Quilts of Lancaster County #1October 2010 On Sale: October 1, 2010 Featuring: Matthew Bontrager; Jennie King 320 pages ISBN: 1426707630 EAN: 9781426707636 Trade Size $14.99 Add to Wish List Inspirational Fiction Romance Buy at Amazon.com A Time to Love by Barbara Cameron Does time really heal all wounds? War correspondent Jennie King thinks she’s just a temporary guest in her grandmother’s Amish community while she recuperates from the devastating injuries sustained in a car bomb attack that changed her world. But when she meets Matthew Bontrager, the man she had a crush on as a teenager, she wonders if God has a new plan for her. Jennie has emotional and physical scars and though she feels she has come home to this man and this place, she’s not sure she can bridge the difference between their worlds. A beautifully inspirational story of the Amish people and of the seasons we go through in our lives. Excerpt Jenny woke from a half-doze as the SUV slowed to approach a four-way stop. “No!” she cried. “Don’t stop!” “I have to stop.” “No!” she yelled as she lunged to grab at the steering wheel. David smacked her hands away with one hand and…

The Morning a Ghost Climbed Into Bed With Me My husband and I built a house in northwest Atlanta in 1989.  You’d think I’d be safe from ghosts in a new house, right? That’s what I once believed, too. About six months into living there, my husband got up one Saturday morning at 2:30 AM to go fish a bass tournament.  I sat that one out because I had a wall mural to paint that day (this was back before I ever thought of writing a book).   He was great about being quiet while he got ready, even though he knew I always woke up the minute he got out of the bed.  I remember him kissing me goodbye and shutting the bedroom door on his way out as if I wouldn’t hear him opening cabinets in the kitchen to get what he needed for a day on the lake. I lay there in the middle of the bed where I’d stretched out on my stomach, thinking about what I had to do that day.  I heard the garage door groan its way up, then back down five minutes later after he pulled the boat out and left. It was…

June 2010 On Sale: May 25, 2010 Featuring: Stella Hardesty; Goat Jones 288 pages ISBN: 0312643233 EAN: 9780312643232 Trade Size $13.99 Add to Wish List Mystery Cozy, Mystery Woman Sleuth Buy at Amazon.com A 2010 Macavity Award Nominee for Best First Mystery. The Macavity Award is named for the “mystery cat” of T.S. Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats). Each year the members of Mystery Readers International nominate and vote for their favorite mysteries. A Bad Day For Sorry by Sophie Littlefield Stella Hardesty dispatched her abusive husband with a wrench shortly before her fiftieth birthday. A few years later, she’s so busy delivering home-style justice, helping other women deal with their own abusive husbands and boyfriends, that she’s barely got time to run her sewing shop. Since Stella works outside of the law, she’s free to do whatever it takes to be convincing–as long as she keeps her distance from the handsome devil of a local sheriff, Goat Jones. When young mother Chrissy Shaw asks Stella for help with her no-good, husband Roy Dean, it looks like just another standard job. But then Chrissy’s two-year-old son is taken, and Stella finds herself up against a much more formidable…

Harry Hole #4 January 2009 On Sale: January 1, 2009 Featuring: Harry Hole; Anna Bethsen; Tom Waaler 480 pages ISBN: 0061655503 EAN: 9780061655500 Hardcover $25.99 Add to Wish List Mystery, Suspense, Thriller Buy at Amazon.com A 2010 Macavity Award Nominee for Best Novel. The Macavity Award is named for the “mystery cat” of T.S. Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats). Each year the members of Mystery Readers International nominate and vote for their favorite mysteries. Nemesis by Jo Nesbø Gripping and surprising, Nemesis is a nail-biting thriller from one of the biggest stars in crime fiction. Grainy closed-circuit television footage shows a man walking into an Oslo bank and putting a gun to a cashier’s head. He tells the young woman to count to twenty-five. When the robber doesn’t get his money in time, the cashier is executed, and two million Norwegian kroner disappear without a trace. Police Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case. While Hole’s girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame decides to get in touch. Former girlfriend and struggling artist Anna Bethsen invites Hole to dinner, and he can’t resist a visit. But the evening ends in an all too familiar way as…

Hello again! Thanks for having me back! I had such fun blogging last time about collections, I’ve been pacing around my office trying to think up another topic that might be as fun. Nothing like a little pressure to motivate…lol. Well, as I was brainstorming, I realized I reached for my tea about ten times. I adore tea. All sorts, flavors and kinds. So I thought, what are your fun foods? Some people call them comfort foods and I think that term applies well. My biggest one is the tea. In my kitchen there is an entire cabinet full of tea boxes. It smells really good when you open it up too. There are loose leaf and bags. Fruit tea…I’m sort of on a cranberry kick at the moment, last year it was almond. I’ve got mint growing in my yard that I often add to my tea when it is brewing. My latest thing has been decaffeinated varieties because I drink so much of it, I have to switch to “unleaded” or I can sit still to write! My Dad was and is a coffee man. I keep coffee in my house for when he drops by. A lesson…

Hannah Vogel #1 May 2009 On Sale: May 12, 2009 Featuring: Hannah Vogel 304 pages ISBN: 0765320444 EAN: 9780765320445 Hardcover $24.95 Add to Wish List Mystery Woman Sleuth Buy at Amazon.com A 2010 Barry Award Nominee for Best First Novel. The Barry and Macavity Awards will be announced at the opening ceremonies of Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco. A Trace Of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell Even though hardened crime reporter Hannah Vogel knows all too well how tough it is to survive in 1931 Berlin, she is devastated when she sees a photograph of her brother’s body posted in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead. Ernst, a cross-dressing lounge singer at a seedy nightclub, had many secrets, a never-ending list of lovers, and plenty of opportunities to get into trouble. Hannah delves into the city’s dark underbelly to flush out his murderer, but the late night arrival of a five-year-old orphan on her doorstep complicates matters. The endearing Anton claims that Hannah is his mother… and that her dead brother Ernst is his father. As her investigations into Ernst’s murder and Anton’s parentage uncover political intrigue and sex scandals in the top ranks of the rising Nazi party, Hannah fears…

In attending various writing workshops, I’ve picked up the following tips for creating villains: 1. Give the villain his own GMC, i.e. goal, motivation, & conflict. 2. Allow him to care about something to show his humanity. 3. Have a “good” villain as well as a “bad” villain, i.e. an official who obstructs the hero’s efforts. 4. The stronger the villain, the more stalwart the hero must be to defeat him. 5. The villain may have a twisted view of the universe. In other words, he doesn’t see himself as being evil. Here are some handy motives for your bad guy: 1. Protection of a Loved One 2. Fear of Discovery 3. Jealousy 4. Envy 5. Savior, i.e. it’s his calling to punish the sinners or save his species from annihilation 6. Greed 7. Power 8. Revenge Sometimes we can mix and match these negative motivators. In my current paranormal WIP, I have a female villain who justifies her actions in torturing humans because the survival of her species is at stake. However, she’s ambitious and resentful that women don’t have authoritative roles in her society. So she stoops to murder to climb to a position of power. The worse…

Sharon McCone #26October 2010 On Sale: October 1, 2010 Featuring: Sharon McCone 352 pages ISBN: 0446400491 EAN: 9780446400497 Mass Market Paperback (reprint) $7.99 Add to Wish List Mystery Woman Sleuth Buy at Amazon.com A 2010 Barry Award Nominee for Best Novel. The Barry and Macavity Awards will be announced at the opening ceremonies of Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco. Locked In by Marcia Muller Shot in the head by an unknown assailant, San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone finds herself trapped by locked-in syndrome: almost total paralysis but an alert, conscious mind. As she lies in her hospital bed, furiously trying to break out of her body’s prison, all the members of her agency fan out to find the reason she was attacked. Meanwhile, Sharon becomes an incapacitated detective, evaluating the clues from her staff’s separate investigations and discovering unsettling truths that could put her life in jeopardy again. But as the case draws to a shocking conclusion, her husband, Hy, threatens to return to his own violent past–and exact fatal vengeance on Sharon’s would-be killer. Excerpt Monday, JULY 7 SHARON MCCONE A typical July night in San Francisco. Mist swirling off the bay, a foghorn bellowing every thirty seconds…

When I first started writing Backstage Pass, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Yes, I knew the book would be about a smokin’ hot love affair between a sexy, albeit romantic rock guitarist (Brian Sinclair) and a professor who appeared stuffy on the outside but was a raging inferno of sexuality on the inside (Myrna Evans). When I least expected it, these four other guys showed up. They happen to be Brian Sinclair’s band mates, who make up the rest of his band, Sinners. I thought they were perfectly harmless. Just some secondary characters to progress the story. Boy, was I in for a surprise! I never expected them to take over in the first chapter. Don’t get me wrong. I love the guys in Sinners. All five of them. It’s just that writing about them is like herding cats. None of them pay any attention to what I say. They do exactly what they want, when they want to do it, and couldn’t care less about my plot. Behind door number two, we have Sed Lionheart, the lead singer. He has a collection of groupies he uses without apology and hides behind a façade of…

July 2009 On Sale: July 7, 2009 240 pages ISBN: 1416599096 EAN: 9781416599098 Paperback $15.00 Add to Wish List Mystery Historical Buy at Amazon.com A 2010 Anthony Nominee for Best Paperback Original Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott In October 1931, a station agent found two large trunks abandoned in Los Angeles’s Southern Pacific Station. What he found inside ignited one of the most scandalous tabloid sensations of the decade. Inspired by this notorious true crime, Edgar®-winning author Megan Abbott’s novel Bury Me Deep is the story of Marion Seeley, a young woman abandoned in Phoenix by her doctor husband. At the medical clinic where she finds a job, Marion becomes fast friends with Louise, a vivacious nurse, and her roommate, Ginny, a tubercular blonde. Before long, the demure Marion is swept up in the exuberant life of the girls, who supplement their scant income by entertaining the town’s most powerful men with wild parties. At one of these events, Marion meets — and falls hard for — the charming Joe Lanigan, a local rogue and politician on the rise, whose ties to all three women bring events to a dangerous collision. A story born of Jazz Age decadence and…