The older I get, the more I’m against the concept of ‘guilty’ pleasures. You want that cupcake, go for it! You want to put off the laundry and binge-watch every season of a television show, have at it! You want to crank that pop song and sing loud and proud in traffic, you belt that song, baby! Even in the bedroom, as long as it’s between two consenting adults, and hurts no one, why feel guilty about something? Unabashedly love and own the things that make you feel good! Whether it’s tattoos, or dancing to a certain type of music (hey, reggae! I love you!), there’s something out there for everyone that makes their smile a little brighter. And that is especially true when it comes to publishing. Search for nearly anything and you’ll find it—sometimes thanks to the inimitable Chuck Tingle. Like I said, I’m not about judging you for the things you like. But there’s one trend in romance that was definitely not my cup of tea. The taboo romance involving stepsiblings, in particular, the stepbrother romance trope. Stepbrother romances lit the literary world on fire in the past year or so. It seems a release date didn’t…

Many people have asked me what my inspiration was for writing BURNOUT. Answering that question is a piece-a-cake. I’ve been a federal agent for over two decades, so the suspense part of the story flowed naturally from my brain to my fingers, and from there, to my keyboard. That, and I’ve always enjoyed the underlying crime that has to be solved in a suspense novel. That aspect of a story inevitably throws the hero and heroine together under extreme circumstances, something that always leads to emotions and passions running high. Perfect fodder for a romantic suspense. Having worked with police and federal law enforcement officers my entire career, I have the most amazing contacts. I like to be factually accurate, so when I don’t personally know a specific agency factoid, I have an incredible contact list of cops and feds who are only too happy to assist in the creation of my stories and bringing my characters to life. There is also a huge part of me in this book. Many times in my career, I’ve considered leaving “the business” and doing something completely different, like opening a small restaurant or a bed-and-breakfast and cooking my little heart out. The…

By Hitchcock, of the Bad Luck Cat Mysteries by Kay Finch Cats aren’t often asked to speak their mind, so when I get a chance like this I’m going to take advantage. My name is Hitchcock, and I’m a coal black cat. I was pretty much nameless until I decided to hang with Sabrina Tate in Lavender, Texas, in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. Sabrina’s a mystery writer, and she has this idea in her head that my presence helps her write suspenseful scenes in her fiction. Thus the name Hitchcock, which is fine by me. So long as I can live with Sabrina at the Around-The-World Cottages owned by her Aunt Rowe, I’m happy. Sabrina and I live in the Monte Carlo cottage on the banks of the Glidden River, and things are peaceful most of the time. Until people start saying I’m some legendary bad luck cat. Maybe I look like this legendary cat. I guess he existed at some point in time because everyone (except Sabrina) seems to believe the legend. I’m only five years old, so there’s no possible way I could know for sure if this legend they’re talking about truly existed back…

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…

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…