Detective Anne Boleyn

My Anne Boleyn story

Some years ago, I was sitting on a train, minding my own business, when a woman came and sat down on top of me. Imagine my surprise! Even worse was the fact that she wouldn't get up. I poked, I pinched, I yelled and finally she looked at me dismissively and oozed over a few inches.

At around the same time I was thinking about Anne Boleyn, who has always been fascinating to me. So bold. So doomed. So visible, and I began to think, what would happen if the most visible woman in the world were to meet a woman who was so invisible as to be sat upon? And together, they worked to solve a mystery.

That wasn't easy to figure out. Took me years, but eventually I did and I'm thrilled that Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine published it. And featured it on the cover of their May/June 2022 issue.

Love at First Sight

Do you believe in love at first sight? I do, because it happened to me. Some time ago.

It was my twenty-fifth birthday and I was at church and I hadn’t had anything to eat. Someone sat down alongside of me. The church was absolutely still because the minister was saying a prayer and, of course, my stomach started to growl. That was when the person next to me asked if he could take me to lunch after church. I looked into his eyes, and there you go. We’ve been married for 37 years. (We had better luck than Romeo and Juliet, pictured above.)

In my new mystery novel, Maggie Dove and the Lost Brides, two of my characters fall in love just like that, though I didn’t intend at all for that to happen. Originally I just thought they would meet and talk. The young woman is Maggie Dove’s niece. She’s from Indiana, a Latin scholar, recently jilted. Vulnerable. He’s a young man from Maggie’s small town. The Eeyore of the community. (When you live in a small town, for better or worse, you get a reputation and it’s hard to shake that.) He’s also suspected of being a murderer.

The scene was coming along fine, but it felt a little flat. I wanted to do something that would unsettle everybody and I thought: What if they fell in love? Just like that. Based on my own experience, I knew it was possible. Would it work? I think so. (I hope so.) It gave the whole novel, and me, a jolt. Love it when that happens.






Secret Histories

A weird thing happened when I started to write my new novel, Maggie Dove and the Lost Brides.

The novel is set in the lovely little village of Darby-on-Hudson, which is a lot like Irvington, the lovely little Hudson village I live in. It’s the sort of place where you can spend half an hour going up and down Main Street because you keep running into people you know. I’ve lived here for most of my life and I love it.

But, at the time I began writing the novel, I happened to be reading a terrifying book called Deranged by Harold Schecter. It’s an account of a truly terrifying man who commit horrifying crimes in New York City. Comes the point where the police figure out where he might be, and so they get in their cars and drive north. To Westchester. The county in which I live.

Then I read this: “The police went on to the Saw Mill River Road, following it until they reached the village of Irvington in the Westchester town of Greenburgh. I couldn’t believe it. Turned out that one of the most terrible crimes of the 1930s, a crime that shocked people all over the world, took place in the pretty little village in which I live. In a place called Wisteria Cottage, which is no longer there, though I believe the wisteria is. I was stunned because I’d driven by it countless times.

I couldn’t imagine this evil existing in my village, and yet clearly it did. That made me wonder what else might exist that I didn’t know about. I think of my protagonist, Maggie Dove, as being someone confident in her own world. But what if the world is not what she thinks? What if her niece comes for a visit and encounters a whole other side of Darby? What if Maggie comes to realize she’s shut herself off from seeing things she didn’t want to see? And, of course, what if that leads to murder?

This post was originally published on www.missdemeanors.com.

Why I Love Miss Marple

It may not come as much as a surprise that I love Agatha Christie. After all, the protagonist of my mystery series is a 62-year-old woman who lives in a small village. You have to think Miss Marple. I certainly did.

But what I love about Miss Marple is not that she's a fluffy little old lady, but that she's tough. She sees the world the way it is. She has friendships, she's loyal, but she's really smart and people are always underestimating her. I like underdogs and I like writing about people that other people tend to dismiss because they think they know who they are. 

Here are some of my favorite Miss Marple quotes (by and about her).

“Yes, it was dangerous, but we are not put into this world, Mr. Burton, to avoid danger when an important fellow creature's life is at stake. You understand me?” 
― Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger

“It's what's in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy.” 
― Agatha Christie, A Murder Is Announced

“Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it all as in the day's work....where crime is concerned, she's the goods.” 
― Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library

“One does see so much evil in a village,' murmured Miss Marple in an explanatory voice.” 
― Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library

 

Introducing Maggie Dove

Welcome to my new blog. Thank you so much for stopping by.

On June 14, my first mystery is to be published by Penguin Random House’s digital Alibi imprint and I’m thrilled. I’ve been reading mysteries since I was a child, and I’m honored to be entering the official mystery writing world.

Let me tell you a bit about my mystery, Maggie Dove, which is being marketed as “a cozy mystery with bite.”

Maggie Dove is a 62-year-old Sunday School teacher who lives in a small village in the Hudson Valley. She loves her village, her church and her friends, but her life has been marked by terrible loss. Two decades ago, her 17-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident and Maggie has been unable to heal. She feels like she’s sleepwalking through her life, and she might have stayed that way except that a new neighbor, Marcus Bender, has moved next door and he’s driving her crazy. Suddenly Maggie’s beginning to feel the stirrings of life, though unfortunately they’re coming in the form of anger.

Marcus Bender wants her to cut down the oak tree on her front lawn. Maggie loves that oak tree. Her father planted it, her daughter played on it. She’s not cutting down the tree. Bender offers her money. She says no. Then, one day, she goes out to look at the tree and finds lye bubbling in its dirt. Marcus Bender is trying to kill her tree. She’s beside herself. Furious, she pounds on his door and tells him that if he sets foot on her lawn again, she’s going to kill him. That night, Maggie feels terrible. What’s happening to her? What sort of person is she turning into? She vows to try and calm down her temper.

The next day she finds Marcus’s dead body under her tree.

No one in her small village of Darby-on-Hudson seriously thinks she commited the crime, but soon a prime suspect emerges and Maggie’s horrified. It’s Peter Nelson, a man who was the worst of her Sunday School students. He’s grown to be a troublesome sort of man, but he was also her late daughter’s fiancé and he’s devoted to Maggie. He takes her to lunch. He visits her, he remembers her daughter’s birthday. She loves Peter Nelson and will do anything in the world to protect him. So Maggie begins investigating the murder.  But as she starts asking questions, she discovers something troubling: many of the people she knows are harboring secrets. Even more troubling is Maggie Dove’s realization that the murderer must be someone she loves.