My new book, On Behalf of the Family, is the third in a series featuring Detective Dave Mason of the Santa Monica Police Department. He is presented with a complex car arson death of a beautiful and rich Turkish girl. The question is whether this young girl’s...
I’ve just returned from a six-week cruise ship experience in the South Seas. Was it everything I’d dreamed? Of course, in some ways. Nothing beats going to sleep rocked by the gentle motion of the ocean swell. I didn’t get to see the Southern Cross because it appeared...
I know that I’m a lucky woman. They say it’s better to be lucky than rich. I must have made some good choices in life, because I’ve sure as hell made some lollapalooza bad ones. This week I’ll embark from San Diego on a cruise ship for a six-week experience in French...
Radine Trees Nehring wrote an inspired blog http://radine.wordpress.com/ recently about the reasons for poor financial prospects in the mystery writing game. My heart sank as I read it because it mirrors my own experience. Even Marilyn Meredith,...
I imagine those of you who are mystery writers have also received this memo. Everyone is writing murder mysteries these days. There are mysteries that open an aperture into the world of dogs, of Boston gamblers, Icelandic housewives, Venetian art thieves, and even...
Am I the only writer out there who is addicted to Spider Solitaire? I can sit at my desk with my current mystery open in one screen, and all too easily switch screens, and allow myself only one game. Then two. And so it goes. When I’m feeling generous to myself I call...
What happens when an idea for a book strikes and won’t leave you alone? What if it’s something you know nothing about? Such as banjo picking, as in the second book of my second series set in the tranquil mountain town where I live in Central California? I...
I have only received one terrible review and that’s too bad because I learned a lot from the experience. I was green as grass at the new business of self-publishing in 2010 and did not hire a professional proofreader at the end of the process of publishing my first...
You’ve read all these murder mysteries of one kind and another from grisly hard-boiled noir to the sweetest cozy. You’ve seen all the tricks and seen how the detectives unravel a Gordian Knot of a story to solve the murder. You let your mind out to play imagining the...
A work of fiction has to be about something, doesn’t it? And really good books are about a lot of things, some of them heavy social issues. Raymond Chandler’s novels are about crime and corruption in the 1940s in a place he called Bay City, in truth, Santa Monica. No...
