I’ve always been interested in the public’s fascination with unsolved mysteries. In how people become invested in events that happened decades or even thousands of years before they were born. I’m curious about why some mysteries endure while others simply fade away in the sands of time.

Cable television and streaming services like YouTube have fueled our appetite for the truth - or at least some version of it. They’ve sparked our interest in events we may not have known occurred until we saw a clip about it.

There seems to be a niche for everyone. Did aliens build the pyramids of Egypt? Did they later crash in Roswell in the 1940s? Is Bigfoot real? Did Amelia Earhart survive? What happened to Atlantis? How did the Roman Empire fall?

The Kennedy Assassination certainly qualifies as such a mystery. Its lasting appeal is easy to understand. The Kennedy Era was Camelot. JFK was America’s King Arthur. He was the dashing young president with the fashionable first lady and their two adorable young children. He was the first president of the television age and he used that medium to maximum effect. He used it to further his ambitious political agenda.

In the sixty years following his death, generations of researchers and conspiracy theorists have plumbed the depths of that which took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Books, documentaries, articles and movies have examined every aspect of President Kennedy’s murder. Did Oswald act alone? Was it a conspiracy? How many shots were fired in Dealey Plaza? Was there an official cover-up? There’s even a recent documentary that said the assassination was a hoax concocted by the president to run off with a mistress. I’m still shaking my head over that one.

I’ve always considered myself a skeptic when it comes to conspiracy theories. I was a government employee for twenty-five years. I know the myth of the hyper-efficient government is more worthy of ancient Greece than modern day. If a government agency had played a role in the assassination, it would have required hundreds of people to maintain their silence for the rest of their lives. It simply isn’t a feasible hypothesis.

But even a skeptic like me must admit that the facts as reported to us simply don’t add up. Even a cursory review of the evidence reveals inconsistencies and oversights in the official findings of The Warren Commission. Important questions went unanswered. Relationships with individuals close to Oswald were glossed over. Evidence and conflicting testimony were simply ignored.

Incongruities are fertile ground for thriller writers like me. They lead to intrigue and conspiracy. Suspense lives in the gray areas of such events. That’s what compelled me to write about it. To relate facts I had uncovered in my own way that would appeal to readers.
Writing about an important historical event can be daunting. The challenge of the Kennedy story is that everyone knows how it ends. Somebody planned to shoot the president and succeeded. The end. What more can be said?

But knowing the destination doesn’t make the journey any less interesting. My research led me down several paths I did not expect to find. I discovered events and relationships that proved to me that we didn’t know the whole story. It is there where my idea was born.
My ‘Dallas ’63’ trilogy doesn’t pretend to be a true crime work. The first book in the series – THE TWILIGHT TOWN - is a hardboiled novel that depicts fictional and historical figures in a factual context. It’s about Dallas in the early 1960s, a place where the criminal underworld mingled with the public overworld. Where corruption was almost respectable and part of the Dallas way at that time.

The book begins in early 1963 where Dallas PD Detective Dan Wilson is secretly working with the FBI to investigate corruption in his own department. When an informant – Lee Oswald – tells Wilson about Jack Ruby’s upcoming arms shipment, Wilson asks his ex-partner, J.D. Tippit to help him track where the weapons are going and why.

Over the course of the next several months, Wilson and Tippit find themselves being gradually pulled deeper into a conspiracy that will change the course of a nation forever.
My goal with this trilogy isn’t meant to inform or entertain, but to hopefully do both. My research has taken me on a wonderful and unexpected journey that I hope the reader will enjoy.

Terrence McCauley is an award-winning, bestselling author of thrillers, crime fiction and westerns. A resident of Dutchess County, NY, he is currently working on his next novel. Please visit his website at www.terrencemccauley.com

By Andrea J. Johnson

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” or as one would write in steno, SKWRA*EUPBLG. What’s steno you ask? My novel’s main character, Victoria Justice, would say it’s the curious little language that has almost gotten her killed and earned her a front row seat to her town’s most heinous crimes. In actuality, steno—also known as shorthand stenography—is an abbreviated symbolic writing method done on a stenotype, which is a machine that increases the speed and brevity of writing compared to a standard computer keyboard. Thus, the goal of a person who uses stenography is to write as fast as someone can speak. But for me, steno is the inspiration for Poetic Justice, the first book in the Victoria Justice Mysteries, which launches its second and third installments in Spring 2025 and Spring 2026, respectively.

The character of Victoria Justice has lived in my brain since 2006—although back then I didn’t know what to do with her. She was inspired by the call for “original action stars” to compete in the reality TV series Who Wants to Be a Superhero? presented by Stan Lee. The premise of the show was for contestants to create characters who could become comic book heroes. In my mind, what better hero could there be than a court stenographer who seeks to undo bad verdicts through vigilante justice? But at that time, I hadn’t discovered my literary passion, so I couldn’t take advantage of the epiphany.

Cut to almost two decades later. By then, I’d left my full-time job as a courtroom stenographer to pursue writing and had started the search for a new novel idea. Luckily, I found my old notes on Victoria, tweaked her persona to read as more human than hero, and matched her up with highly fictionalized snippets of real-life court cases. And, voila, the Victoria Justice Mysteries were born.

Now, if you’re wondering about the tone of these books, they are a cross between traditional cozies and light legal thrillers (think Murder, She Wrote meets The Pelican Brief). Victoria Justice, is the story’s moral compass, so I devised a name that would leave no doubt about her ethics. She will always do what is right, and she will always prevail against evil. Sure, the moniker is a little on the nose as are most of the names in the series. However, I think that’s the best way to help readers quickly acclimate to the setting and identify the conflict. Of course, there’s also some backstory to the name. In the sixth chapter of Book 1, Victoria reveals that she’s adopted and that her birth mother was a teen hooked on drugs. Doctors had expected her to die from a neonatal opioid addiction, but she survived and her adopted mother named her Victoria in honor of her victory over death.

Even though the books are fictional, just about everything I experienced as a court stenographer has been crammed into this series—from brawls in the courtroom to missing evidence to bomb threats to gun-toting attorneys. And yet, the thing that’s had the most influence on Victoria’s characterization is the outward perception of the profession by those unfamiliar with what stenographers do. She’s often ridiculed for being the one person in the courtroom whose job it is to be seen, not heard. People ignore her, call her an overpaid notetaker, and assume she’s not very smart. I played into that a bit with the physicality as well by making her short and meek, but inside she has the ferocity of a panther and tons of snark. And while the thrust of the series is about solving murders, an equally large portion of it is about Victoria finding her voice and learning to stand up for herself. In a way, she becomes the town’s last bastion for morality by using the profession’s tenants of accuracy, honesty, and neutrality in the face of the law to claim her space in the world. She also finds love while maintaining her independence, which I think is a valuable lesson for young people today.

But because I’ve used several personal experiences to craft these books, all of my friends assume that Victoria Justice is my alter ego. After all, she’s a Black female like me, and I spent nearly ten years as a shorthand stenographer. However, that’s really where the similarities end between me and Victoria. If anything, we are polar opposites. Victoria loves her job and, despite the early childhood hardships of adoption and bullying, she is optimistic about working in the court system since that’s all she wants out of life. I, however, wasn’t a cheerful or disciplined court reporter because I knew my destiny lied elsewhere. I am much happier as a writer, but I love that the time I spent in the steno world has been memorialized in this series. Other than that, any crossover audiences think they see between Victoria and me is merely coincidental.

***
 
Andrea J. Johnson is a speaker, editor, book coach, and author of the Victoria Justice Mysteries. She also teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and her craft essays have appeared in several publications such as CrimeReads, Mystery Scene, and The Romance Writers Report. In addition, she has contributed commentary on popular fiction, films, and television as a freelancer writer for the entertainment websites Popsugar and The List. More notably, she’s authored a series of nonfiction books that include How to Craft a Killer Cozy Mystery, Mastering the Art of Suspense, and How to Craft Killer Dialogue. She has also given writing seminars on these topics through the Mystery Writers of America, Malice Domestic, Sisters in Crime, the International Thriller Writers Association, Women’s Fiction Association, and the Surrey International Writers’ Conference (Canada). When Andrea isn’t writing, teaching, or coaching, she loves dissecting reality television. Join her for those online conversations by visiting ajthenovelist.com or following her on Twitter (X), Pinterest, BlueSky, and Instagram @ajthenovelist.
 

Novelists are often asked where they get their ideas. All writers know it’s an impossible question. Is there a muse that creeps into the writer’s nook, sprinkling idea dust across her desk? Perhaps. Maybe it’s divine intervention or a deceased writer channeling characters and scenes into the writer’s mind as she toils over the blank page.
 
All writers have their own approach. My ideas are stolen from everyday life, like a thief on the prowl for anything unusual, hilarious, gross or bizarre. I generally don’t have to look far as these things organically cross my path. The key is to pay attention and when it hits, I jot down observations on foolscap yellow notepads with an arsenal of rolling writer pens.
 
In my recently published kid-lit novel titled Ruby and The Boss Cricket, there’s an antique dresser discovered by Ruby, the protagonist, and the dresser is inhabited by an orchestra of crickets led by the Boss Cricket. The idea for the novel came when I discovered a dresser dumped by the curbside destined for the landfill. The dresser was scratched and water stained, but I know a thing or two about bringing old furniture back to life, so I hauled it home and refurbished it. Later that day I was skimming the pool and found a dead mole in the filter basket. I analyzed the waterlogged mole before putting it to rest in the woods. That night there was a cricket hiding in my room, chirping away at 2 a.m., causing sudden-onset insomnia. The foolscap notes from that day read: bossy cricket…jalopy dresser…drowned mole. I Googled mole and cricket and discovered that there is such a thing as a mole cricket. And so began the ideas for the first book in the Inspire Island series.
 
The sequel’s main character, Galvin the Tomte, was inspired by an adorable gnome garden statue that captivated my imagination. What if Galvin came to life and created mischief? What if only one girl could see him? What if they got together with Ruby and the Boss Cricket? The story took off from there and the novel will be published by Level Best Books in December 2025.
 
Recently, my spry 85-year-old mother popped over for lunch. We spent a lovely afternoon together on an otherwise bleak winter day, and I walked her to her car when it was time to leave.
 
“Be careful when you backup,” I said, pointing across the road. “I’m parked directly behind you.”
 
“I’ll try my best,” she said, grinning and revving her green Toyota Camry.
 
Cruuuunch.
 
She backed up into the bumper of my SUV, pumped the brakes, gunned the car into drive, and peeled down the block like Kurt Russell in Death Proof.
 
Foolscap entry: Short story idea. Working title Hitskip based on police slang for a hit-and-run. Mother hits daughter’s car, speeds home to her retirement community, finds her book called Old School Hacks, and whips up a toothpaste concoction to buff out the scratch on her car. The green Camry paint and the toothpaste concoction is a Leprechaun attraction-agent. Soon the elderly mother’s apartment is inundated with leprechauns…The ending hasn’t hit me yet, but I have my pad and pen ready for when it shows up. Perhaps I should invite my mother to lunch again.

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Julie Sampson is the author of two novels, The Eye in the Ceiling and The Winter Hexagon, and two non-fiction books, Elite Wrestling and Beginning Wrestling. Ruby and the Boss Cricket is the first novel in the Inspire Island Middle Grade series. 

On January 14th, LBB released my sixth novel, a domestic thriller titled Deadly When Disturbed by D.M. Barr, which is a modern take on Single White Female. In the Spring, they will release my eleventh book overall, the first of my multi-volume nonfiction series called Vacations Can Be Murder: A True Crime Lover’s Travel Guide to New England, which I wrote under my actual name, Dawn M. Barclay. (The Mid-Atlantic volume, featuring NY, NJ, and PA, comes out in September.) Since you are Level Best fans, invested enough to read our blog, I thought it might be fun to give you a bit of backstory and insight into these books, the inside scoop, as it were.

Deadly When Disturbed

I got the idea for the book, and specifically for the character Merry from the dissolution of a long-term friendship that went sour in 2016, just around the time my first book came out. A former actor, this person loved being the center of attention, but that’s where the similarity ends. She was not a tacky dresser, nor did she have any criminal or murderous tendencies. This was definitely a case of applying “What if...?”

I softened the Merry character by giving her a pet cause, fundraising to release captive dolphins back into the wild. A while back, I saw a documentary about a dolphin kept in a pool at a hotel for the amusement of its patrons. The creature was all alone in the water, with no stimulation, and only one plastic toy to play with. It broke my heart then, as it does every time I remember that poor, lonely mammal. I saw similarities between the dolphin and Merry’s back story, so it seemed like a good fit.

The shards of glass on the cover have a special meaning, because not only do they reflect two different people who resemble each other, but the book is also about the false faces we show both to others and to ourselves. (I can hear the lyrics to Billy Joel’s The Stranger playing in my head right now.). The shards are also meaningful because the book is about people who wreck homes, but also homes that wreck people (Dara’s architect husband’s hands were sliced to pieces by an imploding glass door at a job site.)

The novel’s autism theme came from my research for another book I wrote called Traveling Different: Vacation Strategies for Parents of the Anxious, the Inflexible, and the Neurodiverse (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). Having personal experience with individuals with autism, I had actually suggested the idea of ‘Birthday Parties for All’ to a local ARC chapter, but it never went anywhere. As I often do in my books, I take a legitimate, if unproven, business idea and fictionalize it. The wonderful thing about fiction is, all businesses can work if that’s my aim.

Deadly When Disturbed is the third of my novels to involve Rock Canyon Realty. (I’m a Realtor who works in Rockland County, NY.) The first, Expired Listings, involves a serial murderer who was killing off all the unethical real estate agents in town (meaning all of them) and no one cared. (The locals considered it a public service; the other agents saw it as less competition). What can I say, I love satire. In truth, 99% of agents are honest, hardworking people; it’s the 1% that end up in my books. The second, The Queen of Second Chances, features the stepdaughter of the local queen of mobile home sales, who reluctantly helps “Queen Bea” break into the elder market by infiltrating a senior center as a recreational aide. (I’d say this was purely satire but someone I work with—who I didn’t know at the time I drafted the book—specializes in selling mobile homes and volunteers for Meals on Wheels. He loved QOSC, by the way, and bought a second copy to send to his mom.)

But, despite the generally satiric nature of those previous books, the idea of Dara Banks using Ruben Bockelman’s kidney dialysis against him to secure a listing in Deadly When Disturbed was based on real life. I had a friend at my first real estate agency who confided she had breast cancer, then swore me to secrecy. She was sure that if other agents found out, she would lose potential listings, much as Ruben did. Sadly, that agent is gone now but we kept her secret secure at the time and her business never faltered because of her ailment.
 
Vacations Can Be Murder: A True Crime Lover’s Travel Guide

There’s not as much backstory with this one. I conceived of the idea in September of 2022 during the Bouchercon convention in Minneapolis. (Bouchercon is the world mystery conference; it’s named after mystery writer, reviewer, and editor, Anthony Boucher.)  One of the pre-conference activities was a true crime tour of Minneapolis and St. Paul and since I’d never taken a tour like that before, I signed up. Not only was it fascinating, but it also got me wondering if anyone had ever published a reference guide listing all the true crime tours around the world.

The idea of my book took off from there, because not only did such a book not exist, but there was also considerably more to include than just those tours. My Vacations Can Be Murder guides  detail the summaries of major crimes; a listing of where to read more; hotels and restaurants that were formerly jails, or courthouses, or are reportedly haunted; true crime and ghost tours’ museums and other crime and justice-related attractions; the local prisons, where the bodies are buried; and itineraries to see all the true crime sites, including the street names where the actual crimes took place.

There will likely be ten volumes, though that could grow. For example, my second book was supposed to cover six states—NY, NJ, PA, DE, MD, and DC—but because the first three had so much crime (especially New York!), I had to move DE, MD, and DC to a “Capital Regions” edition that will also include VA and WVA. So, I think it’s conceivable that Florida and Texas might end up with their own volumes, but I won’t know until I get there.
 
If you have questions about the thriller or the true crime series, or would like me to speak to your book club, please don’t hesitate to contact me at [email protected]. You can follow me at www.dmbarr.com and www.vacationscanbemurder.com, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky at authordmbarr. Happy reading!

Dawn Barclay/D.M. Barr is an award-winning author who writes psychological, domestic, and romantic suspense. Her published books include Expired Listings, Murder Worth the Weight, Saving Grace: A Psychological Thriller, The Queen of Second Chances, and Simple Tryst of Fate. Dawn recently finished her second stint co-editing a Sisters in Crime NY/Tri-state chapter anthology, New York State of Crime, which includes her third published short story, Orchestral Removals in the Dark. In December 2025, Down & Out Books will publish Better Off Dead, Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, which she conceived and edited solo. A member of ITW and SinC-New England, she has served as president of Hudson Valley Scribes, vice president of Sisters in Crime-NY, and the newsletter author/board member of the NY chapter of Mystery Writers of America. 

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“When you die, I believe, God isn’t going to ask you what you published.  God’s going to ask you what you wrote.” (McNally, T.M. “Big Dogs and Little Dogs,” in Martone, Michael, and Susan Neville. 2006. Rules of thumb: 73 authors reveal their fiction writing fixations. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books).

There’s a certain wisdom to that remark, but, with all due respect to McNally and to God, the Almighty isn’t in my target demographic.  God, perhaps, will read my unpublished manuscripts, but the ladies in the Hungry Readers Book Club won’t read my books unless they’re published.

Now that The Other has been released, I find myself pondering two questions that readers often ask me.

Where do your story ideas come from?

Every book starts from an idea. Where do these story ideas come from? In the case of The Other, I found the story idea when I went down a rabbit hole. I trust you know what I mean. You start out searching for a certain bit of information. You have the best of intentions, but something grabs your attention, and you’re pulled just a little bit off course. Then there’s another grabber, and another, and before you know it, you’ve lost sight of your original question and instead you’ve spent the day reading about Camp Wille und Macht. At least, that’s what I did.

Camp Wille und Macht was the first Nazi youth camp in America, established in the summer of 1934 on the banks of  the Delaware-Raritan Canal. It only stayed open for a few weeks, but it became the prototype for camps in New York and New Jersey, as well as other sites scattered across the country.

I don’t write nonfiction. But I believe that fiction can reveal emotional truths in a way that a strictly factual account cannot. I set out to write a fictional account of a Nazi youth camp, on a fictional canal in a fictional New Jersey. And like most writers of fiction, I started with a simple What if?

What if the lock tender on the canal was Jewish? What would his  life be like if one hundred teenagers dressed in brown shirts erected tents in a field that abutted his home? What if those brown shirts spent their days marching along the towpath?
And then I asked myself, What if those brown shirts returned today? What would you do to protect your family if the Nazis came to town?

When does the book become real to you?

When I first get the idea for a book, the story exists in my head, only. I’ll carry that imaginary world around in my head for months, perhaps years. There are milestones along the way. A finished manuscript. A book contract. Final edits. A book cover. Advanced Reader Copies. The book release.

Then something remarkable happens. After the book is published, a stranger reads the book. Maybe you. And the story that was stuck in my head, gets stuck in your head too. That’s when the book becomes real to me. When the story that was stuck in my head, through the magic of reading, gets stuck in your head too.

The Other is a story of faith lost and faith found. Although the story is fictional, the problem of hate is all too real. And it is not ancient history.

If you read The Other, if the story gets stuck in your head, perhaps you’ll spare a moment to reach out and let me know. That’s the reality that makes a writer start thinking about the next great story.

Jeff Markowitz is the author of six mysteries, including the award-winning dark comedy, Death and White Diamonds. Jeff spent more than forty years creating community-based programs and services in New Jersey for children and adults with autism, including twenty-five years as President and Executive Director of the Life Skills Resource Center, before retiring in 2018 to devote more time to writing. In October 2021, a puzzle hunt based on Jeff’s novella, Motive for Murder raised more than $1 million for at-risk children in NYC. Jeff is a past President of the New York Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. He lives in Monmouth Junction NJ with his wife Carol and two cats, Vergil and Aeneas.