An interviewer asked me recently which I prefer to write: standalones or series? As I await the Level Best Books re-launch of my “Witch Cats of Cambridge” cozy series, the answer is obvious – but not for the reason you may think.

Before I get into it, I should explain that I love all my books. Asking an author if they prefer one work over another is kind of like asking a parent which is their favorite child. My standalones, which tend to be dark (like Hold Me Down or The Butterfly Trap) will always excite me. In these books, I get to explore adult themes and sexuality and really dig into the dark side of humanity. (Yes, I used to write quite a bit about psychology and mental illness, see: Mad House.) Plus, when those books were finished and off to my agent, I felt done with them – I could clean out my head of betrayal, rape, substance abuse, and characters playing off each other, sometimes unintentionally, in some truly twisted ways.

My cozy series, of which there are several, are a different experience. Over the first four “Witch Cat” books, for example, I’ve come to love spending time with (that is, writing about) dear Becca, a smart, well-intentioned young woman who truly believes she has magical powers. And I’ve fallen equally hard for her three cats – Harriet, Laurel, and Clara – who are the ones who actually have magical power and whose primary duty, as it is with all cats, is to keep their person safe.

People have some misconceptions about cozies. Because they’re gentler than other types of mysteries, some think they’re likely to be cloying or cute. In truth, they deal with real emotions, same as my darker books. If anything, they are more reliant on believable human interactions: nobody is evil in a cozy, although some are misled or confused. (Even my killers tend to either have acted on a misguided impulse or gotten worked up beyond their normal states.) Characters must have honest motivations – even if these are based on misperceptions – if readers are going to relate to them. And in cozies, even more than in, say, thrillers, the relationship between the reader and the folks in the book is vital. We read cozies for the plots, sure. But we love them for the characters.

Even animal characters need to pass muster on this point. True, in our everyday lives we may not know exactly what our cats are thinking. But as we commit them to the page, we have to see them as three-dimensional, with their likes and biases, virtues and flaws – as real as any of us. As I write Becca’s three litter-mate pets, Harriet, Laurel, and especially Clara – who, as Becca’s primary caretaker serves as the heart of this series – I’m particularly aware of how real sibling relationships can play out, and how teasing (and even bullying) give way to the underlying love when push comes to shove.

This is where the writer in me should also point out that cozies are not easier to write than darker books. Do you know the old saw about Ginger Rogers? That she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in heels? Well, that’s true of cozies, too. Sure, we have to plot carefully and people our books with believable characters (both human and feline). Only in the case of cozies we have to make it all seem as light as a souffle – or one of Rogers’s fancy quick steps, all swirling skirts and pumps, with a smile as bright as the sun.

With both kinds of books, I – the writer – immerse myself in their world. I have to think like my characters and, to some extent, see the world as they do. Hear their voices. For the extent of the writing period, this means they’re in my head, my dreams, and my heart.

Which leads me back to that original question: Which do I prefer to write, standalones or cozies? By now you can probably guess that – at least for now – it’s cozies. You see, I’m not only awaiting the re-launch of A Spell of Murder, An Incantation of Cats, A Cat on the Case, and To Conjure a Killer, I’m finishing up final edits on The Cat’s Eye Charm, a new “Witch Cat” mystery, which should be out in December, and looking forward to starting a sixth “Witch Cat.” And that means I get to live in this particular world for a bit longer, savoring its particular brand of warmth and magic. A blend that I hope you readers will enjoy as well.

Won’t you join me?

Clea Simon is the Boston Globe-bestselling author of three nonfiction books and more than 30 mysteries, including World Enough and Hold Me Down, both of which were named “Must Reads” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. A graduate of Harvard University and former journalist, she has contributed to publications ranging from Salon.com and Harvard Magazine to Yankee and The New York Times. Visit her at www.CleaSimon.com.

Someone once asked me how long I spend doing research for my historical crime novels. In truth, I am not sure, but I replied by saying that perhaps fifty percent of my writing time is occupied using digitised newspapers and other online sources to check the accuracy and authenticity of the settings and detail of The Reggie da Costa Mysteries. My research covers everything from crime and criminals, clothes, cars and architecture, to the political, social and economic landscape of Australia in the 1910s and 1920s. I’ve also come to realise that this aspect of my writing life is something I love doing, not only because it provides the information that I require, but also because it satisfies my love of trivia and the bizarre.
 
So here, for your reading pleasure, are some of those little absurdities that have made me chuckle as I pursue my passion as an historical crime writer.
 
My first novel, The Death Mask Murders, was inspired by my work as a volunteer guide at the Old Melbourne Jail. In the cells are displayed death masks of executed felons. This gave me the impetus for a story line: What if the psychopath in The Death Mask Murders had developed a fixation with death masks and created them as ‘trophies’ of his victims?


Back in the real world of Australia in the 1800s, these death masks were created to prove that criminality could be predicted, by applying the pseudo-science of Phrenology. This theory asserted that a person’s character could be determined by the shape, or contours, of their skull. Although this theory has now passed its ‘use-by date’, I was fascinated to learn that some expressions associated with Phrenology are still used today. For example, describing people as ‘well-rounded’, their interests as ‘high-brow’ or low-brow’, or even suggesting that ‘You should get your head read,’ are derived from Phrenology.

Similarly, there were others in the past who ascribed criminal tendencies to certain physical characteristics. Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist from the late nineteenth century, asserted that most murderers who committed crimes of passion had bright or ‘hard’ blue eyes and persisted in staring. To support his case, examples of serial killers were given: Dr Crippen, Frederick Deeming and George Joseph Smith (the ‘Brides-in-the-Bath’ murderer), amongst them. In Pennsylvania, the killers of Joseph Raber were known as ‘The Blue-Eyed Six’.
Followers of Lombroso also believed that criminals were born with heads smaller than normal, again a variation on the theories of Phrenology: that particular physical characteristics were an indication of criminal tendencies.

My second novel, Deadly Intent, features Squizzy Taylor, Australia’s best-known gangster from the 1920s. My research revealed that Joseph Theodore Leslie Taylor, or ‘Squizzy’ as he was known, was nicknamed for his squint. This diminutive jury fixer, thief, sly-grogger and murderer modelled himself on the bootleggers of America’s Prohibition days. He was a flashy dresser, a dandy, favouring iridescent silk shirts, velvet collared coats, patent leather shoes, fawn gloves, silk socks and diamond rings. It was said that when Detective Piggott raided his home, he was surprised to find Squizzy in bed wearing pink silk pyjamas. Not your usual gangster from the wrong side of the tracks!

Another of Squizzy’s idiosyncrasies was his taste in cars: flashy American models that he would leave parked outside a suburban police station when he committed crimes, giving him the perfect alibi. He was also very disorganised and forgot to organise a getaway car in his first foray into armed robbery, forcing him to hail a taxi. 

On a more serious note, Deadly Intent also features the police strike of 1923, when 600 members (or one third) of the Victoria Police failed to report for duty. The newspaper reports were firmly on the side of the government, even though the strikers had valid reasons to protest. Long hours, poor pay, no pension, working seven days a week with one Sunday off a month, and being required to buy their uniforms, made up the major part of the strikers’ complaints. The final straw was the appointment of four Special Supervisors to secretly monitor or spy on ordinary constables on the beat.

The response of the public to the news that the police were on strike was enthusiastic, to say the least. Thousands poured into the city of Melbourne, smashing windows, looting shops, getting drunk, even upending a tram and setting it on fire. A menswear shop, The Leviathan, had an unfortunate and prescient sign in their front window: ‘GENUINE CLEARING SALE’, ‘WHY GO SHABBY?’ The suggestion was taken literally by the mob who helped themselves to the clothing on display. 

Baton-wielding police and volunteers drove the rioters back with fire hoses. Army, air force and navy leave was cancelled. A detachment of 200 men from Queenscliff Garrison Artillery and Engineers was sent to Melbourne, each man issued with 200 rounds of ammunition and carrying a rifle fitted with a bayonet. At the Victoria Barracks, machine guns were also held in readiness. Soldiers and sailors guarded the banks, the treasury, Government House and other public buildings. It was interesting that the government of the day was prepared to deal with the strikers using lethal force.

Another interesting aspect of my research revealed that although the ensuing Royal Commission recommended that the strikers’ demands be granted, not a single striker was re-employed. Another interesting fact was that the government of the day prohibited the export of newsreel footage so that this embarrassing event should not be viewed overseas.

My third novel, A Deadly Game, will be published in June this year. One of the most interesting aspects of researching the book was discovering that the excavation and discovery of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun prompted an obsession with all things Egyptian. Theme parties, Egyptian style jewellery, décor and artefacts became immensely popular. The downside was that this interest fostered a burgeoning black market in Egyptian treasures throughout the world.

We often think that scam artists and con men and women are a blight on the present day alone, but their presence was felt in the 1800s and 1900s too. In my research for Lies and Deception, I researched some of the more outrageous confidence tricks seen in ‘Scam History’.

Apart from William McCloundy, who sold the Brooklyn Bridge to a tourist, there have been many other examples of infamous scam artists. Not to be outdone, George C. Parker sold Madison Square Garden, General Grant’s Tomb, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Statue of Liberty to gullible buyers. He took up residence in Sing Sing. And then there was Victor Lustig, who became infamous for selling the Eiffel Tower twice for scrap metal. Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Bigley, alias Cassie Chadwick, posed as the illegitimate daughter of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, ripping off the banks for millions of dollars in loans, at a time when women were not allowed to borrow from banks or vote.

On a smaller scale, but just as effective in drawing in the gullible and the naïve, were the snake oil salesmen, peddling patent medicine drugs containing alcohol, morphine, opium or cocaine. Phony claims of their efficacy and lack of government regulation in the late 1800s and early 1900s led to their widespread use. The tragic case of Eben Byers, who took Radithor (radium water) to ease the pain of an injured arm, is perhaps a more extreme example of the effects of pills, salves, lotions and syrups pushed by fake doctors. Byers died of ‘radium poisoning’ in 1932, after his jaw fell off and his bones disintegrated. He was buried in a lead-lined coffin.
​
No doubt, other crime writers apart from me have shaken their heads, chuckled and thought:

‘If I wrote that, no one would believe me!’
 
Laraine Stephens lives in Beaumaris, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. She worked as a teacher-librarian and Head of Library for over 35 years. After retiring at the end of 2013, she became a writer of historical crime fiction. Apart from writing, she is an avid golfer, loves travelling, going to the football and playing Mahjong, and enjoys reading, restaurants and films. For five years she worked as a volunteer guide at the Old Melbourne Gaol.
 
She is a member of Writers Victoria, Sisters in Crime (Australia), the Australian Crime Writers’ Association, the Historical Novel Society of Australasia, the International Thriller Writers and the Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom.
​
Laraine has a six-book contract with Level Best Books (USA).

‘No matter which century, Besties Kathleen Kalb and Erica Miner prove that an opera house is the perfect setting for murder and mayhem—fictional and otherwise.’
 

​Erica Miner believes opera theatres are perfect places for creating fictional mischief! Drawing on her 21 years as a violinist at the famed Metropolitan Opera, Erica’s fanciful plot fabrications reveal the dark side of that fascinating world in her Julia Kogan Opera Mystery series. The three books in the series have been recognized as: finalist, 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Awards and Chanticleer Independent Book Awards; Distinguished Favorite, 2024 NYC Big Book Awards, and Distinguished Favorite, 2025 Independent Press Awards. Erica’s debut novel, Travels with My Lovers, won the Fiction Prize in the Direct from the Author Book Awards. Her screenplays have won awards in the Writer’s Digest, Santa Fe, and WinFemme competitions. She is also a top speaker and lecturer both nationally and internationally and a frequent contributor to multiple arts websites.
 
 
Kathleen Marple Kalb ​is an Author/Anchor/Mom…not in that order. A Regional Edward R. Murrow award-winning weekend anchor at New York’s 1010 WINS Radio, she writes short stories and novels including the Old Stuff, Ella Shane, and as Nikki Knight, the Grace the Hit Mom and Vermont Radio Mysteries. Her stories (under both names) have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, and prestigious anthologies. She’s been a finalist for National Excellence in Storytelling (NEST), Derringer, and Black Orchid Novella Awards. Kathleen, her husband, and son live in a Connecticut house owned by a large calico cat.
 
EM: Kathleen, congratulations on your series! There are so many things I love about our commonalities. Our strong female opera-connected protagonists for starters, but we’ve both had prominent careers in New York City and are passionate about OPERA—specifically, the one called Metropolitan.
 
KK: Congratulations on YOUR series. Very impressive! I have to tell you, you hooked me with that opening in Aria for Murder. It’s got a great thriller vibe and really draws in the reader! And one of the things I love in the whole series is the way the Met itself is essentially a character. You take us backstage and just immerse us in that world. And I'm in awe of your time at the Met. For the obvious reason of the amazing skill to get there, of course—but also: “There's the Met, and everything else,” The Met is shorthand for the absolute peak of one’s profession. It’s a common expression among some of us news folk to explain why we endure backbreaking commutes and crazy schedules to keep working at 1010 WINS.
 
EM: That sounds a lot like what we crazy musicians do to keep working at the Met! I’m so glad you got the thriller vibe from Aria. I’m rather partial to that opening too. For starters, I’m dying to know how you became interested in writing about the Met.
 
KK: Honestly, I didn’t start off as an opera fan. I started off as a Beverly Sills fangirl. And I still am! Sills got me interested in opera, and “high culture” in general. As a kid growing up in the Western Pennsylvania back country, I read her memoir, and it was a window into a whole different world. I ended up exploring opera and other things because Sills talked about them in this wonderful down-to-earth voice – I figured if “a little Brooklyn girl” could enjoy them, I might too!
 
EM: I love when people are converted to opera! Your Ella Shane mystery series and my Julia Kogan opera mysteries take place in different historical periods: yours at the turn of the twentieth century and mine contemporary. I’m fascinated that our protagonists are both strong-willed, musically talented young women, one a violinist, the other an opera singer, with similar penchants for getting in trouble! Do you find that as extraordinary as I do?
 
KK: It’s pretty amazing! We both landed on characters who enable us to use our backgrounds as performers, as well as the other things we do. You’re an accomplished musician and a journalist, and you bring both to your work. I’m a radio news anchor, which is a much more performance-oriented job than folks might expect, and a lifelong history buff, and both really play into the Ella books. And of course, we’re both mystery fans, so our characters would have to end up in the middle of murder and mayhem!
 
EM: I have no doubt that being a radio news anchor is performance oriented. Ella and Julia are anything but professional sleuths. Yet they both become entangled in murder investigations. Ella sounds like quite the fascinating mix. How would you describe her?
 
KK: Usually, I describe Ella as part Beverly Sills, part Errol Flynn (trouser roles and swordplay!), part Anne of Green Gables, and all her own woman. Ella and the Met have been circling each other for most of the series…in each of the first three books, which were with an earlier publisher, she considers overtures from the Met, but – unlike just about any other opera singer in her world – is in no hurry to get there, because she has a successful touring company. But in the fourth book, A Fatal Reception, she arrives at long last, deciding to settle for her impending marriage. Her best friend, the Met’s resident Queen of the Night, is married with young children, and a major influence on her decision. It's really interesting, because Ella almost fights coming to the Met, but Julia’s actively worked her way there. Tell me how you see her?
 
EM: In some ways similar to Ella, yet very different. Julia is a musical Nancy Drew with a keen sense of justice, who knows nothing about investigating murders. She starts out a naïve, starry-eyed young violinist thrilled to be making her debut in the orchestra of the Met, the world’s most prestigious opera house, with no clue that something terrible is about to happen. Before she knows it, and to her own surprise, she finds herself entangled in a murder investigation. First Julia is devastated to witness the murder of her beloved mentor, the conductor, on the podium during her opening night performance. But when her closest colleague in the orchestra is accused of the crime, and Julia’s sense of justice kicks in, and she is determined to find the real killer. Mind you, she has no idea where to begin. She uses her instincts, much as Ella does, to start the journey.
 
KK: I love that we both integrate the murder mystery into the performance and the life of the company. Okay, I’m going to fangirl a little because we’re pals and I know you won’t judge me. You have to have a good Beverly Sills story or two…


EM: Considering that she was one of the greatest of all divas, Beverly was amazingly down to earth and known for her practical quotes, such as, “There are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going.” What a gal! For sure she took no shortcuts to get where she was going! I was lucky enough, through some backstage connections, to have met her on a few occasions at New York City Opera, and she was as gracious and natural as they come. But I think my favorite story came from a backstage conductor at NYCO who was in the wings during an opera where Beverly had constant on- and off-stage entrances and exits. When she flounced off the stage after the last one, she gave a huge sigh and declared, “What a way to make a living!” That was Beverly!
 
KK: What an amazing talent – and professional! Did she end up in your characters?
 
EM: I played many performances both at the Met and NYCO with Sills. Though I definitely had her in mind, she didn’t specifically inspire my “diva” characters, most of whom are the “detestable,” like the soprano in Prelude to Murder. But Kathleen, I love that Beverly Sills partially inspired your portrayal of Ella. How much of Beverly is there in your protagonist?
 
KK: Actually, a lot. She’s a New York kid made good, very down-to-earth and aware of herself as a New Yorker, which really chimes with the Sills of her memoirs. And most importantly, everything I’ve read about Sills’ love of the work and professionalism really helped inform the way Ella behaves as a singer and owner of her own touring company.
 
EM: Not to mention Ella’s “Beverly” strawberry blond hair! What are the chances that both Ella and Julia have super close friends who are opera singers? Yours is known as “the Met's resident Queen of the Night.” Is that related in any way to the Queen being one of Sills’s signature roles?
 
KK: It absolutely is! In Sills’ memoir, she talks about what a tough role it is, and how a coloratura who can sing it well can essentially write her own ticket. Which is absolutely perfect for Ella’s friend Marie, who’s married and raising a young family while maintaining a career. That’s a tough lift even in 2025, and it was virtually impossible in 1900, but Marie’s incredibly rare and valuable skill gives her a chance to make it work.  Marie’s deep commitment to both family and opera – an echo of Sills’ values – inspires Ella to go forward with her own courtship and marriage. Tell me more about how you created Julia’s singer friend.
 
EM: I just love your description of Marie! In both Prelude to Murder and Overture to Murder, Marin (what are the chances mine and yours are spelled almost exactly the same—great minds!) and Julia meet at the Met Café, which is virtually the only place we lowly “downstairs” (the orchestra pit is two levels down from the stage) musicians get to hobnob with the “upstairs” performers. The two young women hit it off immediately. Unlike Marie, however, Marin is a mezzo, and was inspired by true stories that some famous opera singers—Frederica von Stade and Jennifer Larmore among them—were kind enough to share with me. As you know from Ella, mezzos have entirely different personalities from sopranos. Less diva, more down to earth. But they’re all fascinating.
 
KK: One of the other wonderful things about your series is the way you weave it into the Met.
This series couldn’t happen anywhere else, with any other characters. You do such a wonderful time of bringing the reader right there.
 
EM: Thank you!
 
KK: Is that all from your experience…or did you have to do any additional research?   
 
EM: For the first book in the series, Aria for Murder, it was one hundred percent Met. After 21 years hanging out all over that opera house, I knew the place inside out and used my experiences to inspire the plot and characters. After a reader asked me for a sequel and insisted it take place at Santa Fe Opera (he was right; it’s a unique and magnificent setting), I combined my Met experiences with the atmosphere at Santa Fe and stories I heard from the people at the opera to create the story. A San Francisco Opera friend made a similar suggestion, and I realized I could add my Met experiences to what I learned at other opera houses and from my research to create the same authenticity as the series moved along. Speaking of research, I had a great time connecting with your story, characters, and setting in Fatal Waltz. What kind of research did you do to authenticate the inner workings of the world’s most famous opera house at the time of your story?
 
KK: I spent incredible amounts of time online tracking down programs and calendars, as well as histories of the Met and earlier opera companies. Prints and photos, too – it took forever to find one with a view from the Met stage, but it was really important so I could have a really good sense of what it was like for Ella. My goal wasn’t absolute historical accuracy, but finding space for my characters inside the known facts. So the timing of Ella’s performances in the fifth book are based on season schedules from the period, as well as current ones…with a little fictionalization to accommodate plot points!
 
EM: What’s next for you?
 
KK: I’m currently finishing the sixth Ella book, which leans a little harder into Victorian melodrama, complete with Ella once again dueling a villain on a catwalk. No spoilers, but this time, the stakes are much higher for her – and everyone else. Regular readers will get the hint here! How about you…and Julia?
 
EM: I’ve discussed a possible Book Four with my publisher. There’s a pivotal character, new to the series in Book Three, who’s been speaking to me and insisting I find new ways for her to get in trouble, and I’m tempted to start exploring those. But we also discussed going in a whole new direction, possibly something historical like a true crime. Or maybe a fictional Met mystery from the past. Now there’s something fun you and I could collaborate on! Meanwhile, there’s a whole new season of Seattle Opera and Seattle Symphony waiting for me to review. So my writing chops will not get rusty by any means.
 
KM: What a wonderful conversation! I think we need to get tickets for the Met the next time you’re in town…or maybe just get together for a virtual Beverly Sills marathon!
 
EM: Or both! Either way, I’ll make sure our foray to the Met will be unlike any you’ve experienced before. You’re on!
 
Connect with Erica and Kathleen on their websites: http://www.ericaminer.com/ and https://kathleenmarplekalb.com/
 

Writers are often asked where they get their ideas. Some ideas—maybe most—begin as kernels. Just a sense of something that could expand. Sometimes, they sit for years before they pop. When they do, one little kernel could set up a whole novel.
 
We should always write them down for future use. It’s amazing what can happen when we light the fire to see if they’ll pop. My third novel, Dead-Handed, was based on the kernel of an idea from thirty years ago. I read about a cursed property and thought, “I’ll use that one day.” My latest book, You Can’t Hide, popped from another one: from a plot around the daughter of a serial killer.
 
I’ve encountered several relatives of serial killers and have found the daughters to be especially interesting. One desperately wanted to believe her father’s lies that he wasn’t as bad as people said. A few helped to hide evidence while others assisted police to find it. Several have used the popularity of true crime culture to establish notoriety and financial support. Some have falsely posed as serial killers’ daughters, accusing their fathers (without evidence) of substantial criminal behavior.
 
Those daughters who’ve gone public often claim they’re victims, too. They go on talk shows and podcasts, and some have written memoirs. Melissa Moore, the daughter of “Happy Face Killer” Keith Jesperson, developed a TV series, Monster in My Family, in which she joined relatives of serial killers with members of families whose loved ones were the killers’ victims. The goal was healing for both parties.
 
Kerri Rawson, the daughter of Dennis Rader, Wichita’s “BTK” serial killer, has wavered between outright rejection and coming to terms. A decade after his arrest in 2005, she described her anguish and humiliation upon learning that the doting father she’d loved had murdered ten people. In A Serial Killer’s Daughter, she describes the difficult process of trying to understand. “It’s horrible to realize that as my dad was raising children, he chose to take another mother away from her own children. He was about to have a daughter yet took two more daughters away from their families.”

As part of a TV broadcast, I once spoke to the daughter of a man who’d killed 13 sex workers. She visited him in prison and believed he was sincerely remorseful (although he said a “disorder” prevented him from feeling said remorse). This made it possible for her to feel close to him as a daughter and believe he was still a good man.

In contrast, the three daughters of Michelle “Shelly” Knotek turned her in. Using beauty and sex to deflect suspicion, Knotek subjected her children and tenants to torment. Using a caretaker’s persona to hide her sadistic cruelty, she manipulated her third husband, David, into covering up her crimes and even killing for her. Knotek was convicted in two deaths and her husband a third.

The nightmares for such offspring often continue. Whether they accept or reject, they’ve been emotionally damaged. Some find solace in religion, community, and family. Some become victim advocates, as if their work can neutralize their parents’ crimes.

So, I had plenty to work with to form my character, Vaughn Ryder. I just had to decide what she’d be like as the result of this jarring change to her life and whether she’d have a relationship with her criminal dad. She decides not only that he’s innocent but also that she must advocate for him. Is it denial, or does she have proof that the real killer is still out there? When my investigative team encounters her, she’s a force to be reckoned with. Non one tells her no, not even her dad.

So, an idea that sat for years waiting to be popped added significant momentum to my crime story. Vaughn was headstrong, determined, and unpredictable but also the key to propelling the plot. To add some twists, I even included that cursed property from Dead-Handed.

Keep track of your kernels! You never know when they’ll become exactly what you need to pop your plot.

With her Nut Cracker Investigations series, Katherine Ramsland injects her expertise in forensic psychology into her fiction. She consults for coroners, trains homicide investigators, and has appeared as an expert on more than 250 crime documentaries. She was an executive producer on Murder House Flip, A&E’s Confession of a Serial Killer: BTK, and ID’s The Serial Killer’s Apprentice. The author of more than 2,000 articles and 74 books, including I Scream Man and How to Catch a Killer, she also has a Substack and pens a blog for Psychology Today. 

Trapped and Tested, the second book in my DeeLo Myer cat rescue mystery series, has a title with a double meaning. The “Trapped” portion brands the series, which features a woman who does TNVR (Trap, Neuter, Vaccinate, Return) for a local animal rescue group in an effort to manage the overpopulation of free-roaming cats. (The first book, Trap, Neuter, Die, was released in November 2024.) It’s the “Tested” part of book two’s title that has two meanings.

When the story opens, DeeLo is talking to her mixed-race niece, Demi, who is like a sister since the women are about the same age and lived much of their childhood under the same roof. Demi is the daughter of DeeLo’s much older sister, Desiree, who wasn’t ready to be a mother at sixteen when she gave birth to Demi and thus left her parents in charge of her daughter’s upbringing.

Demi has no idea who her father is, and all her life, Desiree has dodged the question. Now that she’s grown, Demi gave up asking, submitted her DNA to an ancestry site, and found a match: a half-brother named Kwintone Johnson. Kwintone claims to have a lead on who their father might be. Demi has set up an in-person meeting with Kwintone, and she persuades DeeLo to accompany her.

On the way to the meet-up at a restaurant in Pecan Point, where DeeLo resides, Kwintone gets a speeding ticket. Demi puts DeeLo on the spot, telling her alleged half-brother that DeeLo will help him get the ticket off his record by doing community service. Demi blabs that DeeLo got her start with the Pecan Point Humane Society by doing community service as penance for a D.U.I.

Fast forward a few weeks, and DeeLo is assigned to train Kwintone on TNVR. He’s a difficult volunteer: he shows up late, after DeeLo has already set the traps; he immediately takes a phone call, and then he tells her he has to leave early. She refuses to sign his time sheet since he didn’t do any work.

When DeeLo finishes her cat trapping and drives away, she discovers Kwintone’s car parked on the side of the road. The windows are down, his cellphone lies in the seat, and Kwintone is nowhere to be found. She waits a few minutes to see if he’s coming right back; when he doesn’t, she calls Demi, who has made arrangements to meet him for a drink afterwards.

Demi hasn’t heard from him, so she comes over and together, they search for Kwintone. When they dial the last number in his call log, they hear ringing. The sound leads them to the prone body of a severely wounded man. DeeLo calls 9-1-1, and Demi immediately gets to work trying to stop the bleeding. When DeeLo returns to her vehicle for a blanket with which to cover the victim, Kwintone’s car is gone.

Has Kwintone been taken against his will? Has someone stolen his car? Did he have something to do with the assault on the man they’re trying to save?

DeeLo later learns that the stabbing victim is Aiden Green, CEO of Neuroscience Laboratories, a company that conducts neurological tests on animals—mainly cats. Hence, the double meaning of the word “Tested” in the book’s title: ancestry DNA testing, and animal testing. Also, Kwintone tested DeeLo’s patience throughout the story with his disappearing act and evasive answers.

I often use my stories to explore contemporary social issues, so the reader can learn something along with solving a mystery. In Trap, Neuter, Die, I show how many communities thwart the efforts of rescue groups to control the feral cat population by passing feeding bans and ordinances that effectively render TNVR illegal. In Trapped and Tested, I tackle the controversy over animal testing and the moral question of whether one species has the right to torture another without its consent in order to improve life for the “superior” species.

Regardless of how they feel about the merits of animal testing, readers will enjoy trying to solve two mysteries that overlap. And DeeLo gets involved in local politics in her quest to update the Pecan County animal ordinance to recognize TNVR. Will she succeed this time? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Sharon Marchisello is the author of the DeeLo Myer cat rescue mystery series, which began with Trap, Neuter, Die. She is a long-time volunteer and cat foster for the Fayette Humane Society (FHS) with a Master’s in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. She also published two mysteries with Sunbury Press--Going Home (2014) and Secrets of the Galapagos (2019). Sharon has written short stories, a nonfiction book about personal finance, training manuals, screenplays, a blog, and book reviews. She is an active member of Sisters in Crime, the Atlanta Writers Club, and the Hometown Novel Writers Association. Retired from a 27-year career with Delta Air Lines, she now lives in Peachtree City, Georgia, and serves on the board of directors for the Friends of the Peachtree City Library.

After decades as an art historian, journalist, curator and director of a historic house museum, ten years ago I felt the urge to write murder mysteries. I was not, however, inspired to make them up out of whole cloth. For some unexamined reason, I choose to do away with real art-world characters who are, in fact, dead but who (with one exception) didn’t die when or where I kill them. All of them meet ends different from their actual deaths. 
 
Scholars aren’t supposed to make up stuff like that, so I don’t think my grad school advisor would have approved. Journalists are also expected to be factual, though as a New York Times art critic I had license to express my opinions, but not to be inaccurate. Museum directors and curators need to get their information right, too. Honest mistakes happen, but none of those lines of work tolerate outright liars.
 
So why would I go against the accepted ethical norms? Well, to be honest, just for the fun of breaking the rules and keeping my readers guessing. Locate the fictional crime in an authentic setting inhabited by people who were, or could have been, there at the time, have them interact with imaginary characters, and it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s false. That’s how I’ve constructed all my Art of Murder mysteries, set in the creative community that migrates between New York City and the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, where my husband and I have lived for nearly fifty years. It’s such a rich source of potential victims and suspects that I’ll never run out of material.  And while the art world may seem opaque to outsiders, its machinations and motivations are entirely recognizable to the average reader.
 
As one of my fictional characters breaks it down, there are five universal motives for murder: jealousy, deception, rivalry, greed and revenge—words to live (or die) by in the world at large. Each of my novels takes a different slant on one of them, with predictably fatal consequences. In the first, An Exquisite Corpse, titled after a Surrealist parlor game, greed is at the forefront. Number two, An Accidental Corpse, hinges on jealousy. Revenge is the motive in the third, An Artful Corpse, while deception is at the heart of number four, An Elegant Corpse, and the latest, number five, A Willful Corpse. I’ll examine rivalry in mystery number six, published in April by Level Best Books. 
 
The Art of Murder series develops chronologically, decade by decade, starting in 1943, when a contingent of Surrealist artists and writers fled Hitler’s Europe and camped out in New York City during World War II. Those who know the true story have asked me why I decided to kill Wifredo Lam, one of the exiled Surrealists, who died in 1982 and who wasn’t even in the city during the war. The answer is, he was the perfect victim to lead the narrative in intriguing directions, and to rope in colorful characters who were his real-life associates. 
 
Two fictional NYPD officers, Brian Fitzgerald and Juanita Diaz—yes, there were female cops back then—who investigate the crime fall in love and marry, and their family story carries forward through the series. By 1956, they’re vacationing in East Hampton with their eight-year-old son, Timothy Juan, known as TJ. He helps solve the mystery of what looked like an accident but may have been the murder of Edith Metzger, a passenger in the car crash that killed the painter Jackson Pollock. (This is the only one of my novels in which the victim dies when and where, though not how, it really happened.) 
 
TJ takes the lead in the next book, set in 1967 New York City amid anti-Vietnam War protests and the heyday of Pop art, when the controversial artist Thomas Hart Benton—who died in 1975 and, like Lam, wasn’t in New York at the time—is stabbed to death at the art school TJ is attending. At age 19, TJ, who’s also studying at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is torn between a career in law enforcement and life as an artist. He resolves the conflict by giving up on art class, but not on his classmate, Ellen Jamieson. Fast forward to 1976, when TJ, now 28 and a licensed private eye married to Ellen, investigates the murder of his friend and mentor, the wealthy artist Alfonso Ossorio, who is found dead—14 years before his actual demise in 1990—in his East Hampton mansion. Ten years later, TJ is hired by Francis V. O’Connor, the leading expert on Jackson Pollock’s work, to track down an art forger, but winds up trying to find out whether O’Connor’s sudden death was an accident, suicide, or murder. Book number six will circle back to 1939, with Brian Fitzgerald as a rookie cop patrolling the soon-to-open New York World’s Fair, where muralists meet with mishaps—one fatal—that are definitely not accidental.
 
As a New York City native and longtime Hamptons resident who trained as an artist before studying art history, I’m intimately familiar with the milieux in which my mysteries are set. Many of the real characters were my friends or acquaintances, so I have an insider’s view of their personalities and behaviors. I knew Pollock’s long-suffering wife, Lee Krasner, and his lover, Ruth Kligman, as well as several of the artists in their circle. Ossorio and his life partner, Ted Dragon, were much as I describe them, and I was especially close to O’Connor. After reading An Exquisite Corpse, he told me I had a flair for mystery writing—high praise from a very judgmental critic. Sadly, A Willful Corpse, the book in which I kill him, was published in April, more than seven years after his death in 2017, so he will never know whodunit.
 
During her 34-year tenure as director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York, Helen Harrison began writing mystery novels set in the art world of which she’s a denizen. A widely published author of nonfiction books and articles on art, she enjoys making up stories in which fictional characters interact with people from her own background and experience as a New York Times art critic, NPR arts commentator, curator at the Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall Museum and the Queens Museum, and a practicing artist. Her second novel, An Accidental Corpse, won the 2019 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Mystery & Suspense. A Mystery Writers of America active member, she and her husband, the artist Roy Nicholson, live in Sag Harbor, NY, with the ghost of Roy’s beloved studio cat, Mittens.

People often ask me, “Did you decide to write a cozy mystery series about a wedding planner because you got an idea for it from your wedding planning business? The answer is… sort of.
 
Hello, I’m Mary Karnes, and I write ‘The Wedding Planning Mystery Series’ – a cozy mystery series published by Level Best Books. I always wanted to be an author. My mother helped me obtain the first of many rejection letters when she submitted a series of my poems to “Redbook Magazine” when I was six. I did not, however, always want to be a wedding planner. That was born more out of necessity than desire.
 
I have four daughters. When daughter number two got engaged twelve years ago, my husband said, “Let’s get a wedding planner!” I said flat out, “NO! We are not wasting good money for that!” I won’t bore you with the details, but it was a grave mistake. After daughter number one’s wedding the following year, I thought, I can be a wedding planner. I did just that. I built a website, with the help of Godaddy.com, advertised on the knot.com and my business has been in the black since day one. All I needed to start was advertising, a computer, a clipboard, paper, and some pens – no overhead.
 
Has it always been easy? Heck no! I was dealing with young women planning the biggest day of their lives. But I have been lucky. In ten years of professional planning, I have had only one ‘bridezilla.’ I now have a team of three ladies, and in the 2024 season, we did thirty-nine weddings. I planned them all but wasn’t always the ‘Day of Coordinator.’

I had written three books before I started the wedding planning business, in fact, I had written one wedding planner book before I had even started my business. ‘Why not write a wedding planning series now that I’m in the biz?’ I asked myself. So, I did.

Friends say, “It must be so easy to write your series! You must get so much fodder from your brides!” Actually, the opposite is true. I have to work really hard to make my stories not resemble my couples, as I guard their privacy very closely.
 
My first book, WEDDING BRIDE AND DOOM, was published in September 2023. Here’s a brief synopsis:

WEDDING BRIDE AND DOOM
 
KATE LUDLOW has moved back home to New England with her daughter, ELLIS, and her little dachshund, Hannah. Her husband, the cheating louse, left her for their next-door neighbor back in California. Finding herself in need of full-time employment, Kate turns her part-time wedding planning business into full-time event coordination.

Home a little over a year, Kate lands a big society wedding, (it could be her big break!), and she’s ready to do anything to make the wedding a success, including finding a missing family heirloom ring. Kate is unsure why the family thinks she can find it when no one has been able to locate it for decades, but she’ll give it a shot.

As she begins to get all the society wedding vendors in place, Kate stumbles upon the body of her best florist, LORI-SUE JOHNSON. Lori-Sue and Kate weren’t friends back in high school, and they aren’t friends now. And just like that, Kate is the police’s number one suspect.

Even though Kate is the police’s only suspect, Kate sees potential murders all around her, including her best friend from high school, JEN COOPER. Back in the day, Jen was worried Lori-Sue might steal her boyfriend, and she never got over it. Was there another layer about their relationship that Kate is not aware of?
To compound matters, BRIAN MCALLISTER, Kate’s high school boyfriend, and breaker of her heart, is the lead detective heading up the murder investigation. Are there still strong feelings between them?

After the police search her home, Kate realizes no one is going to help her except for herself. She starts her own investigation, beginning with searching the deceased florist’s shop and finding a wrapper to a peanut snack, (Lori-Sue had a deadly peanut allergy), and Brian finds her. Brian tells her, “Kate you are your own worst enemy.” But still Kate carries on with her investigation. She doesn’t know who killed Lori-Sue, just that she didn’t.

It could be any of a number of people from old friend, Addalee Baker, who provides Kate with an earful on why she’s not sorry Lori-Sue’s dead, to Brian’s former high school girlfriend and Kate’s archenemy, Sarah-Grace Deloro, the town’s top real estate agent. Why were pending  ‘Board of Realtors’ charges dropped as soon as Lori-Sue was murdered? Even society Mother of the Bride, JOYCE SIMPSON, looks guilty.

 As if Kate doesn’t have enough on her plate, her daughter, Ellis, confides that she has been receiving nasty anonymous texts. Ellis guesses it is the relative of the deceased Lori-Sue, and daughter of Kate’s business rival, KENDRA JACKMAN. Kate goes to Kendra’s house and confronts her, telling her she’d better stop her daughter from harassing Ellis. But Kendra goes to the door to accept a delivery and Kate snoops on Kendra’s phone. It was Kendra who was sending the anonymous texts! Through further digging, Kate finds out Lori-Sue was blackmailing her own cousin, Kendra. Another murder suspect?

Kate’s clients begin canceling her planning services, afraid she will be arrested for Lori-Sue’s murder. Kate is panicked. What will she and Ellis do if her business crashes or worse, she’s arrested for murder? Kate’s sleuthing has produced little, so she decides she might as well try to find the socialite’s missing family ring. The search takes Kate from a local jewelry store to a farm to the town’s historic landmarks. She has an unlikely ally, her old high school beau, and police detective Brian. Sparks fly, and it’s obvious there are still lingering feelings between the two. The strongest lead sends Kate to a local wedding cake baker who has purchased the antique ring at a farm tag sale. Where has the ring been all these years and how did it end up at a tag sale?

After visiting the farm, Kate goes to a local retirement home to question a resident about the ring’s origin. As Kate investigates, she discovers a long-buried mystery that involves JOYCE SIMPSON, mother of the bride. Kate finds, at the risk to her own life, that Joyce has a deep secret she would do anything to keep, including killing Lori-Sue (and Lori-Sue did die by peanut allergy). This all comes to a head when Joyce realizes Kate is too close to the truth and kidnaps Kate to ultimately silence her. Kate’s unlikely savior is arch-rival Sarah-Grace.
Kate discovers her other suspects’ secrets and why they had motives to kill Lori-Sue. The dead florist had been quite the blackmailer and used her friends and family’s secrets against them.

The arrival of Kate’s ex lends another layer to her already chaotic life when he makes it plain, he’d like her back. Will Kate reunite her family, or seek what will make her happy, Brian?
 
SAVE THE FATE was published in October 2024. Here is a brief synopsis:

SAVE THE FATE
 
Wedding Planner Kate Ludlow is back with her fun circle of small-town New England friends. Life is clipping along well for Kate. Her wedding season is off to a great start; she has reconnected with her former high school boyfriend, and her teen daughter is happy and looking forward to a fun summer.  At the town’s traditional kick-off to summer party, “Strawberry Moon,” Jack Malone, the town’s parodical son, surprises the population with his appearance. He’s the best baseball player the whole of New England has ever produced, and he now plays professional baseball in Los Angeles. He hasn’t been home in years but has returned home to marry a local girl. He taps Kate to be his wedding planner, and she couldn’t be happier; what a boon this will be for her business!

Jack reconnects with old friends, and apparently old enemies too, as his body is found in the Connecticut River on his third day home. Jack’s high school girlfriend, and Kate’s best friend, Jen, is the prime suspect. She can’t or won’t give an alibi for the time of Jack’s death. But she’s not the only person who looks guilty. A new business partner has come to Eastbury looking for Jack, claiming Jack cheated him in a business deal gone wrong. Then there’s the high school rival who lost everything in a decade’s old confrontation with Jack. The state police leading the investigation into Jack’s death feel certain Jen is their killer, so Kate has to act. If Jen won’t help herself, Kate will have to step in to save her; but this won’t help her fledgling relationship with her old/new love, Brian, who is Eastbury’s lead detective.
 
The third in the series, UNVEILED SECRETS, will be published in October 2025. All books in the series are available wherever online books are so, in print, eBook, or audio formats.

​Mary Karnes is a mother of four who raised her family through six corporate moves, but always dreamed of being an author. Once the kids were grown, she started a wedding planning company and decided to simultaneously chase her dream of being a published author. The ‘Wedding Planner Mystery Series’ was born, with her business
providing much subject matter for her books. Mary resides in New England with her husband, Ken, her mini-dachshund Lucky. Her door is a revolving one with her kids and grandkids visiting frequently.

I am a cozy mystery writer who decided one day to write what I call a historical cozy.  I enjoy reading historical fiction, but I would never consider myself a historian. But I loved the idea of using a historical event as the setting for a cozy mystery. That’s when Dot Morgan became my latest heroine. I placed her in the early sixties and gave her the not-so- glamorous job of secretary. This occupation was a splendid vehicle to put her in various work settings, but always in her small town in Texas. It also meant Dot would keep losing her job. To date, she’s lost three jobs, yet amazingly keeps getting hired.
​
In the second book in my Swinging Sixties Series, If I Had a Hammer, I placed Dot and her cousin Ellie on the grassy knoll on November 22, 1963. Think about the writing hurdles here. Everyone knows this scene because they have seen it or read about it countless times, both in fiction and nonfiction. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is an event that some generations use as a “Where were you?” moment. Readers know the history of this day, so the thought of getting it wrong is not something I wanted to do.

The writing challenge was intimidating since my cozy characters pretty well plotted their lives around bake sales and beauty shop gossip. A presidential assassination brought a very non-cozy element into my story. I took a cue from historical writers and immersed myself in research. I studied black-and-white photos of the people who stood along the parade route on November 22 and then wrote my two characters in the middle of them. They were elbow to elbow with people in headscarves and boxy black glasses.  As the motorcade approached, I focused on my two young women.

What would they be thinking before the assassination?

They would look at Jackie Kennedy. My mother was obsessed with all things Jackie. She bought clothes in Jackie style and even mimicked her hairstyles. Yes, these characters would look at the first lady’s outfit and feel the way I remember my mother feeling. They would have great respect for a woman they had never met. They would refer to the president and his wife as Jackie and John, as if they knew them personally.

When the shooting started in my story, I zeroed in on Dot who was winding the wheel of an Instamatic camera. My reason for doing this, instead of her witnessing the entire horrific scene as her cousin did, was to keep Dot’s viewpoint at a safe, cozy distance. Ellie, the cousin, sees the whole thing and goes through PTSD after this scene. Dot, who I’ll need to solve a murder in her small town, remains a bit more removed. She never looks up, but only through the eyehole of the lens, and then to the wheel on the back of the camera to forward the film roll.

Cozy mysteries are about a sense of safety in the middle of a murder investigation. Miss Marple was rarely in danger, and if she were, she carried knitting needles. In writing a cozy historical mystery, I put my characters in a little more danger than Agatha Christie did, but they are still cozy with their three-network television, wind-up watches, and Instamatic cameras. I typically borrow more from Mayberry than the realities of that Dallas parade route in 1963.

After this book, I put Dot to work in a radio station in Listen, Do You Want to Hear a Secret? and in 2025 she’s working in a funeral home in the upcoming release, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. It was the only job she could get because people kept dying in her other jobs.

Dot Morgan tackles the sexism and racism of the sixties, along with overcoming her own stereotype of being a young, attractive, blond secretary (she must be simple-minded because she’s blond). I love including the history of this period because it gives my cozy mystery another layer of story. But don’t worry, even historical cozies will have plenty of bake sales and beauty parlor gossip.
 
 
Teresa Trent writes the Swinging Sixties Cozy Mystery Series as well as several other cozy mystery series from her home in Houston Texas. She is also the voice of Books to the Ceiling, a podcast that features narrated excerpts from new mysteries coming onto the market.  You can find her online at teresatrent.com and teresatrent.blog.

Autumn Embers, the third book in my Batavia-on-Hudson mystery series, is a story about family, friendship and identity. When I stopped to write this essay, I realized that identity is a theme I return to over and over.
 
So much of my writing has to do with characters attempting to fit in, trying to feel comfortable, getting to know themselves. Be it in a new community, in a profession, in a relationship, or even in their own skin. They are testing their potential, overcoming their personal blocks.
 
The Batavia-on-Hudson series started with Winter Witness where Bianca St. Denis is working to be accepted as a member of her new community, a small village in the Catskill Mountains, and learning how to live as a new young(ish) widow. It’s a new identity for her and she’s not sure she is ready to embrace it. Many of the other characters are also flailing: the local troublemaker teenager who can’t seem to shed the bad boy image no matter how hard he tries, the new young doctor in town who doesn’t measure up to Old Doc, the quiet Japanese man who lives alone in the hills above the village. They are all searching to know themselves and where they fit. 
 
Dead Man’s Leap, Book 2, is where Bianca comes to grips with her grief and learns what’s important to her. In fact, the entire community deals with a storm that causes enough damage that they all have to reassess what is important to them and their identity. They learn to cut their losses (material and emotional) and move forward with their lives.
 
It’s no surprise to me that I write on this subject. As a child, I was painfully shy and my affliction was complicated by a lifestyle of frequent house moves, including a major one out of the country. I needed to fit in again and again. And just as I thought I had it under control, we’d relocate one more time. Needless to say, these moves were very difficult for someone like me, but in the long run, I learned a great deal from these disruptions. Each time I settled in my new community, I was able to peel off a layer of my shyness—of my identity—until one day it no longer debilitated me. I had shed one version of me and replaced it with another version I preferred: someone more adventurous and more comfortable in my own skin. Each new location taught me that I could remake myself over and over.
 
I started investigating these ideas in my writing years ago. Some of my first pieces of short fiction were on the subject of my childhood as a daughter of immigrants. How I never really understood my friends. How I had to mold myself to be like them, dress like them, eat the foods they ate, and listen to the music they liked. In fact, one Friday in grammar school, after being embarrassed during recess for not knowing a pop song, I spent the entire weekend with my transistor tuned into WABC to introduce myself to all the hottest songs. By the time I returned to school on Monday morning, I knew them all, along with every word of their lyrics. This incident was the basis of my flash fiction piece entitled “Lost in America.” So, no, it’s no surprise to me that I write about identity.
 
As I said above, Book 3 - Autumn Embers, is a story about family, friendship and identity. Ian, Bianca’s son, has made a new life for himself in Japan. There, he has embraced the expatriate community and as a result, they have become like family—his chosen family. Bianca must come to terms with this painful realization, but she also learns that she has done the same thing in Batavia. She too has chosen her new family in the villagers of Batavia. Many of the expat characters in Autumn Embers are grappling with these same notions. They learn just how malleable their identities can be. In the meantime, at home in Batavia, Mike Riley, the sheriff and Bianca’s love interest, is grappling with his own issues. It looks like he may not be re-elected as sheriff and he has no idea how to not be a law enforcement officer. As if that weren’t enough, he has learned news about his partners death from years ago that calls into question who Sal really was. And Mike does this all while learning how to live his new life as a separated bachelor. He is in flux and learning the depth and complexity of his own identity.
 
My experience has shown me that my identity has many layers and many iterations. I have taken these lessons, shared them with Bianca and the others, and enjoyed watching each character evolve on the page.
 
 
This essay first appeared on the Wall-to-Wall Books Blog on October 23, 2024
https://wall-to-wall-books.blogspot.com/2024/10/autumn-embers-guest-post-by-tina.html

Tina deBellegarde’s debut novel, "Winter Witness", was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. "Dead Man’s Leap", her second book in the Batavia-on-Hudson Mystery Series, was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel. Reviewers have called Tina “the Louise Penny of the Catskills.” Tina also writes short stories and flash fiction. Her story “Tokyo Stranger,” nominated for a Derringer Award, appears in the Mystery Writers of America anthology When a Stranger Comes to Town, edited by Michael Koryta. Tina co-chairs the Murderous March Conference and is a founding member of Sleuths and Sidekicks, where she blogs, tours virtually, and teaches writing workshops. She is a member of Writers in Kyoto and reviews books for BooksOnAsia.net. She lives in Catskill, New York with her husband Denis and their cat Shelby. She travels frequently to Japan to visit her son and daughter-in-law and to do research. Tina is currently working on a collection of interconnected short stories set in Japan. Visit her website for more: https://www.tinadebellegarde.com/

​I never intended to write a series. The thought of going to the well too often was off-putting, and I feared getting stale. I wanted to write standalones; I believed they would test the limits of my creativity.
 
Then I wrote PUBLIC MORALS. Loosely based on a real-life corruption scandal in the New York City Police Department, it's told in two parts. In the first part, set in 1982, a crooked cop named Terence Devine is convicted for killing a sex worker. In the second part, which occurs forty years later, his daughter, Sheila, a documentary filmmaker, investigates the crimes that he and other people committed -- in the process unearthing startling new evidence.
 
As I put the novel through multiple drafts, I discovered that I really liked Sheila Devine (I do not always feel this way about my characters; in reviewing my novel MIAMI TWILIGHT, the mystery impresario Otto Penzler said that "Coffey has a genius for creating antiheroes"), and I wanted to extend her journey. For a number of years, I've also kicked around the idea of writing a book based on the Central Park Jogger case. I wouldn't say that I had a "Eureka!" moment, but after finishing PUBLIC MORALS, and not wanting to let Sheila go, I decided that she could be the vehicle that would allow me to write about the jogger case. The result is SPECIAL VICTIM, the second novel in what I am immodestly calling The Devine Trilogy.
 
Thirty-five years after it happened, the Central Park Jogger case still resonates in New York. I got a sense of that on Nov. 2 when I read from the book at a Mystery Writers of America event at a library in midtown Manhattan. Perhaps it's my imagination, but as soon as I began reading I felt I had the rapt attention of the two dozen people in attendance, all of whom were familiar with the story. The air seemed to leave the room, in a good way. When I was done, and the moderator Hal Glatzer asked for questions or comments, instead of the typical non-responses from the audience, many people waded in with pointed questions and comments. I was happy for the strong reactions, both pro and con, and after the session, I talked to a retired NYPD detective who had taken part in the interrogations of the five young men who were first convicted, and then exonerated, in the assault. It turns out that some of the people close to the investigation had doubts about their guilt from the start -- doubts that were memorably aired by Joan Didion in an essay in The New York Review of Books two years after the attack -- but groupthink prevailed, both in law enforcement and the news media.
 
Much as I'd like to pin the blame for this miscarriage of justice on police and prosecutors, I cannot. I was a journalist in New York City for many years, and this was one of my former profession's worst moments. The presumption of innocence may seem like a quaint and no-longer-relevant idea, but it was established for a reason. In this case, as soon as the young men who became known as the Central Park Five were arrested, they were convicted in the court of public opinion. Blaring headlines in the tabloid press assumed the defendants' guilt and wondered why they hadn't been put in prison for life already, placing an incredible amount of pressure on the police to arrest somebody, anybody, really didn't matter who it was. The overwhelming desire in New York was for vengeance, not justice, and inconvenient facts were ignored. Even after DNA established the identity of the real attacker, many people who were involved in the investigation, and who wrote stories about it, refused to admit that they had made mistakes, or had gotten anything wrong. As a result, many people in New York City still believe that the members of the Central Park Five were involved in the attack. (To be fair, some of those guys were in the park that night, and they weren't doing outreach to the homeless; they were beating up the homeless.)
 
Now I'm on to the third book of my trilogy, which I hope will complete the journey of Sheila Devine and her family. The book is tentatively titled STOP AND FRISK, and I'm reluctant to say anything about it because I haven't finished writing it yet. While it's not based on a specific event, it does deal with the all-too-frequent deadly encounters in this country between the police and young men of color. And in writing this trilogy, rather than writing each novel as a standalone, I've discovered that I've been able to delve even more deeply into story, into character, and into the state of the human condition.
 
Which means, I guess, that I may have to start another series.

When I began writing Murder on the Med, book three of the Kat Lawson mysteries, I felt as though I was channeling a slightly different voice for my protagonist, Kat Lawson. In the previous two books, Kat was a level-headed, if not a headstrong, reporter determined to follow the story no matter what the risks. But as I opened a blank page on my computer and began to write, I realized Kat needed a vacation.

As writers, we all understand the difficulty in trying to get a character to do something on the page they don’t want to do. Try explaining this concept to a non-writer, and they will look at you like you’re crazy, but writers understand. Our characters either talk to us or they won’t, and when they don’t, it’s because we’ve taken them where they don’t want to go, and they simply disappear!

So I went with the idea that we all need a break, and voila! There on the page in front of me was Kat sitting onboard a luxury yacht having High Tea with two elderly British ladies who felt it was their duty to inform Kat of a drowning, or at least what they felt was a probable drowning. 

It was a nonsensical conversation, for sure. Kat was uncomfortable, aware the two spinster schoolteachers with whom she was having tea were either daffy or drunk. Either way, the scene was the perfect setup for Kat’s next adventure on the high seas, where she’s been rewarded with an all-expense paid cruise around the Amalfi Coast by her employer, Journey International. All she needs to do is write a feature article about Athena, a luxury cruise ship designed as a floating retirement community for seniors wishing to spend their waning years sailing blissfully into the sunset. This assignment her employer promised was just for fun. A bonus for her previous work as a feature writer while working as an undercover operative for the FBI. What could possibly go wrong? 

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I would choose a retirement center as the location for Kat’s next adventure. My mother had been ailing while writing this book, and I was spending a lot of time at her retirement complex. Mom was ninety-nine-and-a-half years old when she passed—she insisted I always include the half when referencing her age. She was very proud she had lived such a long and healthy life, and I felt fortunate that I was able to spend time with her at the end. My mother was bright, articulate, and well-read. Her favorite authors were Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. She loved mysteries, and she looked forward to my reading to her what I was working on every day. Without a doubt, she was my biggest fan.

My mother loved the idea that Kat’s next adventure would take place aboard a floating retirement center with a bunch of quirky senior citizens. The more I let Kat take charge, the more I began to accept the idea that the tone of this book would be a little different. My theme:  A group of rogue seniors trade their pensions for piracy as they sail into their sunset years. 
 
I’ll admit I held my breath while writing this book. Would my readers accept a slight change of tone, a blending of genre, in the series? I’m relieved to say early reviews for Murder on the Med have allied my fears, and I’ll share a few.
​

• This is my third Kat Lawson Mystery, and I’ll confirm that they keep getting better; some are more history, some more mystery, and this one has great rom-com vibes.
• Reading Murder on the Med was like watching Love Boat or Murder She Wrote...great Agatha Christie vibes.
• A great beach read!

I don’t know why characters and stories come to writers as they do. But I do know that as a writer, it’s important to trust our instincts. Sometimes, we just need to take that leap of faith and go with what shows up on the page. At the end of the day, I think it makes us better writers.

Nancy Cole Silverman spent nearly twenty-five years in news and talk radio before retiring to write fiction. Silverman’s award-winning short stories and crime-focused novels, the Carol Childs and Misty Dawn Mysteries (Henry Press), are based in Los Angeles, while her newest series, the Kat Lawson Mysteries (Level Best Books), takes a more international approach. Kat Lawson, a former investigative reporter has gone undercover for the FBI as a feature writer for a travel publication. Expect lots of international intrigue, vivid descriptions of small European villages, great food, lost archives, and non-stop action. Silverman lives in Los Angeles with her husband and thoroughly pampered standard poodle, Paris.

​Sarah: Somehow we both have written very similar characters, though different
plots, in our first procedural novel. Your book takes place in Laurel,
Maine. It's a small town on the coast of Maine that is a tourist area
(meaning summer residents), and a small steady population year round. LT
Nichols never planned to join the police, and in fact was a bartender
when it was suggested to him. My book takes place in Eden County,
Florida. A rural county with a tiny year-round population in North
Central Florida. Jim Sheppard didn't want to be a sheriff, and he was
getting his masters in education so he could teach history, when his
wife's death and having a baby son made him decide to drop out of
college and go home to Eden County and become a deputy under his father
who was Sheriff.

In the first book they are both faced with crimes that test their
ability to be law enforcement officers, and make both of them doubt
their ability to solve the crime. But they are both determined to find
out what happened and who did it and why, no matter what roadblocks get
thrown in their path.

How did you come to write about LT? And why do you think he became a
good police chief?

Albert: There are so many characters in crime fiction who have extraordinary capabilities, whether it’s incredible powers of deduction or a deep knowledge of psychology or ninja-like combat skills.  But none of the police officers that I know and have known are like that.  They’re real people who try to do their best in an extremely difficult job.  To me, that’s much more dramatic and compelling than the adventures of fanciful quasi-superheroes.  (Though I will admit to reading and loving all of Sherlock Holmes—over and over.)  LT is a good person with good intentions, like many of us.  The difference is that while he realizes his shortcomings, he will not let them get in the way of doing what’s right.  He’s not afraid to do the hard things, even if they appear to be beyond his capabilities.  The funny thing is that I don’t see The Ruins of Woodman’s Village as a police procedural (though I suppose that’s what it is).  I see it as character-driven fiction where the protagonist happens to be a police chief.  Maybe that approach is what keeps LT from being a cliché on the page.

One thing that Sheriff Jim Shephard has that LT does not is a high level of education and a certain thoughtfulness.  LT is a college dropout who was drifting before he joined Laurel’s police force.  Jim Shephard was purposely headed in a different direction and yet wound up in the family business:  being the Sheriff of Eden County.

How does Jim’s educational background and intelligence play into how he approaches his job?  Is it at odds with his family history?

Sarah: I never thought about LT’s education. That is a difference. Jim Sheppard had a Bachelors and was half-way through his Masters program when his wife died in a car wreck. He’s more educated than most of his deputies, except for Dee Jackson, who is completing her Masters in Criminal Justice. That might be a reason that Jim and Dee connect really well.
Jim’s father went to the University of Florida on a football scholarship, which is what he wanted his son to do. He also wanted him to major in Criminal Justice, and instead he majored in history.

I don’t think that Jim thinks of himself as better educated, but more that he loves history. I don’t think he considers what education level his deputies have, as long as they are good at their job. He hires a lot of veterans, because he sees them as having experience that prepares them for dealing with violence.

In BURNING EDEN, Jim does not feel qualified to solve a kidnapping or a possible serial killer. He is overwhelmed. He really relies on the experience of his deputies. He leans on Dee Jackson, with her Military Police experience, and his contacts in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement who do all the forensic work for Eden County.

Jim’s education is at odds with everyone’s in his department, and with his family as well.
However, history does educate a person a great deal about human beings. His education has caused him to hire diversely. He has deputies who know the people – all the people – and don’t react according to the prejudices that you’d encounter in a mostly white Sheriff’s department in rural Florida.

Eden County is pretty rural. There are a few wealthy people, but the majority of the population is poor. In THE RUINS OF WOODMAN’S VILLAGE, because Laurel is a summer tourist community, there are HUGE differences in wealth that are visible. You continue to deal with this part of being the Police Chief in Laurel in FLOOD TIDE, the next book – where LT Nichols has to work with a very wealthy, politically connected family. LT definitely seems to have issues with the “summer” people who come into Laurel and change the atmosphere a great deal. Does that change how you approach the characters and the crime?

Albert: The changing summer demographics and the accompanying dynamics of being in a seasonal tourist town pose additional challenges for LT Nichols. They complicate what is already a difficult job. As the town transforms from a small fishing village into a fast-paced resort every summer, a heightened energy envelopes Laurel. In the simplest analysis, the more people who occupy a space, the greater the chance for interactions that can take a bad turn. In addition, backgrounds and expectations can clash. It’s a lot for LT to handle. At the same time, however, he comes to realize that people, no matter what their socioeconomic status, all want the same things (love, comfort, respect, etc..,) and face the same demons (greed, selfishness, unchecked desire, etc..,). When all these things collide, life gets tough for LT Nichols. Maybe that explains his fondness for a cold Budweiser at the end of the day.

Jim Shephard does not exactly have it easy in Eden County, Florida. In Burning Eden and Frozen Eden, the sequel, he faces a different set of challenges, and they come from environmental stressors. In the first book, it’s heat and wildfires. In the second, there are unheard-of wintry conditions and an ice storm. What choices did you make to place Jim and Eden County under these conditions? How do they work into the fabric of who Jim is and his role in the county?

Sarah: Florida weather is a bit like “Florida Man,” unpredictable and extreme. The wildfires written about in BURNING EDEN really happened in 1998. There used to be orange trees in South Florida, but the freeze I write about in FROZEN EDEN pretty much destroyed the industry here.
Yes, we have long periods of “typical” Florida weather. It includes daily afternoon rains, sunshine in the mornings, and clear skies at night. It’s hot in the mornings and early afternoons, then the rain cools it down for the evening.

We have hurricanes and tornadoes. Four Corners, an unincorporated community west of Walt Disney World, has more lightning strikes than any other community in the USA.
We rarely have freezes long enough or bad enough to ice roads. We have no salt, no sand, no way to distribute it on the roads if we had it. We still have homes that don’t have any heat!
For Jim these conditions change everything. They literally threaten the lives of everyone in the county. They bring out Jim’s best qualities. His empathy and his ability to know how and where to use the strengths of his deputies. He’s a smart man, and it’s enjoyable to bring that out in the open.

One of the things I really like about LT Nichols is there’s no artifice about him. He’s a local guy who ended up being the police chief. In both THE RUINS OF WOODMAN’S VILLAGE and FLOOD TIDE, LT has to deal with people who control their world and the people around them with finely developed public personas. From a big man who controls a community through fear to a man who controls his world through wealth and political power, LT never stops pushing for the truth. Even when everyone is telling him to let it go, he simply can’t. Why?

Albert: It’s who he is. He is constantly trying to prove something, not to anyone else, but to himself.  He’s always been small in stature and often underestimated. But he knows if he’s doing his best, he can live with himself. Although he was a good athlete, it wasn’t until he found wrestling in his youth that he fully applied himself to something. LT realizes that it was giving everything he had to wrestling that made him successful—a state champion. He knows that if he wants to do his job to the best of his abilities, he needs to apply that same single-mindedness to being the chief of police in Laurel, Maine. And while he is correct about that with regards to his work, his personal life can suffer collateral damage as a result. This is something that’s explored in THE RUINS OF WOODMAN’S VILLAGE and carries over into FLOOD TIDE. By being someone who refuses to let himself down professionally, LT steps out onto a tightrope of his own creation again and again.
   
While LT Nichols is a bachelor, Sheriff Jim Shephard is a single father—of a son who wants to follow him into law enforcement. While Jim reluctantly stepped into his father’s role of Sherriff of Eden County, Jim is determined to keep his son, Michael, out of the family business. But in the upcoming FROZEN EDEN, Michael edges closer to an active role in an investigation. This intertwined family and professional dynamic is at the heart of who these characters are and where they are going. How does this weigh on Jim? How does it affect the decisions that he makes, both professionally and as a father at home?

Sarah: I think Jim Sheppard feels that his son should have the choice he was denied in life. It’s not that working in the Eden County Sheriff’s Department is a bad choice, but it was a choice he feels he didn’t make. Michael Sheppard has grown up watching his father, and before that his grandfather, do a job that is about doing good in the community. He’s watched his father make changes – a more diverse group of deputies, better educated/trained deputies – and he admires it. While Jim sees being a deputy as limiting Michael’s life experiences, Michael sees it as challenging.

Many of Jim’s deputies have greater life experiences – such as serving overseas in the military. Others are better at routine and knowing the people and Eden County’s geography. The variety of experience makes his department stronger, more capable. He can use deputies in different ways, capitalizing on their abilities and experiences.

I think he fears that Michael would be “settling” for something familiar and never giving himself the opportunity to grow more as a man by being a part of the outside world. Jim did experience that by going to graduate school and his love of history. Being a father pulled him back into Eden County, which I don’t think he regrets, but that he does feel limited him in ways that he sees other people aren’t.


Sarah Bewley has been a private investigator, a freelance writer, and is an award-winning playwright. Her love of mysteries inspired her to write her first book BURNING EDEN. She lives in North Florida with Pat Payne, a visual artist. She rock climbs, takes boxing lessons, and loves reading and dogs.  
 

Albert Waitt is the author of Flood Tide, The Ruins of Woodman’s Village, and Summer to Fall.  Flood Tide, published by Level Best Books in March of 2024, is the second book of a series featuring Laurel, Maine, police chief, LT Nichols.  Waitt’s short fiction has appeared in The Literary Review, Third Coast, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Words and Images, Stymie: A Journal of Sport and Literature, and other publications.  Waitt is a graduate of Bates College and the Creative Writing Program at Boston University.  Experiences ranging from tending bar, teaching creative writing, playing guitar for the Syphlloids, and frying clams can be found bleeding through his work.

​Most of us enjoy a sense of the familiar. It’s predictable, comforting, and often preferable, even if lacking in thrill. It allows us to relax and gather ourselves. That’s why adding consistent rituals throughout your series can deepen your readers’ connection to your characters. They experience repeated rituals as an element of series consistency.
 
When I planned my “Nut Cracker Investigations” for Level Best Books, I wanted to develop ways to cohere my PI team. I have three primary and several secondary members, but I wanted the primaries to participate most clearly in closure and commitment. All for one, and one for all, that type of thing.  
 
Annie Hunter, a forensic psychologist, manages the investigation agency; Ayden Scott is her PI, and Natra Gawani her data manager and confidante. My secondary team features a digital expert, a forensic meteorologist, and an attorney. They’re in and out as needed.
 
One ritual I use runs in the background: Annie likes red wine, so whenever the team has an opportunity to brainstorm over wine, they pick a label that matches the situation. Stormy Weather during a tornado, for example. Readers recognize this display of character (and sometimes they buy wine for book club signings).
 
A more important ritual is the case debriefing. Although there are plenty of times when the team brainstorms, it’s the post-case gathering that really unites them. No one else is allowed, no matter what part they might have played. This is a solemn Nut Crackers ritual. Here, they patch holes, lick wounds, plan improvements, and show how much the work means to them. They might tease or toast each other, or even mourn together. For them, it’s the best part of the case.
 
I include a debrief scene in every novel because I want readers to expect it, appreciate it, and watch how Annie responds to their own lingering questions. She might even use the time to set up the next case, whetting readers’ appetites.
 
Like Annie’s wine, rituals pair well with our sense of anticipation and connection. Here are three psychological reasons to develop some rituals for your series:

1. Rituals help us connect as we enter familiar territory together.

 

1. Rituals provide a predictable sense of expectation, a resting point.

 

1. Rituals give shape and coherence to emotions, calming anxiety and promising closure.

 
It’s worth considering rituals that put your characters in motion or reveal their qualities. Thus, you’ll get an added benefit, and readers will likely look forward to how these rituals play out.
 
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Katherine Ramsland has played chess with serial killers, dug up the dead, worked with profilers, and camped out in haunted crime scenes. As a professor of forensic psychology and a death investigation consultant, she seeks unique angles. The author of 71 books, she’s been a forensic consultant for CSI, Bones and The Alienist and an executive producer on Murder House Flip and A&E’s Confession of a Serial Killer. She’s become a go-to expert for the most deviant forms of criminal behavior, which provides background for her Nut Cracker Investigations. Her second novel in the serial, In the Damage Path, is now available.