating the volunteer firefighters, who race into fires and learn as they go, was fun and exhausting at times.

A third book will be out in 2015, In Hot Water, which continues the story of Eric, Stella, Hero, and all the others. A new book is only as exciting as the feelings and characters we create for it. This story has been a wild ride. I want to thank all of the readers who have written such nice letters and reviews. It’s only because of you that the story goes on.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Wednesday guest--with some great sounding books

Please welcome my guest author, Carolyn Mulford.

Carolyn decided to become a writer while growing up on a Missouri farm. She earned an M.A. in journalism and went off to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia. There she became fascinated by other cultures and addicted to travel. She edited a United Nations magazine in Vienna, Austria, and a national service-learning magazine in Washington, D.C. She then worked as a freelance writer and editor and dabbled in fiction.

A few years ago she moved back to Missouri to focus on fiction. Her first novel, The Feedsack Dress, became Missouri's Great Read at the 2009 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. In 2013 Five Star released the first two books in her mystery series, Show Me the Murder in February and Show Me the Deadly Deer in December. The books (in hardcover and Kindle) feature three women who grew up together in a small town, led wildly different lives for thirty-five years, and come together again as each faces a major crisis.

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I select the main characters for my books as carefully as I choose companions for a long trip. They must share some of my interests but differ enough to surprise, challenge, and entertain me day after day for months.

The protagonist for my Show Me series began to form ten years ago while I was working in Washington, D.C. I was horrified when the Bush administration revealed the name of a CIA covert operative, exposing her and acquaintances abroad to danger, ruining her career, and surely ending some friendships. I empathized because I’d feared that I wouldn’t be the only one to discover a friend in Vienna led a daring double life. Leading such a life required tremendous energy, brainpower, self-confidence bordering on arrogance, and—fascinating to me—idealism mixed with deception.

 But I hadn’t worked abroad for years and had avoided the CIA when I did. I planned to move back to Missouri. My spy would do the same. After thriving in a dual career in one of the world’s great cities, she would be compelled by a failed mission to give up her day and night jobs and return to her rural hometown. I call her Phoenix Smith.

In Show Me the Murder, Phoenix arrives weak from a near-fatal wound. She expects to relax with her childhood neighbor and closest friend, Annalynn Carr Keyser. The only child in a wealthy, educated family, Annalynn stayed home and became a civic leader. She has just buried her husband. He was found with a bullet in his head in a cheap motel with the body of a young woman. Everyone else except Annalynn believes it was a murder-suicide. She asks Phoenix to help prove it was a double murder.

Skeptical but sympathetic, Phoenix agrees. Soon she recognizes signs of a set-up and fears the killers will come after Annalynn, who refuses to run. Using different skill sets and reconciling conflicting attitudes, the two women risk their lives to identify the killer. To Phoenix’s disgust, the third member of their high school trio insists on helping. Connie Diamante expected to star on Broadway, but she never made it beyond summer stock. After her marriage disintegrated, she moved back and leads a precarious existence as a wedding singer and voice teacher. Connie adores Annalynn but barely tolerates Phoenix. Much of the book’s humor comes from the sparring and the coerced cooperation between Connie and Phoenix.

I had these three ongoing characters well in mind when I began writing. To my surprise, a character brought in as a plot twist refused to get off the page. So the series includes Achilles, a K-9 dropout who adopts Phoenix.

In Show Me the Deadly Deer, Phoenix goes with Annalynn, now acting sheriff, to look for a missing farmer. They find him dead on a pond bank with an antler sticking out of his back. Did someone frame a deer? Phoenix thinks so.

She searches for the deadly deer as an excuse for questioning suspects. At first she views the investigation as a game to relieve her boredom, but she cannot maintain an emotional distance as she sees how the death affects and endangers others. She breaks the law not only to find evidence but also to prevent additional tragedies.

In each book in the series, the women unravel complex crimes, deal with social issues (e.g., elder abuse in book three), and struggle to overcome large and small personal problems.

My major goal for each book: to tell a good story about people worth caring about.

You can read the first chapters of Show Me the Murder, Show Me the Deadly Deer, and The Feedsack Dress on my website: http://carolynmulford.com. Questions for book discussion groups and ordering information are also there.