1–What is the title of your latest release? A GRAVE ROBBERY 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Victorian sleuth Veronica Speedwell and her handsome sidekick Stoker are at it again! But when the wax figure they find turns out to be an actual corpse, they end up facing their deadliest foe yet. 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? I had just taken my characters into the country, so it was time to go back to London for a proper city adventure. I needed access to laboratories, private clubs, cemeteries, and gaslit streets. 4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? For a short period of time only. I adore Veronica, but I’m quite certain we would butt heads and I think she could take me in a fight. 5–What are three words that describe your protagonist? Intrepid, resourceful, outrageous. 6–What’s something you learned while writing this book? That no matter how hard I try to get my little ducks in a row, they will always choose chaos. I work extremely well under pressure; unfortunately, I seem to only be able to work under pressure, so if I have loads of…

1–What is the title of your latest release? A SINISTER REVENGE 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? What happens when one guest at a Victorian house party decides to exact vengeance for a murder that happened twenty years before? 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? I knew I wanted to set a book at the country estate of one of my recurring characters, and because there were fossils involved, it was a natural choice to place it in Devon. They don’t call it the Jurassic Coast for nothing. 4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? Absolutely! This is my eighth book with Veronica Speedwell, and it’s a delight to hang out with her every time. 5–What are three words that describe your protagonist? Intrepid, audacious, irrepressible. 6–What’s something you learned while writing this book? That there were clergymen who claimed to know the exact date and time the earth was created. 7–Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done? I plow on through until the book is finished. It’s much easier to revise when I can see the book as a whole. 8–What’s your…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Deanna Raybourn!   Writes: What happens when a quartet of 60-year-old female assassins discovers the organization they work for would rather kill them than let them retire? That’s the question behind KILLERS OF A CERTAIN AGE, a contemporary thriller that follows the adventures of Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie, four of the deadliest, funniest, and most engaging women you’ll ever meet. They’ve been friends for forty years and although they’ve gone their separate ways, now they have to band together to settle scores and save their skins.   About: Deanna is a 54-year-old mother of one who is married to her college sweetheart and lives in Virginia. A sixth-generation native Texan, she writes about female characters who are as audacious as they are intelligent. She loves Twitter, travel, and tea—the sipping kind and the latest scandal. Come sit by her!   What I’m looking for in my ideal reader match: Appreciation for witty banter Love of badass women Need for escape Understanding that…

Whenever an author names a piece of art in a novel, I must look it up. I have to know if it’s just a fictitious name from the author’s imagination, or if this piece truly inspired the author. I know better with Deanna Raybourn. She shows her inspiration in the written word as if you were looking at the piece yourself. So when she described, The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes by Lenor Fini from 1941 in her latest release KILLERS OF A CERTAIN AGE as having:   “Lavish ’80s hair, rising up tawny and tousled. She was wearing a sort of  armored piece over her genitals, a metallic bathing suit if you squinted while you studied it…Their expressions were serene as they surveyed their gentle  pasture dotted with flowers and the bones of the dead men they’d eaten. It  was ghoulish and beautiful, a perfect representation of the terrible feminine  power of life and death.”   I had to see it. Because I left out the best part of her description, and seriously I was picturing a Def Leppard album cover. It turns out, that the real painting is a little over 18×15 inches, not much bigger than an album…

Everyone needs a break, including authors. I’ve been on a personal hiatus for several months from everything but family, and I have to say it was nice. Like all good things, however, my recess had an end date. Now I’m back with fresh a perspective, and a whole bunch of books to talk about! (No reader actually takes a break from cracking open a new book, do they?) While away I found several new authors that made me wonder what rock I’ve been under the past few years. (No, it wasn’t Dwayne.) I mean seriously, these are good books, how did I miss them? One series in particular just rocked my world, the Veronica Speedwell Mystery series by Deanna Rayburn.  And this series has the added bonus of audiobooks performed brilliantly by Angele Masters. I was hooked with the first book A Curious Beginning and lucky for me, book six, An Unexpected Peril, was released March 10, 2021—Yay! So yes, since December I have listened to books 1-5 and have thoroughly loved the characters and the mysteries and I’m totally thrilled to have this latest release in cue for this weekend! An Unexpected Peril  A Veronica Speedwell Mystery by Deanna Rayburn 3/10/2021 A…

Hi, Deanna! We are so happy to have you back on Fresh Fiction. Please introduce yourself to our readers.  I’m a 5 foot, 5 inch-tall Gemini, I like long walks on the beach and men who aren’t afraid to cry. (Okay, I’m a 52-year-old 6th-generation Texan married to my college sweetheart with one child and a starter pack of Australian Labradoodles. I am currently working on my 17th novel and I have a mild addiction to Twitter.) The Veronica Speedwell historical mystery series is such a fun premise and has been enthralling readers for the last few years. What do you love about the character of Veronica?   Veronica is one of the most enjoyable characters I’ve ever written because she is–like Molly Brown–unsinkable. Nothing ever seems to get her down for long. We know she’s been through volcanic eruptions, shipwrecks, kidnapping by brigands, yet she’s irrepressibly optimistic. She’s very secure in her own sense of purpose, and I love that she is so thoroughly grounded in who she is. I suspect she might be a little tiresome in real life–she’s an absolute bulldozer to poor Stoker sometimes–but on the page, she delights me.   One of my favorite aspects…

1–What’s the name of your latest release?  A MURDEROUS RELATION, the fifth Veronica Speedwell mystery. 2–What is it about?  My Victorian butterfly hunting sleuth, Veronica Speedwell, joins with her detecting partner, Stoker, to investigate a potential royal scandal during Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror in London. 3–What word best describes your heroine?  Intrepid. Veronica has a zero-tolerance policy for other people’s nonsense and she is never afraid to seize an opportunity or take on a foe. 4–What makes your hero irresistible?  Stoker is a walking contradiction; he’s big and fit and dangerous, but he’s also the guy who needs a constant supply of candy and who reads French romance novels and cuddles stray dogs. 5–Who are the people your main characters turn to when they need help?  My characters are always adding to their found family. They have a mentor–an elderly noblewoman who is the power behind the English throne–as well as a resourceful female reporter, a Black master pastry chef from Martinique, and a police detective who is just as likely to arrest them as take a bullet for them. But, always and above all, they turn to each other. 6–What do you love about the setting of…

Recently I had a chance to chat with a charming book club in Ohio about my last novel, The Dead Travel Fast. They mentioned that they love to extend their reading experiences by taking field trips that somehow relate to their book club selections. They talked about visiting Washington DC after reading Night, and I jokingly asked them if they were planning a trip to Transylvania after reading my book. (I would not have been at all surprised if they said yes. They were one of the most dynamic groups I’ve chatted with, and if any club organizes a trek to the Carpathians, it will be them!) I also had a lovely tweet this week from a reader who is planning an entire dinner party around the release of my newest book, Dark Road to Darjeeling. She’s inspired by the Himalayan setting, and I made her promise to send details of every course—I only wish I could be there too. (It is always a good idea to feed a writer. We sometimes forget to forage for ourselves.) But my intrepid book group and my gourmet reader got me pondering all the different ways you might celebrate a book. I usually…

One of the questions I am most often asked by readers is how I come up with titles for my books. The short answer is that I don’t! Sometimes the book seems to title itself. A single phrase, usually a snippet of a quote from a poem or play, will settle down on the title page and I cannot bring myself to think of it as anything else. My March 2010 release, The Dead Travel Fast, was one such book. I had the idea for the novel some five years ago, and started researching it and compiling notes. It is the story of a Victorian novelist who leaves the security of her Edinburgh home for the grim castles of Transylvania and meets up with an aristocrat who may or may not be a vampire, and as part of my research, I read Dracula. I knew as soon as I came across this passage what the title of my book had to be: As he spoke, he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to the other…‘Denn die Todten relten schnell.’ (‘For the…

As a writer of historical fiction, I am frequently asked about research. Specifically, readers—and aspiring writers—want to know if it is necessary for me to visit the sites I write about. On this point I always give a firm and unequivocal yes. And no. Contradictory, I know, but hear me out. Developing a historical novel means creating a dual setting; it means creating a specific time and place for your reader to inhabit. They are a tourist in your world, and you must give them a guidebook of essential details to help them get around. In order to do that, you have to know the neighborhood at least as well as they do—and preferably better! In preparation for writing Silent in the Grave, I traveled to England. (Technically, I tagged along on a school trip as a chaperone—a maneuver I only recommend to the truly desperate or masochistic.) I had planned that Grave would be a Regency effort, light and sparkling and frothy as a syllabub with just a spot of murder to spice the pot. But once I began writing, I realized the book needed Victorian London, a city of foggy streets, shadowed by industry and populated by Jack…