Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Dana Mentink | Scooping Up Some Fun!
Author Guest / July 12, 2021

“Life is like an ice-cream cone, you have to lick it one day at a time.”-Charles M. Schulz We all scream for it, don’t we? Yep! Ice cream is that universal crowd-pleaser that makes us think of celebrations and summer days. So what better way to indulge in that sweetness than a mystery series centered around an ice cream shop in the wacky little town of Upper Sprocket? To whip up a sweet mystery series, we’ll have to have an interesting protagonist. How about, Trinidad Jones, a woman who lands in the same hometown as her two ex-sisters-in-law and finds out the police chief is her felonious ex-hubby’s sister? How is she going to keep her Shimmy and Shake Shop going when there’s a murderer on the loose? And any worthy cozy will need an animal sidekick, of course. Trinidad’s faithful friend is Noodles, the aged labrador, who flunked out of service-dog school due to his myriad of quirky behaviors. He’s been known to hoard the mail and activate the car’s turn signal upon occasion. Okay! We’ve got the protagonist, the fuzzy sidekick, and the town. On to the good stuff! Writing a series of this kind necessitates LOTS of…

Boston Teran | Exclusive Interview: TWO BOYS AT BREAKWATER
Author Guest / July 12, 2021

Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Boston. Please tell us about yourself and a little about your new book, TWO BOYS AT BREAKWATER.   A writer should never tell you a little about their own book. It might tend to sound too much like a waiter reading off to you the night’s specials. Set against the backdrop of New York in the 1950s and 60s, TWO BOYS AT BREAKWATER is about two young men growing up and learning about who they truly are, and the love they find in each other. Where did the idea for this novel originate?   I collect incidents. I listen and I watch. And what I sense will take me somewhere else I write down. I sat at my desk for a generation And watching the Bronx rain one night I recalled A moment in a drinking dive not unlike The one Gary Snyder wrote about in I Went into the Maverick Bar That too was on a rainy night Coming down hard on a tin roof. Above the room  Where a pool table reigned supreme. And where two rough type western drunks Shot eight ball and the breeze. “This is gonna come across as strange,” one said. “But…

Debbie Wiley | The Ultimate Lady of Mystery
Author Guest / July 12, 2021

I fell in love with mysteries at an early age. Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and the Hardy Boys were my first foray into the genre. Then I discovered Phyllis Whitney’s young adult mysteries, Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries changed my world. Hercule Poirot bragged about using “the little gray cells” while both he and Sherlock Holmes carefully observed the tiniest details and made brilliant observations around those details. Miss Marple, on the other hand, listened to town gossip and used her years of wisdom about human nature to deduce what others missed. All three of them shrewdly found the solutions to murders that stumped even the cleverest of inspectors. I devoured all sorts of mysteries and thrillers, trying to astutely deduce the murderer just as my fictional favorites of Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and Sherlock Holmes had done. Recently, while driving back and forth to South Carolina, I listened to several of Agatha Christie’s stories as produced by the BBC, including POIROT’S FINEST CASES and MORE FROM MISS MARPLE’S CASEBOOK. My love for all things Agatha Christie re-ignited, and what a joy for me to…