Ali and Taylor Blake and the Dream Club members think they can! If you’ve been following my cozy series set in Savannah, you’ll know that the ladies in the Dream Club meet once a week to analyze their dreams, enjoy some fabulous Southern desserts and solve a murder or two. At first Taylor was skeptical about her sister Ali’s enthusiasm for dream interpretation. After all, Taylor is the analytical type, always cool and rational. Ali is more impulsive, emotional and willing to explore new ideas. How do the Dream Club members solve crimes? They look for clues in their dreams that relate to murders happening in Savannah. Sometimes the clue is hard to find. It might be symbolic and elusive. Often, it involves a clue that the police didn’t notice. It could be a hint about a suspect’s character, a chance comment, a suspicious element found at the crime scene. In A PREMONITION OF MURDER, Abigail Marchand, a wealthy Southern recluse, has a disturbing dream about her own death. A premonition, you might say. She invites her good friends the Harper sisters over for lunch at her estate along with Ali and Taylor Blake. Abigail tells them about her dream…

Cozy and traditional mysteries usually take place in small towns with quirky characters and bakeries, and kittens and puppies. The Museum Mysteries aren’t quite like that. Well, there are quirky characters and some good food, but the books are set in Philadelphia, which is definitely a city—in fact, in 2014 it was the fifth largest city in population in the country. Cozies usually include a death, which is a shock to the small community. Philadelphia sees a lot of deaths each year, and too many go unnoticed. Is DEAD END STREET a cozy? Yes and no. You see, Nell Pratt is president of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society, which is part of the city’s cultural community, where everybody knows everybody else, especially if they’re looking for contributions of collections or money. The staff members at places like the Society know how much money a donor has, what his or her family history is (public and private), and often a few of their secrets. (But most of those people use that information carefully!) I’ve worked in more than one museum in Philadelphia, and I know what’s in those files! Museums offer their visitors a mix of entertainment and education. But Nell believes…

When my publisher asked me to make my heroine, Special Agent Nikki Boyd, the lead character in a brand new series that focuses on a Missing Persons Task Force, I was extremely exited about the idea. And because they also wanted each suspense novel to take place during a tight forty-eight hours time period, giving her the lead in more than one book allowed me to be able to weave in aspects of her personal life and a romantic relationship, as well as a giving readers a chance to connect with Nikki on a deeper level. When I started brainstorming the series, one of the things I wanted to incorporate into book one was Nikki’s compelling back story, Ten years earlier, her younger sister Sarah vanished and was believed to have been taken by a man dubbed by the media as the Angel Abductor. This serial killer terrorized eastern Tennessee in the early 2000’s, leaving behind no clues as to who he was—only Polaroid photos of his victims. Nikki has been searching for Sarah ever since, a loss that compelled her to quit her job as a teacher in order to join the police academy and later lead a newly…

“. . . let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,” Hebrews 12:1 THE BONES WILL SPEAK was the first novel I wrote, and I cried, laughed, hated, loved, and cried again in the process. Bones was an eight year odyssey of learning to write under the patient—oh so patient—tutelage of my mentor, Frank Peretti. Like most new writers, I figured I had a good grasp of English, a story to tell, and a computer to catch my spelling errors. Oh, my! I had so much to learn. Although I wrote Bones first, when I couldn’t sell it, I set it aside and wrote A CRY FROM THE DUST. Cry immediately caught the interest of publishers, went to auction, and sold to Thomas Nelson as a three book deal. It became a Christy finalist last year and won the prestigious Carol award for the best mystery/suspense/thriller of 2014. What a thrill! I decided I just needed to tweak Bones and I’d have book two. Ha! When I re-read it, I realized it was really awful. No tweaking, a major overhaul. How gratifying, and humbling, when Bones also became a Christy finalist! The reoccurring character, Gwen Marcey,…

Hubby (who is my writing partner) and I spend a lot of our time writing, especially on the weekends. In fact, we probably get about 80 percent of our actual writing done on the weekends. So we do everything we can to protect that time for writing. All that being said, sometimes you just have to get off the couch and out of the house every now and then just to keep from going crazy. One of the things we love to do when we go out is catch a movie. And of course, summer is absolutely the best time to do this with all the big summer releases hitting the theaters literally one weekend after the next. So for this blog post, I dug through the Coming Soon pages and found three big summer blockbusters that are sure to drag hubby and me away from our laptops and down to the theater. Warcraft. Okay, I have to admit, neither hubby nor I play WOW, but we did a bit of research for it when we were writing the third SWAT Book, IN THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. You know the part where the hero Becker talks about loving the game…

With the celebration of Father’s Day this month, I wanted to take a moment here to talk about the presence of men in books. In Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance especially, male leads are very important to the storyline. A good hero can either make or break a book. In my reading experience, if I don’t like a hero in a Romance book, that’s it. That pretty much ends all chances that I’m going to enjoying anything else about the book, because if you aren’t invested in both characters in a love story, it won’t have the same lasting impact on the reader. I’ve come across some amazing heroes over the years. Some are alpha and possessive, others are charming and witty, but I love them all. And now, I think whatever your tastes are in men, you’ll likely find an author who writes your kind of hero. Alpha heroes are a popular choice. Readers like heroes that take charge, who show a sense of responsibility for something other than themselves. They also tend to be quite bossy, which isn’t a terrible thing in the bedroom *winks* Some readers prefer beta heroes, who are still amazing but they’re a little…

Sometimes (usually) when I sit down to begin a new mystery, I literally freeze. “Breathe,” I remind myself. So I do, slowly. In and out. That blank computer screen is sometimes as terrifying to me as rewatching The Shining. And that’s where I am these days—staring at the screen, trying to remember how I started MURDER AT LAMBSWOOL FARM (the newest seaside knitters mystery) as I begin the next one. What came to my mind first as I began writing MURDER AT LAMBSWOOL FARM? The murderer? The motive? The victim? The answer came to me with a start. It wasn’t any of those things. In the case of the Lambswool Farm book, it was an article I read about an organic farm that hosted dinners in a beautiful field, the well-set table groaning with the farm’s fresh produce. It had little to do with a murder, but was rather a place where I’d be happy to spend the months I would devote to writing the book. So I began creating the farm itself, its fields and lambs and a barn turned into my dream kitchen. Without a murderer. A victim. A motive. It’s the way I write: scene by scene,…

Romantic tension is essential in true-to-life relationships as well as fictional love stories. It’s the tension that keeps things sizzling. That sensation may start with a biting comment or a look that can kill. Or the accidental touch … or kiss. It’s there, but they try to fight it. When a hero hits a nerve in the heroine, she balks on the surface, but deep down, she’s intrigued. Or when the heroine strikes a chord that lets the hero know she’s on to him, he lifts his armor to protect his heart because he knows she’s the only one who truly gets him. The problem can be their own vulnerability that they both may perceive as weakness but eventually turns into the power of their bond. I’ve seen cases where the hero and heroine are so similar in their strengths—and sometimes stubbornness—they develop a love-hate relationship early on, and it’s through the barbs and squabbles that they discover something no one else can. They may not be soul mates when they first meet or not even like each other early in their relationship, but they have a depth of understanding between them that no one else will ever experience. In…

Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet despises Mr. Darcy for his judgmental haughtiness. In Bridget Jones’ Diary, the modern-day retelling of that novel, Bridget initially experiences the same disdain for the formal barrister, Mark Darcy, for similar reasons. Why, then, do we immediately feel a charge of excitement over the possibility that the hero and heroine might fall for each other during the course of the book? If we stop for a moment and imagine such a relationship in real life, would we feel that same spark? Try it. If you aren’t already single, imagine you are, for purposes of this question. Your wonderful spouse does not exist and is not an option for you. Is it realistic for you—if you consider someone who truly rubs you the wrong way—to imagine you might fall in love with that person eventually? Probably not. All four of the novellas in the IN LOVE AND WAR collection (Mountain Brook Ink, 2016) unfold stories about rivals and romance. Why do they work? Sometimes the rivalry exists professionally, so what spills over into the personal is actually off center. Our heroine might want to focus on professional animosity but may be unwillingly drawn into personal common…

For those who know me know how much I love summer. Which begs the question, why do you live in Nova Scotia where winters are eight months long? I often ask myself the same thing but the answer is the same. Family. I want to be close, so I’m willing to put up with the cold winters. But having said that, I live summers to the fullest and spend as much time as possible outdoors. I give myself a little bit of a lighter work schedule in the summer and try to get outdoors on the deck early afternoon so I can read in the sun. We live right on the beautiful Atlantic Ocean so when I’m not on the deck, I can be found reading at the beach (I’m seeing a theme here, lol) A few years back we also built a fire pit and spend many fun nights drinking wine around the fire and roasting marshmallow with friends. In our garden this year we planted tomatoes, squash pumpkin, and blueberries. For fruit trees we have peaches, apples, pears and cherries, but forget about the cherries, the deer hover close and eat them when they are perfectly ripe! They…