Sharon’s Cozy CornerAll about the cozy mysteries: interviews, reviews, books The holiday spirits are warm, but the winter weather is as chilling as the mysteries on tap as we venture into December. With Christmas upon us, I thought we’d take a look at the lineup of cozy mysteries with a holiday theme to them. Nether snow, ice, or murder weapons of choice will keep the following authors from dishing up an exciting batch of cozy mysteries sure to entertain us this festive season. I mentioned Cleo Coyle’s HOLIDAY GRIND: A Coffeehouse Mystery (Berkley Prime Crime, Nov. 3rd) last month, and I include it here again because it is just a delightful holiday offering. The mouthwatering recipes alone makes this novel worth reading, but Coyle also delivers a delicious thriller with a side order of romance that will warm reader’s hearts while it tickles their minds and appetites. The holidays are coming and that means more than just eggnog lattes and gingerbread biscotti to Clare Cosi, owner of the Village Blend coffeehouse. But when she finds her friend Alfred Glockner, the part-time comic and genuinely jolly charity Santa, brutally gunned down in a nearby alley, a few subtle clues convince Clare…

Writing about domestic divas, Sophie Winston and her rival, Natasha, is always fun, but for my most recent book, I had the pleasure of planning an entire wedding without having to pay for it. Weddings used to be somewhat uniform. We expected the frou-frou bridesmaids’ dresses that would never be worn again, with dyed to match shoes, no less. The white cake was topped with a plastic bridal couple or flowers, and after a reception or dinner with dancing, the happy couple left for their honeymoon. Today, brides face a staggering variety of choices. Cakes are topped with rhinestone studded initials, if there is a cake. Cupcake tiers are all the rage as an alternative. And wedding festivities don’t necessarily end with dinner anymore. Some couples arrange for a lounge with dancing and go on to a brunch in their honor before taking off. I was shocked to learn that some brides buy two wedding dresses so they can change between the ceremony and the reception. Of course, a lounge and dancing necessitate a third dress. In the Domestic Diva Mysteries, Sophie and Natasha write competing lifestyle advice columns. Their tips are included in the books, along with recipes. Sophie…

Writing a craft mystery series is the best. I get to mix my love of making things with my love of mysteries. Like lots of other people, I got hooked on mysteries by reading Nancy Drew books – the originals. Who didn’t want to be her with all the adventures and cool little car? I was thrilled to find out I do have one thing in common with her – we both drive roadsters. My love of mystery grew as I read Agatha Christie’s books. I guess I ended up with a little something in common with her, too. Her Miss Marple knits and my character, Molly Pink, crochets. And just like you don’t have to know how to knit to enjoy Miss Marple’s stories, you don’t have to know how to crochet to read my series. Though I have heard from people who were inspired to pick up the hook after reading my books. Actually mixing in crochet grew out of my own desire to learn the craft. I have a degree in Fine Arts and have always sewed and done different crafts, but always wanted to learn how to make granny squares. I ended up using a children’s…

Many years ago in my distant past, when I was still living on the southeast coast of England, I spent four memorable summers working for my mother in her small seaside hotel. I laid, waited on and cleared dining tables, cleaned rooms, welcomed guests and hauled heavy luggage up two flights of stairs since we had no elevator. It was hard physical work and long hours, made even longer by my mother’s insistence that I entertain the guests on the piano when all the chores were finally done. All I received for my pains were room and board, and tips that were few and far between. A poor return for the efforts I put in. At least, that’s how it seemed at the time, when I was stumbling exhausted to my bed, only to rise a few hours later and do it all over again. Looking back on that experience much later in my life, I realized it had given me so much more. I made some wonderful friends, met some bizarre characters, and had adventures that would have made my mother’s hair curl if she had ever found out. Life back then was unpredictable, exciting and fun!More than twenty…

I spent the first half of my life in the same house. My grandfather built it with his own two hands back in 1929, and when he died, my mother inherited it, and lived there until she died. It was my home through childhood and most of my teen years, until I headed out, to seek my fortune in the world. Since then I’ve lived in…oh…roughly twelve more houses and a few apartments in a couple of different countries, cities, and states. I renovated my first home eight years ago; since then, I’ve owned and renovated seven more. Eight houses in eight years isn’t too bad of a track-record. Especially since most of them were renovated around our ears as we tried to go about our business as usual in the midst of paint and drywall mud and dust and men with their shirts off flexing their muscles as they drove nails and soldered pipes. And it’s just really hard to keep going about business as usual when there are shirtless men driving nails and soldering pipes in the next room, isn’t there? Anyway, it’s that background that caused Berkley Prime Crime to offer me a chance to create a…

What goes into writing a good mystery? While it’s critical to have a compelling plot filled with twists and turns, I’ve always believed that the book’s heroine – and the development of her “real life” – was at least as important. When I started writing the Reigning Cats & Dogs mystery series, I wanted the focus to be my protagonist, Jessica Popper. Jessie is a veterinarian with a mobile services unit, essentially a clinic on wheels. I chose to make her practice mobile instead of based in a regular office because she needed an excuse to go out into the community every day, talking to suspects and ferreting out clues. But since I love to incorporate humor in all my books, I wanted her to be sassy, independent, and strong-headed, as well as someone who was battling a few demons. The main one is her conflict over commitment, which provides the ups and downs she experiences with her boyfriend Nick. (I tried to model their relationship after the sparkling repartee in those wonderful old Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy flicks – or one of my favorite movies of all times, It Happened One Night.) The Reigning Cats & Dogs series was already…

Have you ever been caught by the scent of something that takes you immediately back to a particular time or place in your memory? Roasted marshmallows. Zing! You’re ten years old at summer camp. Did you know that baby powder is one of the all-time favorite scents, which is why it’s been made into a perfume? Our sense of smell is the only one of our senses that bypasses the conscious part of our brain and connects directly with our primitive emotional region. The place where our sexual feelings emerge. And our sense of danger. This is a key issue in APHRODISIAC, the first book in our romantic suspense series featuring Brooklyn sex therapist, Saylor Oz. Along with the idea that most people have a deep down secret wish to experience what it is like to be irresistible to the opposite sex. None of us is perfect, and in a society inundated with super-gorgeous media celebrities, that idea can plague even the most sensible, intelligent men and women (especially if you add in some major disses form high school). Enter our height-challenged heroine, Saylor Oz, who grew up with the revolting nickname, “the munchkin.” She may be small, but don’t…

This is the question I’ve gotten most often over the past few years, since Ken Bruen and I published our first book together (BUST in 2006). Writing, obviously, is normally a solitary process and it’s hard enough to organize your own thoughts coherently, so people wonder how we can possibly do it when Ken lives in Ireland and I live in the U.S. and we write entirely over the Internet? Like with any type of writing, I don’t think there’s any formula for how to write a book with someone else. The most important thing is that the writers need to have chemistry and share the same vision. We knew we had that part down–we both knew the books would have a nourish, darkly humorous sensibility. We were more concerned about the writing itself. Ken and I have written three books together now and going into each one I wasn’t sure we could actually pull it off, but I had my biggest doubts before we wrote the first book. We had a bit of a head start with BUST because it was loosely based on a book I had previously written, but had kept in the drawer. The original manuscript…

“She flowed into his arms and they stood silently for a moment: two middle-aged people, much encumbered by heavy winter outerwear and vintage emotional baggage, but, for the moment, in perfect harmony.” So, I get the invitation to blog on Fresh Fiction and I accept joyfully, especially since the kind folks here have named my recent release In a Dark Season “Pick of the Day” (5/25/08). I start checking out some past blogs and then I see the covers of featured books. Hmmm. Flowing hair, heaving bosoms, and more six-packs than a convenience store. Oh dear! This isn’t what I write – do they really want me? Mind you, I have nothing against tempestuous heroines and hunky heroes – I’ve drooled my way through a Judith Krantz title or two before this. But when I began to write in 2000 – at the age of fifty seven – I’d already spent about ten years, looking around for role models — older women who were aging in the way I hoped to. It seemed as if the media was crawling with gorgeous twenty-somethings and the occasional cute, feisty old lady and in real life there was a great middle ground of…

It’s an odd way to make a living when you think about it. We write about things that would terrify and dismay people if they were real. Murder. Serial killers. Violence. And we do all this to entertain people. I think about this issue whenever a news show covers an intimate tragedy like the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba or Madeleine McCann in Portugal. Cable news shows play on our love of mystery and drama to boost ratings. The difference is that, unlike a novel, the crime is real. Our news programs treat these dramas as whodunits, to an extent that we often cheapen or even forget the actual tragedy. The question is: Are those of us who write mysteries any different? We invent our stories, but we strive to make the fear, crime, and drama real for the reader. The best writers make us gasp and cry, afraid to turn the page, but unable to put the book down. My only explanation is that mysteries make us confront difficult moral choices and decide for ourselves. Mysteries also give us something that the real world often cannot. Order. Resolution. Truth. The frustration in watching the news is in not…