Remember Rumaki? - The Maritime Club is Mahina’s oldest private club. The bill of fare hasn’t changed since before Hawaii attained statehood, good news for fans of split pea soup, chicken a la king, and baked Alaska.
What’s off-limits for a cozy mystery? - Cozy mysteries: ‘Tain’t What You Write (It’s the Way That You Write It) (With apologies to Jimmy Lunceford) I write cozy mysteries, and I know that cozy is what my readers expect. Which is why I put this disclaimer into the description of my latest Professor Molly mystery, The Perfect Body. The Perfect Body…
The Baby Gets a Word In. Featuring Francesca from The Perfect Body. - Let’s get the obvious issue out of the way first. I’m two months old, and I can’t speak yet. Preverbal, I believe is the technical term. 
Judging a book by its cover: What does your face reveal about your personality? - Go ahead and judge a book by its cover. You'll probably be right. 
Let’s talk about campus murder mysteries - Let’s talk about campus murder mysteries. I love reading them and writing them. What is it about academia that sparks thoughts of murder? Of course there’s the old saying that “campus politics are so nasty because the stakes are so small.” But that’s more of an observation than an explanation. I have some ideas: Clashing…
The real-life version of the “Labor Day Race” - In The Cursed Canoe, Professor Molly Barda’s best friend Emma Nakamura practices with her crew for the “Labor Day Race.” Emma’s big race was Saturday morning. I wasn’t actually planning to attend in person. If I wanted to catch Emma and her crew before they left, I’d have to be down at the water before dawn.…
Paddletics - In The Cursed Canoe, Professor Molly Barda’s best friend Emma Nakamura is the captain of a paddling crew. With seven women on the crew and only six seats in the canoe, things get a little competitive. In fact, there’s a word for this kind of infighting: Paddletics. “We call it paddletics,” Yoshi said. “When paddlers get…
Truth is Boring - One question that I get is, “Am I in your book?” I can see why people might ask this. The setting is a public university in Hawaii, similar in some ways to my own workplace. The main character is Molly Barda, who teaches in the Mahina State University College of Commerce. I teach at a…
“Okay, who needs to die?” - What genre do you write? I write mysteries that don’t have explicit sex or violence, so technically they’re in the “cozy mystery” category, although that might be a little misleading. I think that because of the success of series like “The Cat Who…” and the Hannah Swensen mysteries, sometimes people expect cozies to have cats…
Interview: Five Questions (that Turned into Ten) - People who enjoy the Molly Barda Mysteries are diverse age- and gender-wise, but what they all seem to have in common is experience working in extremely bureaucratic organizations. They also have excellent taste.
What is your favorite..? - Twenty questions for Frankie Interview originally posted on Escape with Dollycas, 2016
Where everyone has a green thumb - I really did have a lot to learn about gardening. I was not one of those persons gifted with a green thumb. In fact, I seemed to have the opposite of a green thumb, whatever that would be. A red thumb? That didn’t sound right, although green and red opposed each other on the color…
Guest Posts, Articles, and Interviews (Private)
Molly Barda Juvenilia: The Towel
The thing that I feared has happened. I was accused, and justly so, of using M.’s towel. It is a thing that I have done for some time, and not without reason. My own towel is intolerably proportioned, measuring perhaps eight inches by thirty six inches. To make matters worse, it is stained and torn…
