Gown with the Wind: A Wedding Planner Mystery by Stephanie Blackmoore

Professional wedding planner Mallory Shepard knows her job is challenging under any circumstances. But when the groom is your ex and someone invites murder, there may never be another tomorrow . . .

Mallory’s fine—really—handling the wedding arrangements for her ex, Keith. But his fiancée, Becca, has at the last minute decided to switch from a Japanese-cherry-blossom theme to a Gone with the Wind theme. She wants to honor her ailing grandmother, who owns an impressive collection of GWTW memorabilia—and who is fiercely at odds with the groom’s mother over the nuptial plans.

But among other complications, Becca gets into a fight with an old childhood rival over a replica Scarlett O’Hara wedding gown. She wins the dress—but soon becomes a murder suspect when the other woman is found dead in Becca’s swimming pool. And it’s up to Mallory to solve the mystery behind this unhappy occasion, before a different kind of civil war breaks out . . .

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Enter to win a print copy

About the Author

A native Pittsburgher, Stephanie Blackmoore now lives in Missouri, with her husband, son and two-spirited cats. She was an attorney in Pittsburgh and a librarian in Florida before becoming a writer.
Stephanie is a fan of everything black-and-yellow.
 

A friendly black-and-yellow bee
“Hello!”

She is hard at work on her next Wedding Planner mystery. Connect with Stephanie at the links below.

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A New Provincetown Mystery: Murder at Fantasia Fair by Jeannette de Beauvoir

 
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Wedding coordinator Sydney Riley never thought she’d get caught up in a murder investigation, but she became an amateur sleuth when her boss was killed during Bear Week. Now she’s back, this time as the Race Point Inn hosts Provincetown’s venerable transgender event, Fantasia Fair… and murder is once again an uninvited guest!

 
It’s all hands on deck at the inn as visitors arrive for the week-long event and Sydney helps coordinator Rachel Parsons organize the occasion. Guest Elizabeth Gonzalez is attending with her spouse, Bob, who–as Angela–is taking a bold first step into a whole new existence. Angela, Elizabeth, and Sydney learn the ropes and politics from other guests, some of whom have attended annually for more than forty years.
But the next day, Sydney’s detective friend summons her to one of the town beaches where Angela’s body has been found–with a knife in her back, a knife stolen from Adrienne, the Race Point Inn’s diva chef.
Fair organizers and attendees try and carry on as Provincetown is overrun with police, press, and rampant speculation. Sydney, her boyfriend Ali, her friend Mirela, her boss Glenn, and a host of Fantasia Fair participants scramble to find out who killed Angela–and why–before the killer strikes again.


Guest Post

I’d been living in Provincetown for about eight years when my friend Michelle said to me, “Seriously, why do you keep writing books that take place in Montréal and Boston? You live in a postcard here!”

She was right, of course; I do live in a postcard. We were having this conversation at the Provincetown Bookshop, and Deborah immediately said, “She’s right. We could absolutely sell Provincetown mysteries!”

I tucked that into the back of my mind—I was very engaged with my Montréal series at the time—but returned to it when a new publisher, interested specifically in Ptown books and Ptown authors, contacted me over a historical novel he was interested in publishing. Several conversations—and several bottles of wine!—later, we’d come up with a new series that takes place during Provincetown’s “theme weeks,” when the town is overrun with all sorts of holidaying folks, from Family Week to the Portuguese Festival to Women’s Week and beyond.

And along with the new series is, of course, a new protagonist, Sydney Riley, wedding consultant for a fictional Provincetown inn. Like me, Sydney’s lived here for a few years, and like me, she has friends in all the different communities that coexist at Land’s End. When the first theme week murder—of her boss, the owner of the inn—plunged her into amateur sleuthing, I took it as an opportunity to explore all the different events and occasions that Provincetown offers its visitors.

Murder at Fantasia Fair is the second in the series, and deals with a subject that’s not for the faint of heart to take on: a transgender woman attending the annual week-long event has been found with a knife in her back, and Sydney—and her author creator!—must learn about this challenging community.

I say challenging, because that’s what it is to the uninitiated. Transgender identity is both a concept and a community that’s in flux, and its complexities are sometimes baffling to an outsider such as myself. It encompasses a wide range of people, from those who see themselves a “gender fluid” to those who have surgery to bring their physical beings into alignment with their psychological and social ones. It challenges language (unlike Mandarin, for example, English doesn’t have a gender-neutral personal pronoun), it challenges politics (transgender women didn’t grow up with the same experiences as those who navigated society as a girl), and it challenges one’s level of comfort with those who are different from oneself.

All that, and a couple of murders, too!

So join Sydney and her cast of characters—her boyfriend Ali, her best friend Mirela, her boss Glenn, her police detective friend Julie, and the inn’s diva chef Adrienne—as they try to figure out who wants the Fair’s attendees dead… before Sydney herself becomes one of the victims!

Excerpt:

The inn looked fantastic: I had to give Glenn that. Well, it had always looked fantastic, but there was a certain gaiety about the place today that had me humming the moment I got in. Rachel Parsons, the coordinator for Fantasia Fair, was standing beside the front desk, calmly ticking off items on a clipboard. I tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, Rachel.”

She glanced at me. “Good morning, Sydney,” she said. “You look awful.”

“Thanks ever so much,” I said sourly. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“They make pills for that sort of thing nowadays,” she observed, her eyes back on her paperwork.

“None that are available at three in the morning.”

She glanced at me, amused. “You should live in New York City,” she said. “There’s nothing that you can’t get at three in the morning there.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Provincetown’s just the right size for me. In the winter I can go to the Stop & Shop and recognize everybody I see there. In the summer the town is flooded with visitors; and, in some way or another, most of us who live here year-round make our livings catering to those visitors. Sometimes I think it’s the contrast between the two seasons that’s most appealing. “Anyway, my cat would have kept me awake even with pills. He snores.”

“Cats snore?” She stared at me, momentarily distracted. “Who knew?”

“Stick with me. I’ll fill your head with all sorts of useless facts.” I slid past the counter to the space where I worked, tucked aside from the day-to-day business of the inn: a roll top desk, a very big calendar, and a wastepaper basket. My domain, such as it was. “Anyone arrive yet?”

“Heavens, yes,” Rachel said. “The meet-and-greet isn’t until six o’clock tonight, it always is, but that’s never stopped people from getting here early, and already there are about a million questions.”

I sat down and opened my laptop. “You must be used to it,” I said.

She sighed. “Yes, I suppose I must.”

I looked up at her. Rachel is tall—well, many trans women are, having begun life as males—and seemed even taller from where I was sitting. “You suppose you must? That doesn’t sound so positive. Isn’t that your job?”

“Of course it is. But sometimes I feel like, gosh, maybe they can just look at the schedule I hand them, or even go all-out and Google something for themselves. How far to the Monument?” She rolled her eyes. “How far is it? You can see the frigging Monument from here.”

“Ah, that kind of question,” I said, nodding sagely. “Welcome to my world.” I grinned. “Last week, someone asked me what we do with the Monument in the winter. I wanted to say that we roll it up and put it in storage.”

Rachel laughed. “Tourists. Gotta love them.”

“Well, that, or starve,” I said cheerfully.

***



Jeannette de Beauvoir grew up in Angers, France, but has lived in the United States since her twenties. (No, she’s not going to say how long ago that was!) She spends most of her time inside her own head, which is great for writing, though possibly not so much for her social life. When she’s not writing, she’s reading or traveling… to inspire her writing. The author of a number of mystery and historical novels, de Beauvoir’s work has appeared in 15 countries and has been translated into 12 languages. Midwest Review called her Martine LeDuc Montréal series “riveting (…) demonstrating her total mastery of the mystery/suspense genre.” She coaches and edits individual writers, teaches writing online and on Cape Cod, and is currently writing a Provincetown Theme Week cozy mystery series featuring female sleuth Sydney Riley. More at JeannettedeBeauvoir.com

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Character Interview and #Giveaway: Wedding Planner Kelsey McKenna from Terror in Taffeta

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Wedding planner Kelsey McKenna is just a few hours away from wrapping up her latest job: a destination wedding in the charming, colonial Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende. The reception is all set up, the tequila donkey is waiting outside, and the bride and groom are standing on the altar, pledging their eternal love. But just as the priest is about to pronounce them husband and wife, one of the bridesmaids upstages the couple by collapsing into a floral arrangement, a definite wedding “don’t.” Kelsey soon discovers that the girl hasn’t just fainted–she’s dead.Losing a bridesmaid is bad enough, but when the bride’s sister is arrested for murder, the demanding mother of the bride insists that Kelsey fix the matter at once. And although Kelsey is pretty sure investigating a murder isn’t in her contract, crossing the well-connected Mrs. Abernathy could be a career-killer. Before she can leave Mexico and get back to planning weddings, Kelsey must deal with stubborn detectives, a rekindled romance, and late-night death threats in this smart, funny cozy mystery debut.
Terror in Taffeta Book cover


Q: Kelsey, thanks for stopping by Island Confidential. Tell our readers a little bit about yourself?
A: First of all, there’s the whole marriage thing. Everyone assumes that since I’m a wedding planner, I secretly want to get married. But really, that’s like saying you secretly want to be an elephant because you work at the zoo. No, I chose wedding planning as my career because I’m organized and resourceful and I love a good party. Plus, it is pretty fun getting to be there on one of the biggest days of people’s lives.
I really do love my job, and I love traveling to different places. Take San Miguel de Allende, for example. It’s a really magical place, with cobblestone streets and a three-hundred-year-old gothic church sitting on the town plaza. A lot of artists live there, and most people who go there end up falling in love with it. If I ever do get married, I could see doing it in San Miguel. Or in a Tuscan villa. Or on a private beach on some faraway island… Actually, the expectations would be so high that I’d probably just elope.
Q: Who’s the character you get along with the best?
A: Brody Marx. He’s an amazing wedding photographer, so I always recommend him to my clients—which works out pretty well because I love it when he gets to come along with me on a wedding. There’s nothing romantic between us, because I’m not his type. In fact, I’m off by a whole Y chromosome. But he’s a good guy to have on your side when you’re trying to juggle wedding planning and fighting crime. I always have to bite my tongue in front of clients, but when it’s just the two of us, I can say whatever I’m thinking and he doesn’t judge. Well, maybe a little. But we have fun.
Q: Which other character do you have a conflict with?
A: I had a hard time with the mother of the bride, Mrs. Abernathy. I can get along with anyone, and I’m used to demanding clients, but she must have thought I had magical powers, because she fully expected me to fix everything that went wrong, even though I’m pretty sure investigating a murder wasn’t part of my contract. I did it though, because I hate saying no to my clients. After all, my whole business is built on referrals, so I do whatever it takes to make them happy. That’s something I should probably work on.
Q: Just between you and me: What do you really think of your author,  Marla Cooper?
A: We have a lot of fun together! She and I share a similar sense of humor, and she loves it when Brody and I get going. I catch her eavesdropping on us all the time and sometimes we say things that make her laugh out loud. She also doesn’t mind when I’m cranky from having to bite my tongue around my clients all day long. Sassy chicks unite!
Q: What’s next for you?
A: I’m planning a wedding in the California wine country. It’s a little awkward, because my clients were using a rival wedding planner, then they fired her and hired me. I’m sure it’ll all be fine, though. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
 
 
 
 


 
About The Author  

 
As a freelance writer, MARLA COOPER has written all sorts of things, from advertising copy to travel guidebooks to the occasional haiku. But it was while ghostwriting a nonfiction guide to destination weddings that she found inspiration for her current series starring destination wedding planner Kelsey McKenna. Originally hailing from Texas, Marla lives inOakland, California, with her husband and her polydactyl tuxedo cat.
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