Summer Must-Reads

I usually read several books a week in order to have enough reviews for the blogs and print publications I write for.  Here are a few of the books I will read this summer, whether I have to review them or not.


Some Like it Hawk (Meg Lanslow #13) by Donna Andrews  (Minotaur/Thomas Dunn hardcover,
17 July 2012).

I adore this series that often has me laughing out loud.  We've known Meg and her crazy family and friends for a long time now, and familiarity does not breed contempt.  Here's the publisher's blurb:

Meg Langslow is plying her blacksmith's trade at “Caerphilly Days,” a festival inspired by her town’s sudden notoriety as "The Town That Mortgaged Its Jail." The lender has foreclosed on all Caerphilly's public buildings, and all employees have evacuated --except one.  Phineas Throckmorton, the town clerk, has been barricaded in the courthouse basement for over a year. Mr. Throckmorton's long siege has only been possible because of a pre-Civil War tunnel leading from the courthouse basement to a crawl space beneath the bandstand.
The real reason for Caerphilly Days is to conceal the existence of the tunnel:  the tourist crowds camouflage supply deliveries, and the ghastly screeching of the tunnel's rusty trap door is drowned out by as many noisy activities as the locals can arrange. But the lender seems increasingly determined to evict Mr. Throckmorton—and may succeed after one of its executives is found shot, apparently from inside the basement.  Meg and her fellow townspeople suspect that someone hopes to end the siege by framing Mr. Throckmorton. Unless the real killer can be found quickly, the town will have to reveal the secret of the tunnel—and the fact that they've been aiding and abetting the basement’s inhabitant. Meg soon deduces that the killer isn't just trying to end the siege but to conceal information that would help the town reclaim its buildings--if the townspeople can find it before the lender destroys it.

Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault  (HarperCollins trade paperback, 31 July 2012).

I loved Arsenault's first two novels The Broken Teaglass  and In Search of the Rose Notes, this one promises to be just as gripping.

Author Gretchen Waters made a name for herself with her bestseller Tammyland—a memoir about her divorce and her admiration for country music icons Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton that was praised as a "honky-tonk Eat, Pray, Love." But her writing career is cut abruptly short when she dies from a fall down a set of stone library steps. It is a tragic accident and no one suspects foul play, certainly not Gretchen's best friend from college, Jamie, who's been named the late author's literary executor.
But there's an unfinished manuscript Gretchen left behind that is much darker than Tammyland: a book ostensibly about male country musicians yet centered on a murder in Gretchen's family that haunted her childhood. In its pages, Gretchen seems to be speaking to Jamie from beyond the grave—suggesting her death was no accident . . . and that Jamie must piece together the story someone would kill to keep untold. 

 A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel #4)  by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge hardcover, 17 July 2012).

Hannah Vogel is a fascinating protagonist; definitely a flawed character, but the underlying reasons for her actions are honorable.

Journalist Hannah Vogel is in Poland with her son Anton to cover the 1938 St. Martin festival when she hears that 12,000 Polish Jews have been deported from Germany. Hannah drops everything to get the story on the refugees, and walks directly into danger.
Kidnapped by the SS, and driven across the German border, Hannah is rescued by Anton and her lover, Lars Lang, who she had presumed dead two years before. Hannah doesn’t know if she can trust Lars again, with her heart or with her life, but she has little choice. Injured in the escape attempt and wanted by the Gestapo, Hannah and Anton are trapped with Lars in Berlin. While Hannah works on an exit strategy, she helps to search for Ruth, the missing toddler of her Jewish friend Paul, who was disappeared during the deportation.
Trapped in Nazi Germany with her son just days before Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Hannah knows the dangers of staying any longer than needed. But she can’t turn her back on this one little girl, even if it plunges her and her family into danger.

Setting Up the Right Writers Group

By Judith Yates Borger

Before I began writing mysteries I asked my experienced mystery-writer friends for advice. The best piece  of advice I got was "Be careful whose opinion you ask."

Today, seven years later, I couldn't agree more. It's the most important tool a writer has.

So, how can a writer choose her writers group? I suggest that she think through what kind of feedback she needs. For example, I'm in two writers groups each chosen for different reasons. They both meet on Tuesdays, one weekly in the morning, the other monthly in the evening.

There are four of us in the weekly morning writers group, each of us with different strengths. One member  is a picky, picky copy editor, who catches my many mistakes. If you've read my posts you know I need her. Another member uses words like a fine violinist. She feels the prose rather than reads it. She tells me when the emphasis is wrong or the pacing is off.  The third member can look at the sweep of my work and tell me when it needs a different direction or a certain character needs better development. The three of them are wonderful writers but they're not mystery writers.

The monthly evening group is comprised of three mystery writers. If they find a typo or grammatical error they circle it and move on. There's no discussion of word choice, timing or character. We three spend most of our time talking about plots. Who gets killed? When? Where? What's the protagonist's motivation? What's the best device that will put the murderer in the right place at the right time to do the deed? Is a particular plot point plausible?

The two groups also have different rules. The weekly group requires that everyone bring at least one three-sentence paragraph, but no more than eight double-spaced pages. The idea is that no matter how complicated our lives are we can all write at least one paragraph. The discipline keeps us moving ahead. We meet at a coffee shop, with free easy parking, at 11:30 a.m. sharp. If someone is late the others go on without her. The tardy one's work is considered last so if we run out of time before the 1:30 p.m. adjournment that person's work gets the least attention.

As you might expect, the monthly mystery writers group is much more relaxed. We meet in each other's homes, 7 ish and wrap up about 8:30 p.m. Snacks are served. There are no requirements on what we submit to the group and it's ok to show up with nothing. The discussion meanders as we brainstorm.

I've been in writers groups that fell apart. There were many reasons, as I recall. In one people routinely showed up late and unprepared. In another one member monopolized the discussion mostly trying to prop up her own ego. She didn't know what she was talking about. In another absenteeism for no good reason was a common theme.

Is it unusual to be in two writers groups? I don't know. Probably. But being in two makes me feel twice as accountable in my work.

What's your experience? Are you even in one? How many members do you have? How often, and where, do you meet? What is the most important rule of characteristic of your group?

Let us know, please.

The New Gal Confesses All

by Gayle Carline
First of all, let me thank the Crime Fiction Collective for inviting me into your cult. I can't wait to learn the secret handshake. In the meantime, I thought I'd let you know how I got into writing mysteries. It's not a pretty story, but I promise to spill all.

I've written all my life, but I didn't think about doing it for publication until I bought my first horse. My girlfriend, who had also been my technical writing instructor, introduced me to her editor at Riding Magazine, and before I knew it I was covering horse shows and interviewing horse folk. It was fun, but I wanted more. I like to write humor, so in 2005 I queried my local newspaper and ended up with a weekly humor column in the Placentia News-Times.
My dream, however, was to write a book.

I love to read mysteries, but I thought they'd be too hard to write. The best mysteries have a bunch of threads that weave together until you have a big, fat rope at the end, tied into a hangman's noose. I couldn't possibly write anything as complex as that, so I decided to write literary fiction instead.

Let's think about this for a moment. Picture, if you will, Herman Melville, telling someone, "I really wanted to write westerns, but I thought they'd be too hard. So I had this idea for a whale story."

The lovely part about naivety is that it comes with such a large side order of audacity.

So I wrote a 90,000 word tome. It took me over a year to finish. I now refer to it as my beautifully written piece of crap. I knew it was bad after I'd gone through two rounds of edits. The words are luscious, it has a beginning and an end, but it doesn't go anywhere and doesn't do anything. I'd tell you what it's about, but I don't know, and I wrote the damn thing. It did teach me a lot, however. Not only did I learn that pretty words are not enough, I learned that I could write 90,000 of them. I just needed them to tell a good story.

I turned back to the mystery genre. I had won a flash fiction contest with the tale of a seedy little man hiring a P.I. to find an ice cube tray in his own freezer. It was a kind of comic noir piece. I started to think… what else could you find in a freezer? Something you wouldn't suspect was in there? How about a body part?

Freezer Burn was born, my story of a housecleaner-turned-detective, who is roped into helping a former client clean his freezer and finds a severed hand inside, wearing an expensive ring. My P.I. is a 50-year old woman named Peri Minneopa, whose name is mangled by others as a running joke, one of the ways being Peri Menopause. The client is an annoying little man who is using his inheritance to buy Dean Martin memorabilia on eBay. I started out wanting to keep it noir, but sooner or later, the humor took over.

I'm such a nerd, I used an Excel spreadsheet to make certain the right clues were found by the right people in the right sequence. I kept the plot fairly simple, so I didn't have a lot of threads, but I wanted them to weave together in the end, even if it wasn't a very thick rope.

Freezer Burn was picked up by Echelon Press and published in July 2009.

My next book in the Peri series wasn't published until May 2011, mostly because it was a petulant child and refused to be constrained by spreadsheets. One day, as I was dutifully following my outline, I got a little bored. If I'm bored, I know the audience will be. So I hit Peri in the head with a golf club. At that point, I left the outline and went rogue. The book turned out to be a fun, if terrifying, writing ride for me, and I swore not to do that again. Or maybe I just swore.

In Hit or Missus, Peri is hired to investigate a wealthy, possibly cheating wife, but the wife's girlfriends have other ideas. After all, a friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a body.

The third book is humming along. I'm now trying something a little different, and doing journals on my characters to help me with their motivations. I'll still do an outline, but give myself permission to leave it as long as I promise to return.

Thanks again for inviting me, and I hope to keep you entertained every other Thursday. As an example of my humor, I'll leave you with the book trailer I made last summer for Freezer Burn: