Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

When we meet Eleanor Oliphant, she is by no means completely fine, but moving through life quietly. She works in an office and lives by herself. In Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, Eleanor is reclusive, has no friends and is a creature of habit. One connection she does have is her weekly telephone calls from "Mummy."

Those phone calls always leave Eleanor depressed and feeling worthless. One day her office computer freezes and she seeks out the IT department for assistance.What she finds is Raymond, dressed in ill-fitting denim pants, a T-shirt with a cartoon character on it and green sneakers, not the sort that would interest the fastidious Eleanor.

Once her computer is repaired, she gets back to her internet search for her "new love", singer Johnnie Lomond, someone she has only seen in a photo and has fallen instantly in love with. Such is

Eleanor's life.

But when Raymond invites her to lunch, suddenly a crack appears in her regimented life. As they are returning from lunch, they witness an older man falling unconscious to the ground. Leaping into action Raymond calls for help and Eleanor keeps talking to the man. Before long Eleanor and Raymond are visiting Sammy in the hospital, meeting his family and spending lunch time together.

Eleanor's life has been so regimented, it is amazing to see her transformation. This book is a fascinating journey through a person's lonely life and how it can evolve with a little nudge from an unexpected source.

Deadly Solution

When Ollie Olafson wakes up from his drunken stupor, he finds himself arrested for the murder of his homeless friend Joe.  Recovering alcoholic and once disgraced attorney Maeve Malloy is assigned to his defense. In Deadly Solution by Keenan Powell, there's more to Joe's death than meets the eye.

After Maeve's fall from grace over a trial gone bad, her investigator Tom Sinclair rescues her from the depths of alcohol, gets her into rehab and negotiates a leave of absence from her job as public defenders office. Now out of rehab and back to work with a huge chip on her shoulder and something to prove, Maeve is determined to clear Ollie.

The only problem is the case comes to trial in three weeks, hardly time to investigate and prepare. Another problem is the defendant - he doesn't remember anything about the night, but he is sure he did not kill Joe. Ollie knows he and Joe were drinking heavily and Joe was using marijuana.

But Tom discovers the tox screen performed on Joe was negative and no autopsy was performed.

Maeve decides to order a private independent autopsy and when she receives the results, it shows that Joe had a high content of several drugs in his system.

As she continues to investigate, she finds many homeless people have died in Anchorage in the past few months and that no autopsies were performed. Is there a serial killer on the loose?

An interesting mystery featuring the "throw-away" people in many towns and the lack of sympathy towards their deaths.

Interview with Judy Penz Shulak

What is the title of your newest book? How many books have you published?

A Hole in One, which is the second book in my Glass Dolphin Mystery Series. The first was The Hanged Man's Noose. I also have one book out in my Marketville Mystery Series, Skeletons in the Attic. (For a review of Skeletons in the Attic, click here.) The sequel to that should be out later this year. And I’ve got 2 collections of three short stories, as well as some stories in anthologies.

How did you become interested in writing?
I’ve been writing stories in my head since I was a young kid walking to school, though I only started to write them down in the early 2000s, when I took a Creative Writing course. But the stories were always inside of me.

What is a day in the life of an author like? Do you write a certain number of words, do you write in the morning or evening, etc?
The life of an author? I can only tell you what the day in my life is like — and it depends. I don’t do well trying to work with a structured word count, but when I’m working on a book, I’ll aim for a chapter a day and write every day, including weekends. But it doesn’t always work out that way. My best time to write is morning, but I’ve written late into the night as well. I edit as I go along, so my first draft is usually pretty clean. But the self-editing can also mean that I backtrack a lot.

Do you plot the entire book first, then write or plot as you go?
I never know what’s going to happen until I’m well into the final third of the book. I’m a complete pantser. I come up with a premise and then just build on it from there. For example, with The Hanged Man's Noose, the premise is greedy developer comes to town with plans to build a megabox store, thereby threatening the livelihoods of the indie shops on historic Main Street. I simply took that premise and asked, “What if someone was willing to kill to stop him?”

Do you use real people and places as models for your books?
My primary locations are loosely based on places I’ve lived. Lount’s Landing is based on Holland Landing, Ontario, and Marketville is based on Newmarket, Ontario. But I’ve taken great liberties with the setting. The people are completely fictionalized, though they may have the odd character trait of mine, or someone I’ve observed. For example, Callie Barnstable (Skeletons) is addicted to cocoa butter lip balm. Guilty!

Who is your favorite author?
I have so many, it’s hard to narrow it down. I loved Sue Grafton and read every one of her books. Her passing has left a deep void in the mystery community. For pacing, you cannot beat John Sandford’s Prey or Flowers series. I’m also a huge fan of Fiona Barton, who came on the scene in 2016 to well deserved acclaim. I could go on and on — I’m an avid reader. Reading in the best teacher.

How do you promote your books?
My website. Blogs like this one are huge for getting the word out. Facebook is very strong, and to a lesser extent Twitter. Pinterest is fun, but not a great marketing tool. I also do a few events in the spring and summer, bookstores and fairs, and I usually attend one writing conference, like Bouchercon or Malice Domestic, each year. This year is an exception — I’m not doing a conference because I’m hoping to do 2-3 next year.

You can find out more about me and my books at www.judypenzsheluk.com. Here’s a link to my Amazon page: amazon.com/author/judypenzsheluk

The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover

It's 1934 and the country is still in the midst of the Depression. In The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover by Susan Wittig Albert, the people of Darling, Alabama, are doing the best they can with what little they have.

Everyone has a vegetable garden so fresh veggies are always available and what is not used at home is donated to the Darling Blessing Box. No one has an extra money except a few people like the Whitworths, but Whit is not spending any money even on the businesses in which he is a partner. This includes the Darling Telephone Exchange which has outgrown its old switchboard causing phone problems throughout Darling.

It's time for the annual Dixie Championship for Barbershop Quartets and the Lucky Clovers are planning to compete. Unfortunately two of their members encounter bad luck - Martin Ewing has pimples on his throat and he cannot sing and Whit Whitworth winds up dead in a car accident.

The Dahlias rush in the console the widow, but discover she was planning to divorce Whit over

money problems. There are other suspects as well because Whit was a limited partner in many businesses, but was unwilling to invest in them, making the other partners angry. Liz Lacy who works for attorney Mr. Moseley is privy to confidential client information and knows Mrs.Whitworth was planning to divorce him.

Lots of suspects as usual but the real charm of these books is the account of life in 1934. The little glimpses into the life of everyday people during the Depression, how they coped with very little and how they looked forward to the New Deal is a study in history. I'm always stunned by the prices of food - tuna fish 10 cents a can (too expensive to buy for cats), a slice of pie 15 cents and a cup of coffee 5 cents. A new car costs $1,500, but the average income was $30 a week.

I love these books and the characters seem so authentic.

Six Feet Under

When the Culinary Channel's show Southern Home Cookin' makes plans to visit Cottonwood, Kentucky, Vivian Lowry is sure this is her chance to become a baking star. In Six Feet Under by Tonya Kappes, Sheriff Kenni Lowry has her hands full with her mother's budding stardom and the animosity generated by the TV star Frank Von Lee.

Vivian is going all out to win the approval of Frank, as she calls him, with her well known chicken pot pie. She even has resorted to botox injections, which worries Kenni, especially as the results are not positive.

When Frank turns up dead in hotel room with remnants of chicken pot pie surrounding him, all eyes focus on Vivian. Because of this Kenni is removed from the investigation and her detective Finn Vincent takes over. That doesn't stop Kenni from looking into the case, from another angle.

Kenni decides to follow the Botox party leads to see where this illegal is operating and how she can

close it down. While she investigates, she nearly finds herself injected with the illegal botox and stumbles across the fraudulent pink handicapped parking signs.

Once again Tonya Kappes gives us a glimpse of life in a small town in the south. Vivian is a "nation" unto herself and would drive any sane person crazy. It's a good thing Kenni has her ghost Poppa to help her.

Divination of Death by Edith Maxwell

Guest blogger Edith Maxwell, or as some of you know her, Maddie Day, talks about her experiences in Burkina Faso.  A short story based on the experience will appear in Malice Domestic Mystery Most Geographical in April.

Twenty years ago I spent a year in Burkina Faso. It’s the former Upper Volta, a landlocked former French colony in West Africa, and is one of the poorest countries in the world. My (now-ex) husband was on a sabbatical year from his post as a professor of linguistics and West African languages at Boston University, and I was on leave from my job as a software technical writer.

We uprooted our two sons from their elementary and middle schools in an almost entirely white suburb north of Boston and packed us all off for a year in Ouagadougou. And what a year it was! We had a western-style house in the capital, and the boys attended the International School. We’d also spent a year six years earlier in Mali, an even larger landlocked country to the north and west of Burkina. That year we’d enrolled the kids in French-language schools, and they still retained some fluency when we arrived in Ouaga. Their French resurfaced with daily lessons at school and they still speak it well.
I didn’t have a real job during the year in Burkina, so I wrote an entire book of memoir/essays. One described the evocative Muslim call to prayer and women’s customs. Another told of a Burkinabe’s generosity in bringing us a sheep before Ramadan. I wrote about getting my hair braided by the traditional hair stylists down the road. I dwelt on the lovely feel of their hands in my fine dark Celtic hair and how my pale scalp showed through after I went home with forty skinny braids that ended in clacking beads. Shopping in the open market, attending the opening of a maternal language school way out in the bush where they honored my husband, taking public transportation - many were the other topics I delved into.

We’d met an American graduate student living in a rural town to the west of the capital.

Susan Cooksey was studying diviners – fortune tellers – for her doctoral dissertation and invited me to come for a visit. With a sometimes cranky husband and nearly always obstreperous older son at home, I welcomed the respite. (Our younger son remained agreeable and open to all new experiences in Africa, but he was ten and is that kind of person. His brother was twelve-going-on-impossible that year and wasn’t a bit happy about being uprooted from the familiar during seventh grade.)

She took me with her to visit a man who was a diviner in a village called Gouinduguba, and a woman named Yabil in a village closer to Banfora. Susan translated what I couldn’t understand and talked about her research once we were back at her home. I even got my own fortune told and was assigned a task to do (not quite a sacrifice) to fix a certain problem. It was all fascinating and mysterious.

After I returned home, I wrote one of my essays about the week with Susan in Banfora. Last year when I saw the submissions call for short stories for the Malice Domestic Mystery Most Geographical anthology, I knew I had to unearth my diviners essay and make it into a piece of short crime fiction. “A Divination of Death” was accepted for the anthology, which will release in April from Wildside Press. I am, of course, honored and delighted.

Here’s the opening of “A Divination of Death:”
The round hut, dark and cool, held mysteries I would never know. We had come with only one to solve. It was a scant week since Issa Diallo—Mariama’s brother and my new love—had been killed on his motorcycle here in southwestern Burkina Faso. The police had ruled it an accident, but I wasn’t so sure. Mariama wasn’t either.

Readers: Which fiction have you read that was set in Africa, or have you been there yourself? Do you have experience with fortune tellers anywhere?

“A Divination of Death” in Mystery Most Geographical (Wildside Press 2018) is Agatha- and Macavity-nominated author Edith Maxwell’s first published fiction set in Africa. She writes the Quaker Midwife Mysteries, the Local Foods Mysteries, and award-winning short crime fiction. As Maddie Day she writes the popular Country Store Mysteries and the new Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. She is president of Sisters in Crime New England and lives north of Boston with her beau, two elderly cats, and an impressive array of garden statuary. She blogs at WickedCozyAuthors.com, KillerCharacters.com, and midnightwriters.blogspot.com. Read about all her personalities and her work at edithmaxwell.com.

The Solicitor

Successful attorney Andrew Stephens finds himself in a tough, close race for Solicitor (District Attorney) in Charleston against S. Bartholomew Michaels. He offers his friend Noah Parks a position of deputy solicitor if he wins, but Noah is not so sure he wants the job. In The Solicitor by Sean Keefer murder and politics take center stage.

After all the ballots are counted, the Solicitor election is basically is too close to call so I recount is scheduled for the next day. When S. Bart challenges some votes, he is declared the winner, but no one has seen Andrew in days.

Noah repeatedly calls Andrews office, his cell and home phones, but receives no response. Feeling uneasy, Noah decides to go to Andrew's house and to his horror, he finds him hanging from the ceiling of the pantry.

At first the police believe Andrew killed himself because of the election, but Noah knows Andrew

would not kill himself over the Solicitor position. Suddenly Noah finds himself arrested for Andrew's murder based on new information. He hires a well-known criminal attorney and after a week in jail, Noah is released, but still charged.

Noah's search for the real killer leads him on a frightening journey through the ins and out of the criminal justice system. One cannot imagine how someone without law experience would be able to navigate the pitfalls of being wrongly accused.

An excellent book with lots of unexpected events.

Interview with Linda Lovely

What is the title of your newest book? 
Bone to Pick

How many books have you published?
Six books. The seventh, Picked Off is scheduled for release June 5.

How did you become interested in writing?
I was a journalism major, so I’ve always written for a living, primarily magazine feature articles, newsletters, and PR/advertising copy. I started writing fiction about 10 years ago.

What is a day in the life of an author like? Do you write a certain number of words, do you write in the morning or evening, etc?
I have no set schedule. But I’m used to deadlines and work hard to meet them. I have no problem butting my bottom in a chair and getting to work. I’m usually most productive in the morning.

Do you plot the entire book first, then write or plot as you go?
I’m a panster. I have a central theme and major crime but characters and the plot develop (and often change) as I begin to write.

Do you use real people and places as models for your books?
Real places definitely. Since there are always murders and villains in the books, I usually create a fictional county but nestle it next to real locations so the atmosphere and the geography are familiar to the reader. For example, Bones to Pick, is set in fictional Ardon County, which is located near Greenville and Clemson, South Carolina. Real people? Only in the sense that I will use personality traits I’ve observed in others to give my characters depth. But the characters are all fictional melds.

Who is your favorite author?
I have many but Susan Isaacs is probably number one. Love her humor. Michael Connelly is a close second.

How do you promote your books?
Blogs, a newsletter, book signings, book club visits, Facebook, Twitter.

A Whisper of Bones

Restaurateur and part-time private investigator Jane Lawless is asked by a visiting professor, Britt Ickles, to find her missing cousin. While in town Britt visits her mother's two sisters who she hadn't seen for 40 years. In A Whisper of Bones by Ellen Hart, Jane is drawn into the investigation.

Britt explains she recalls a cousin the same age as herself, but when she asks her aunts about Timmy, they said they don't know what she is talking about.  When she goes back to visit them, she finds a drawing Timmy had made and hidden in a crack in the wall and baseboard. What has become of him and why do the aunts deny his existence?

As Jane investigates she decides to rent a room in the aunts' house to get closer to them. When a fire breaks out in the family's garage and bones are discovered in the ashes. Britt is convinced her cousin is dead.

But it turns out not to be her cousin and that stumps Jane
and Britt. It's becoming obvious that the sisters are hiding something, but what is it? When another

person dies, Jane begins to wonder about the young next door neighbor who has been very friendly to the wheelchair-bound aunt.

Complicating Jane's life is the reappearance of her former lover Julia, now terminally ill and wanting to return for whatever time she has left with Jane. Despite her friend Cordelia's advice not to let her stay, Jane does.

A Whisper of Bones is an excellent book with a fascinating plot and subplot. I very much enjoyed it.

Murder at the Castle

With a lovely dress selected, Libby Forest has finally set a wedding date with Max Ramshore. But a murder at the castle knocks the wedding off target. In Murder at the Castle by Frances Evesham  Libby is thrust into another investigation.

A group of students is on a tour of Dunster Castle and they are trying out the speaking tube. The tube enabled the butler to speak with the downstairs kitchen staff.  One of the students is reading the part of the butler and volunteer Beryl Nightingale is reading the part of one of the servants. Abruptly Beryl's voice ends.

As the other volunteers rush downstairs, they hear another cry. Volunteer William Halfstead is leaning over the body of Beryl. The timely arrival of Libby to the castle with a cake for the students puts her in the middle of the investigation.

Who would want to kill the timid, quiet  Beryl. She has been a

fixture in the village for decades without raising too much notice. But secrets don't always stay hidden in a small town.

On another front, Max and Libby's Carpathian sheep dog, Bear has gone missing. At first they think the dog has just wandered away and will return at his own leisure, but soon they are worried he has been dognapped. Several dogs in the surrounding area have gone missing and there appears to be a dognapping ring in business.

Max heads off to find Bear and Libby investigates Beryl's death along with the local police. Murder at the Castle is the sixth in the Exham by the Sea series and another clever mystery. I'm happy to see Angela, Libby's friend with an expanded role. She is an excellent character.