In glittering Newport, Rhode Island, status is everything. But despite being a poorer relation to the venerable Vanderbilts, Emma Cross has shaped her own identity—as a reporter and a sleuth.
As the nineteenth century draws to a close, Fancies and Fashion reporter Emma Cross is sent by the Newport Observer to cover an elite house party at Rough Point, a “cottage” owned by her distant cousin Frederick Vanderbilt that has been rented as an artist retreat. To her surprise, the illustrious guests include her estranged Bohemian parents—recently returned from Europe—as well as a variety of notable artists, including author Edith Wharton.
But when one of the artists is discovered dead at the bottom of a cliff, Rough Point becomes anything but a house of mirth. After a second murder, no one is above suspicion—including Emma’s parents. As Newport police detective Jesse Whyte searches for a killer, Emma tries to draw her own conclusions—with the help of Mrs. Wharton. But with so many sketchy suspects, she’ll need to canvas the crime scenes carefully, before the cunning culprit takes her out of the picture next . . . Praise for Alyssa Maxwell and her Gilded Newport Mysteries
“Another entertaining entry in this cozy series.” —Library Journal
“Maxwell’s second entry has a credible mystery, solved by a female detective who’s likeable.” —Kirkus Reviews
About The Author Alyssa Maxwell has worked in publishing as an assistant editor and a ghost writer, but knew from an early age that being a novelist was what she wanted most. Growing up in New England and traveling to Great Britain fueled a passion for history, while a love of puzzles of all kinds drew her to the mystery genre. She lives in South Florida in the current year, but confesses to spending most of her time in the Victorian, Edwardian, and post WWI eras. In addition to fantasizing about wearing Worth gowns while strolling manor house gardens, she loves to watch BBC and other period productions and sip tea in the afternoons.
It’s whale-watching season in Redwood Cove, and B&B manager Kelly Jackson’s battening down the hatches for the tourist rush at Redwood Heights-a Victorian-style estate owned by her boss. And due to recent jewelry thefts, her duties include keeping track of the many dust-covered artifacts spread throughout the property. But when Kelly finds Sylvia Porter’s lifeless body with a blood-splattered brooch around her neck, menial tasks don’t seem so terrible. Enlisting the help of a ragtag group of brainy retirees, aka the “Silver Sentinels,” Kelly’s on the hunt for clues hidden behind the mansion’s glamorous facade . . . and for a killer who may want to make history of her next!
About The Author
Janet Finsilver is the USA TODAY best-selling author of the Kelly Jackson mystery series. She worked in education for many years as a teacher, a program administrator, and a workshop presenter. Janet majored in English and earned a Master’s Degree in Education. She loves animals and has two dogs–Kylie and Ellie. Janet has ridden western style since she was a child and was a member of the National Ski Patrol. One of the highlights of her life was touching whales in the San Ignacio Lagoon. MURDER AT REDWOOD COVE, her debut mystery, was released on October 13, 2015. Her second book, MURDER AT THE MANSION, was released on June 7, 2016.
Laura Pauling writes about spies, murder and mystery. She’s the author of the young adult Circle of Spies Series, the Prom Impossible Series, the time travel mysteries, Heist and A Royal Heist, and the Holly Hart Cozy Mystery Series: Footprints in the Frosting and Deadly Independence with more coming.
She lives the cover of a suburban mom/author perfectly, from the minivan to the home-baked snickerdoodles, while hiding her secret missions and covert operations. But shh. Don’t tell anyone. And she may or may not actually bake cookies. You decide.
Laura Pauling
Laura stopped by to chat about cheesecake, love, and other mysteries.
cheesecake, love, & other mysteries
I wanted to write a cozy mystery. That much I knew. All I needed was inspiration in the form of an amateur sleuth. As I waited for the creative winds to blow my way, I happened to chat with a friend.
I found my inspiration.
My friend was branching out and starting her own business–selling cheesecakes! I loved it. I loved that with an already established career, kids, a husband, and two dogs, she was getting creative with her life. Pursuing a dream. Putting in the hard work and long hours it takes to launch a business. Making herself vulnerable.
Love, love, loved it. And I found my amateur sleuth. The facts that my sleuth, Holly Hart, bakes cheesecake and has red hair are the only similarities between her and the real-life inspiration.
How could I not be inspired? How could anyone not be inspired? If only in that it proves that we can do anything we put our mind to. It’s never to late to start a business or write that novel or attempt to combine what we love with what we do, whether it be for money or love.
After I found my sleuth, I dove into writing the mysteries. I have four written and two already published. Footprints in the Frosting came out in May, and Deadly Independence went live early June. If you sign up for my newsletter, you’ll receive a free mystery, Murder with a Slice of Cheesecake, which will release in July.
If you could branch out and try something new or follow a dream, what would it be?
Visit Laura at http://laurapauling.com to sign up for her newsletter and receive a free Holly Hart cozy mystery novella.
In high school, Joanne Guidoccio dabbled in poetry, but it would be over three decades before she entertained the idea of writing as a career. In 2008, she took an early retirement from teaching and decided to launch a second career that would tap into her creative side and utilize her well-honed organizational skills. Before long, Joanne was a working writer; her articles and book reviews were published in newspapers, magazines, and online. Eventually she progressed to fiction, where she finds that reinvention is a recurring theme in her novels and short stories.
Author Joanne Guidoccio
Today, Joanne came by to chat about having the right kind of skin. Rhino skin.
Writers especially will appreciate this:
It behooves you to develop a thicker skin.
Toastmaster Rosalind Scantlebury did not mince words at a recent Table Topics Contest. Responding to the prompt—Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me—she focused on an individual’s responsibility not to take things so personally. She peppered her impromptu talk with provocative comments, among them, “What other people think of you is none of your business.”
Definitely inspiring, especially for writers.
Thirty-one years of teaching adolescents thickened my skin considerably, but I faced different challenges when I embarked on a writing career. I had to learn how to deal effectively with critiques and rejection letters from agents and publishers and, most important of all, acquire that coveted rhino skin.
These are some of the strategies in my toolbox:
Get the Back Story
Whenever I attend readings, I pay special attention to the author’s back story. I like hearing the details about his or her writing journey and the challenges encountered along the way. Occasionally, I pick up valuable nuggets of advice that help me along my own journey. For example, Guelph writer Nicholas Ruddock (The Parabolist) established his platform by entering and placing in short story contests. When New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny couldn’t find a Canadian or American agent, she crossed the pond and approached a British agent.
Read Bad Reviews
If I have enjoyed reading a book, I look up the one-star reviews on Amazon. That’s right, I gravitate toward the negative. While shaking my head at the nitpicking and negative comments, I realize that no author is immune from criticism. Not even authors of best-selling novels can please everyone.
Eliminate the Negative
Some writers file and keep all their rejection letters. I suspect they refer to these letters often and get discouraged all over again. It is important to keep accurate records, but it is not necessary to keep these negative reminders around for future reference. After reading a rejection letter, I update the information on a spreadsheet and delete the file.
Throw More Irons Into the Fire
We’ve all heard the advice. Send out the manuscript and then immediately start on another one. Easier said than done. After writing 70K words and looking at multiple drafts of that manuscript, the thought of starting all over again can be daunting. Instead, I like to work on shorter pieces: book reviews, short stories, articles, more blog posts. Entering contests and taking online writing courses also keep my skills sharp. It is important not to sit around waiting for a response. Some action—any action—is needed.
Get Support
I belong to Crime Writers of Canada, Sisters in Crime, Guppies, and Romance Writers of America. I also participate in discussion boards for The Wild Rose Press and Soul Mate Publishing Authors. I try to attend writing workshops, panels and readings offered within a fifty-mile radius. While interacting with these authors, I get valuable advice and feedback about my work. I appreciate all the help I have received, especially from good friend and fellow writer Patricia Anderson. I had only request: “Let it rip!” And she did, but in a constructive way.
From Toronto based freelancer Ian Harvey… “Rejections are part of the game, but this is the only game in which rejection doesn’t mean no. It means not now, or not for me, or not for me right now. It doesn’t mean no forever.”
Get Joanne’s latest, A Season for Killing Blondes.
Historian by training, globe-trotting university project manager by necessity, and fiction writer by the skin of her teeth, Mindy Quigley has had a colorful career.
She has won a number of awards for her short stories, including the 2013 Bloody Scotland prize. Her non-fiction writing includes an academic article co-authored with the researcher who created Dolly the Sheep. More recently, she was project manager of the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, a research clinic founded in Scotland by the author J.K. Rowling. Her work as the coordinator of a pastoral services program at the Duke University Medical Center provided the inspiration for her bestselling Reverend Lindsay Harding mystery series.
Author Mindy Quigley
Mindy’s stopped by to talk about how she uses the Cocktail Party Test to guide her writing.
Intrigued? I thought so! Read on:
The Worst Possible Cocktail Party
My husband, Paul, dreads cocktail parties. He’s a mild-mannered, polite British man—a combination of traits that seems to make him easy prey for cocktail-party nutcases. You know the type. The high-strung lady who asks rhetorical questions only to give herself the opportunity to launch into what seem to be well-rehearsed, and incredibly inane, monologues. “Do you like cats? Well, I love them. When I was growing up, we had a cat named Feather who would pee on anything plastic…”
Another type of nutcase who often ends up cornering Paul, usually next to the alcohol table, are those with nutcasia temporaria (a short-term case of the disease). People who’ve recently been divorced or endured a breakup fall into this category. British men like Paul aren’t known for their ability to share their inner lives, nor are they equipped with the skills to deal with people who spew out their tales of failed romance in large, undigested chunks. When confronted with this type of nutcase, Paul often ends up staring uncomfortably into the middle distance, as if trying to endure a particularly thorough dental cleaning.
The worst offenders are the nutcases who take advantage of Paul’s soft-spokenness and good manners to “enlighten” him with their views on politics or religion. “America isn’t what it used to be. I mean look at the state of the economy/the environment/local schools/boy bands.
Those Democrats/Republicans/Hippies/Rednecks/guys from One Direction have flushed this country down the toilet.”
I cast my readers in the role of Paul at that cocktail party and myself as a stranger, approaching him near the snack table. With each chapter, I ask myself, am I being a cocktail party nutcase? Here’s what I mean. Say I’ve written a bit of dialogue that’s outrageously clever, full of nimble-minded wordplay and athletic leaps of language. I’ve peppered each sentence with ten-dollar words and Oscar Wilde-esque wit. But when I examine this brilliant bit of dialogue using the cocktail party nutcase test, I may realize that, it is a clear example of the high-strung woman cornering the unsuspecting partygoer. The dialogue probably doesn’t sound very natural, and all those big words probably impose too much unnecessary work on my readers. I’m just talking to hear the sound of my own voice.
Because my books all incorporate true historical elements, I must be careful to avoid nutcasia temporaria, too. In my case, this might manifest itself in my desire to tell my readers every detail of the blow-by-blow, honest-to-gosh true background historical events. After all, I put a lot of research into understanding those events and I want my book learnin’ to show! But the truth is, just like the gory details of some stranger’s marital breakup, the research a writer puts into her books should blend subtly into the background. If I am disgorging chunks of my research like a drunken frat boy in a Wendy’s parking lot, I’m probably suffering from nutcasia temporaria.
The last one, which is probably even more prevalent at family Thanksgiving dinners than at cocktail parties, is the know-it-all jerk, trying to ram his beliefs down your throat. Since my books have a liberal, female hospital chaplain as the main character, this can be an especially delicate dance. I’ve got to be careful to include enough informative little tidbits about her beliefs to reveal her character, but avoid any kind of posturing, proselytizing, or punditry. I want my characters’ views to feel like a finely woven part of who they are, sitting respectfully in the background of their personalities, never demanding center stage. Unless my character is a know-it-all jerk at a cocktail party. Then it’s kosher.
So that’s the cocktail party test. If I can read what I’ve written and think, yeah, Paul would like this cocktail party, I know I’ve succeeded!
Mindy lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, with her Civil War history professor husband, their daughter, and their miniature Schnauzer. You can follow her at
John Carenen is an author and a professor of English. He holds an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the prestigious University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Signs of Struggle, his first Thomas O’Shea mystery novel, was published in 2012. In the sequel, A Far Gone Night, a late night stroll by the river propels O’Shea into the middle of a baffling murder. Here John talks about how Signs of Struggle took shape and then evolved into a series.
Author John Carenen
I did not plan to write a series. I figured my debut novel, Signs of Struggle, for a stand-alone story about a man and how he dealt with tremendous adversity and his own personal demons springing forth from that adversity. I thought it would make a good story, I would write it, and then I would hope it would be publishable.
The genesis from the story came from an approach Steven King uses. That is, the “What if?” question to propel a story forward. What if the protagonist wakes up in his small Montana town and everyone else has vanished, or is dead. Except him. What happens next? Why did it happen? How will this craziness turn out?
Adopting that approach, in part, I once asked myself a few years ago, what would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to me? Well, at the time I had a wonderful family – wife and two teenage daughters. The worst thing that could happen to me, it seemed, would be to lose them all somehow – car crash, airplane crash, Ebola virus – you name it.
Okay, once I got to thinking about that, as abhorrent as the thought was, what would I do about it? We were living in the South then, and still are, and I decided I would sell everything and head back to my home state – Iowa – and try to heal by withdrawing and very, very gradually try to create some kind of a productive life, if that were possible. Get away from so much that would remind me of what I had lost. Take a few pictures and our Bulldog and go back north.
So, that’s what I did; or rather, that’s what my protagonist did. His name is Thomas O’Shea. He sold his half of a successful business, sold his house, his beach house, his cars, and cashed in everything. He gave away his furniture and all the clothes that belonged to his family. He bought an enormous pickup truck and headed home with just a few things and Gotcha, his Bulldog.
He tries to avoid people, but one day he stumbles onto what looks like a farm accident, but he has questions, and the more questions he asks (he has nothing but time on his hands), the more people try to discourage him. Unpleasant people. Killers. What happens next is in the novel.
Thankfully, the folks at Neverland Publishing decided to publish Signs of Struggle. But then some of my readers, and the people at NP, decided that they wanted to know more about Thomas – his history; his relationship with the comely high school English teacher, Olivia Olson; and where did he learn to be such a tough guy?
A Far Gone Night, the sequel, was born. Thomas O’Shea, suffering from insomnia, goes for a late-night stroll through the peaceful streets of his adopted town, Rockbluff, Iowa, and finds himself pausing downtown on the bridge that spans the Whitetail River, which flows through the village. When he glances downstream, he sees a dead girl’s naked body, rushes down and pulls her from the water, and discovers two bullet holes in the back of her head. When the law shows up, Thomas does not divulge what he discovered because he is distrustful of all governmental agencies. Then, when the coroner declares the girl’s death a suicide, he begins to ask questions again. And people try to discourage him from asking those questions.
This time he’s in deep against powerful forces, but that does not deter him from enlisting help from a couple of friends – Lunatic Mooning, Ojibwa owner of the Grain o’ Truth Bar & Grill; and Clancy Dominguez, an old buddy from Navy SEAL training days. Mix in the rest of the quirky characters populating Rockbluff, and the reader will find themselves in what I hope to be an enjoyable read – with a few surprises.
Thomas O’Shea has begun to take over my creative juices, and so now I am working on the third novel in the series – The Face on the Other Side. There’s just something about this character that won’t let me go. I hope you, as readers, have the same response.
John and his wife live in a cozy cottage down a quiet lane in northern Greenville, South Carolina. He is a big fan of the Iowa Hawkeyes and Boston Red Sox.
FOR SARA, COFFEE WAS ONE of life’s
greatest—and simplest—pleasures. Every time
she took a draw of freshly brewed java, her
eyelids automatically lowered in appreciation of
the robust flavor. Somehow, when drinking it,
life seemed less complicated, or maybe it was
just how it coated the palate and calmed her
nerves despite what some scientific studies
might say.
She was in her home office, seated behind her
desk, staring at the blinking cursor on her
monitor, but it wasn’t because she had writer’s
block. Her wrists needed a break. Better yet, she
needed to indulge in this cup.
Leaning back in her chair, she swiveled from
side to side and closed her eyes, savoring the
aroma ofthe dark beans. While they were ground
at the time she pressed the button, the only way
to get it any fresher was picking the beans off the
plants in Brazil. With their money, she supposed
it was an option
Carolyn Arnold writes three different series, under the same author name. As she describes them,
THE MADISON KNIGHT SERIES falls neatly into the police procedural genre with murder investigations and forensics. Think Law & Order meets CSI. There is some foul language and limited graphic violence.
THE BRANDON FISHER FBI SERIES toys with the edge between the police procedural genre and thriller genre. Due to this, you will find foul language and graphic violence in this series.
THE MCKINLEY MYSTERY SERIES ventures outside of the typical crime genre, lending itself to the cozy variety with no foul language or graphic violence. The series combines romance, mystery, humor, and adventure for a lighthearted, easy read.
So with the same author name, how can you tell what kind of book you’re getting? Good question.
Within minutes my inbox was brimming with pleas from prodigal students, some of whom had attendance records so irregular that the names were only vaguely familiar to me; I had to double check to make sure they were actually students of mine.
Some of this afternoon’s highlights:
“Dear Professor Bow,
I just received my final grade …and I was just wondering if there is any way possible that I could try to bring up my grade to pass the class.”
SURE WHY NOT I’D LOVE TO SPEND MY UNPAID SUMMER DEVOTING MORE TIME TO YOUR GRADE THAN YOU DID THE ENTIRE SEMESTER AND THEN FIELDING GRIEVANCES FROM ALL OF THE OTHER STUDENTS WHO MANAGED TO TURN IN THEIR WORK ON TIME
The untold story behind Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Philadelphia, 1842: Poe’s cat, Cattarina, becomes embroiled in a killer’s affairs when she finds a clue to the crime – a glass eye. But it’s only when her beloved “Eddy” takes an interest that she decides to hunt down the madman. Her dangerous expedition takes her from creepy Eastern State Penitentiary to Rittenhouse Square where she runs into a gang of feral cats intent on stopping her.
As the mystery pulls Cattarina deeper into trouble, even Eddy becomes the target of suspicion. Yet she cannot give up the chase. Both her reputation as a huntress and her friend’s happiness are at stake. For if she succeeds in catching the Glass Eye Killer, the missing pieces of Eddy’s unfinished story will fall into place, and the Poe household will once again experience peace.
About This Author
Monica Shaughnessy has a flair for creating characters and plots larger than her home state of Texas. Most notably, she’s the author of the Cattarina Mysteries, a cozy mystery series starring Edgar Allan Poe’s real-life cat companion. Ms. Shaughnessy has nine books in print, including two young adult novels, a middle grade novel, a picture book, two cozy mystery novellas, and numerous short stories. Customers have praised her work time and again, calling it “unique and creative,” “fresh and original,” and “very well written.” If you’re looking for something outside the mainstream, you’ll find it in her prose. When she’s not slaying adverbs and tightening plots, she’s walking her rescue dogs, goofing around with her family, or going back to the grocery store for the hundredth time because she forgot milk.
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