Great news! The newest book in the Saxon Series will be out next year AND the first book’s adaptation, THE LOST KINGDOM, has already entered into production. BBC will air the Matthew MacFayden (PRIDE AND PREJUDICE) drama in 2015, but until then catch up with Bernard Cornwell, author of THE EMPTY THRONE, in a exciting new Q&A. THE EMPTY THRONE is out on e-book, print, and audio on Tuesday, January 6th. Q.: You have now written eight books in the Saxon Tales series. How many more are planned? What is next in store for the characters? I wish I knew! I can’t plan a book, let alone a series, so every new tale is an adventure. I’ve always thought the joy of reading a book is ‘to see what happens’, and that’s also the pleasure of writing one. I usually have no idea what will happen in the next chapter, and the only way to find out is to write it! That said, there are one or two obvious pointers in the books so far – Uhtred will regain Bebbanburg and a new country, called England, will emerge from the long wars. Essentially the Saxon series is about that; the…

Do you have any strange collections? Recently my husband cleaned out a cabinet under the sink and found that I’d been hoarding wet-ones without knowing. It wasn’t something I use excessively and I’m absolutely not an obsessive clean person. I think I just saw them in the grocery and thought “Oh, I probably need those”–about ten times or maybe twenty. My husband lined them up on the counter. These aren’t the little boxes of wet-ones. Nope, I seem to have an unknown fetish for the big round containers of Clorox Wet Wipes in various scents. Why had I felt it necessary to buy them over and over again? You’ll love this—because they kept disappearing. I would bring home bags of groceries which my family helped put away. Apparently the Wet Wipes belonged under the sink and hubby would stash them there without saying a word regarding the other boxes that were multiplying like crazy nor telling me where they were. I could never find them because I preferred to put them in another spot. My spot housed an empty container so I assumed someone in the family was burning through them like they were candy. Once I was informed of…

Most of the mysteries on my bookshelf, I confess, are cozy mysteries. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the genre, cozies are a subgenre of crime fiction where the crime and the detection takes place in a small town. Remember the old Murder She Wrote series? That’s a good example of a cozy. The detectives in such stories are nearly always amateurs (cue JB Fletcher) sometimes retired lawmen or women. The majority of the detectives are of the female persuasion, and often hold jobs that bring them into contact with the other residents of their town. More often than not they’ll have a contact on the local police force who’ll help them out with a clue or two. The killers aren’t usually hard-boiled serial killer types, and once unmasked, are most often taken into custody with little or no violence. If there is violence, it happens offscreen…no grisly murder scenes depicted in any cozies! Foul language is also kept to a minimum. The murders are generally members of or related to someone in the town wherein the murder occurs and the motives – greed, jealousy, revenge – often are deep rooted. Cozies frequently revolve around a theme –…

Drop from trees like overripe mangos, I should say! A couple of years ago, I began to plan my Key West mystery series. I had the idea for a food critic wannabe named Hayley Snow, but I needed other characters. As I wandered through the crowds at the Sunset Celebration at Mallory Square in Key West, I spotted a tarot card reader set up at a card table, wearing a deep blue turban with an enormous teardrop rhinestone bisecting his forehead. What if my protagonist, Hayley Snow, was addicted to having her cards read because she was insecure about her own decisions? And what if her tarot reader saw a card scary enough that even he got rattled? And what if she his reactions to dig herself into deeper trouble? And so Lorenzo the card reader was born as a character. Then, as I walked around the city, I noticed that homeless people were everywhere, including perched on the stone walls around Mallory Square watching the performers and the tourists. Though they blended into the scenery, they probably noticed all kinds of things that visitors wouldn’t see. And so Turtle and Tony became characters. And then I attended the Key…