OFF KILTER is the first book in the Highlands Mystery Series. It was great fun to write. I especially loved my research in the Highlands. All that local color – men in kilts, that wonderful lilting Scottish accent, the quick wit and infectious sense of humor displayed by the Scots. Did I mention men in kilts? And the setting was spectacular! Munros, lochs, sheep dotting the hillsides, whitewashed cottages, each tiny village with its own central meeting place – the pub, of course.  I must admit I lifted a few pints, learned to sing the national anthem, and sampled a smorgasbord of Scottish delectable, including the (in)famous haggis. My trip was much like my amateur sleuth’s. Eden Elliott arrives in the small village of Glenkillen on the same mission – to research for a series she’s been contracted to write. Only hers is a romance novel, not a mystery. But instead of practicing the fine art of flirtation with those hunky Scottish lads, Eden discovers the sheep shearer’s body. And he’s been clipped with his own shears. Nothing like a murder to cool a woman’s ardor. Worse, if Eden doesn’t figure this one out, she’ll find herself on the receiving…

People think I’m crazy because I write three cozy mystery series. Yes, one book per year for each series (for as long as my publisher lets me!). And there are other books I’ve published through a small independent publisher. Can you guess that I like to write? The first question most people ask is, “How do you keep them all straight?” The simplest answer is that they all are based in real places that I know well: western Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and most recently West Cork in Ireland. I don’t know how I could manage if I had to make up a town and keep all the details consistent. Of course the main characters are different people, although at least two of the characters reflect a little bit of me. Or maybe more than a little bit. Write what you know, right? Meg Corey in the Orchard Mysteries has been blindsided by losing her boyfriend, her home and her job all at once, but she’s got generations of New England ancestors (I borrow a lot of my family tree) to pass on their backbone to her, so over the course of that series she’s learned how to manage an orchard and…

The first time I glimpsed Los Angeles from a plane window, I wasn’t impressed.  The view through a taxi window on my way to Studio City wasn’t much better. The palm trees were too tall and thin. The roads were too tight and travelled. The people looked tired and troubled. Where was the gold and glitter I’d spent the last twenty-five years dreaming of? This should’ve been my first clue that dreams are fickle things. That January almost seven years ago, I’d flown 2,000 miles for work. As a newly hired editor for the Walt Disney Company, I’d achieved a damn-near impossibility in this industry: a steady, dependable paycheck with full corporate benefits—all while working mostly from home in my pajamas. The words “dream job” seriously applied. For three years, I coordinated, culled, cared for, and curated parenting-focused web content. The job was incredibly progressive and creatively freeing. We were supported by the greatest graphics and technology departments in the world. We took tiny sparks of ideas and blew them into ginormous corporate assets. But I hated waking up each morning, and turning on my laptop made me physically ill. Something was wrong, but it couldn’t be the dream job,…

Welcome again to Fresh Fiction’s Halloween Boo-k Spectacular Costume Party! Some of your favorite authors are sending their characters to this virtual party in style. Enter and be charmed by Will Ransleigh, hero of Julia Justiss‘s THE RAKE TO REDEEM HER. *** What better costume party guest than a charming rogue who’s a master of disguises? Illegitimate son of an earl’s brother, Will Ransleigh spent his early years on the London streets before being reluctantly reclaimed by his aristocratic family. His unusual upbringing enables him to move at ease among peers or paupers. Will’s attending the party in one of his favorite guises–as a traveling peddler. (The better to winkle out information, making idle chat with customers distracted by his shiny wares.) He’ll be garbed as a Regency hero, casual-style, in an open-collared white shirt, tight pantaloons and tall black boots, with a red gypsy sash to add flare. You’ll find the ever-convivial Will on the dance floor, downing rum punch, playing a few hands of cards, or charming the ladies with clever conversation. When not dancing or conversing, he’ll delight the women, finding pearls behind their ears, and amuse the gentlemen, plucking gold coins from their cuffs. At a…

I LOVE Christmas and decorating, and for werewolves it’s the same. The only difference might be that they LOVE decorating with live plants as it reminds them of their trips to the woods. Evergreen garlands. Mistletoe. Poinsettias. But even better, the Highland wolves in A Highland Wolf Christmas are starting a brand new tradition! A living tree! Shelly is the botanist in the family, and this is her dream. Not only will the pack enjoy the living Christmas tree, but after Christmas day, the pack will gather and they’ll plant it and make even more of a forest on their castle grounds. What can be better than that? Just in case you’re interested, they do have living Christmas trees at various places that sell trees for that special time of year. If you decide to have a wolfish Christmas, they recommend getting the tree late in the season so that it’s not in the heat-warmed house for too long. As to having that hot wolf help you decorate it, you’ll have to do more of a search for him. Do you have a special Christmas collection? My daughter has snowmen. I have santas. But I also have snowmen and other…

My aunt owns a cabin in the Sierra Nevada woods. Every summer my family goes up for few days. We bring our hiking boots, bikes, bathing suits and floatation devices. Sometimes we float on the river for hours, yelling for the kids to come rescue us when our river rafts go too far down stream–why paddle when you have children for that? There’s a place called the Frosty that we go to get burgers, fries and soft ice cream cones dipped in chocolate. Every year we ride our bikes to a historical one-room cabin where the first trapper in the area set up shop. There’s a railroad museum and lots of Gold Rush exhibits, too. One year we went horseback riding with a guide who showed us the original route of the Western Pacific Railroad. He kept talking about his gelding in the third person, things like, “Red bought this ranch you’re riding on,” “Yep, we owe it all to Red.”  We had no idea who Red was, but eventually learned that he was a famous rodeo horse that earned a lot of prize money in his heyday. When we asked our tour guide why our horses’ tails were tied…

Sometimes life has a way of throwing up so many roadblocks at once that certain aspects of life can seem utterly hopeless. I know. This happened to me with my writing career. I almost gave up the pursuit because I gave up the hope that one day I’d be sitting on my front porch writing this blog about my name being on the cover of a new book that’s about to hit store shelves. 🙂 My love of reading and writing started as a young child, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I decided to pursue my dream in earnest. My husband and I made the decision that I would quit my day job and work on my writing full-time. It was a scary step—walking away from a job I’d held for many, many years. But most ventures are scary at the beginning. It takes courage to follow your dreams. I started off entering contests…lots of RWA contests that had a Harlequin editor as final judge. I learned so much from that experience. By 2010, I entered the Mills & Boon New Voices Contest but didn’t final. However, I won an editor critique. I was thrilled. I was so certain…

I have always had a predilection for female amateur detectives, ever since I first discovered Nancy Drew over forty years ago with The Secret of Shadow Ranch. That was the first mystery I read, and when I graduated to adult mysteries, I discovered Agatha Christie and her spinster sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. I was hooked. As much as I have enjoyed Dame Agatha’s Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple is still my favorite. Perhaps the root of my preference lies in my upbringing. My mother had four sisters, all of whom I knew well growing up. Then there were my paternal grandmother and her sister, my three paternal great aunts, and of course my maternal grandmother. They were all strong Southern women with inquisitive minds, and I learned many an interesting tidbit about human foibles and misdeeds by playing quietly by myself in the corner while these ladies chatted. (Or gossiped, whichever you prefer.) Spinster detectives – or “little old ladies” as they are sometimes called, not necessarily affectionately – have been part of the mystery genre since 1897, when Anna Katherine Green introduced Miss Amelia Butterworth in That Affair Next Door. Miss Amelia established the essentials for the amateur spinster sleuth…

My eleventh Superromance, NO ORDINARY HOME, is currently on bookstore shelves. I can’t believe I have eleven books out and ideas for more stories continue to pop into my head! One of the themes I explore in this book is the question of how much of themselves celebrities owe to the public. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a celebrity? To be so famous that most people would recognize you when you walked down the street? I know I would find it a nightmare to live in that kind of fishbowl, and to have paparazzi follow me everywhere I go. I can understand why some child stars have trouble navigating through tumultuous teen years into adulthood…and why so many of them lose their way. Unfortunately for them, their breakdowns are all too public. The media seem to relish exposing their flaws. My heroine, Gracie Travers. has experienced the nightmare of living in a fishbowl and has gone to great lengths to preserve her privacy and sanity as an adult. In the end, through the hero, Austin Trumball, she just might lose it all. Her fear of exposure is tangible. In her own words… “Do you…

Music is at the heart of FAINT PROMISE OF RAIN. The setting for the story—16th century Rajasthan in Northwest India—had already been laid down by multiple visits to that stunning part of the world, where temples and fortresses rise up from golden sand, where textiles are jewel-toned, and the sky is devastatingly blue. Take away the power lines, and everything else looks much as it must have five hundred years ago. The next story layer came in a very different shape: a class in kathak dance, a classical storytelling art from North India. The moment I set foot into the dance studio, I was smitten. Jingling ankle bells, syncopated rhythms of the tabla (drums), precise footwork, lightning fast turns punctuated by perfect stillness. The moments of silence in music sometimes speak more than the notes themselves. In kathak, the dancer becomes an instrument. In addition to studying dance technique and compositions, the dancer must become intimately familiar with the cycles in which Indian classical music is structured—the 16 beat cycle (tintal), the 14 beat (dhammar), the 10 beat (jhaptal) and many others—and develop an awareness at all times of where in the cycle she finds herself. Much as a writer…