Maggie Pill Mysteries

  One of the great things about cozy mysteries is their humor, and I had fun with this one because I grew up with chickens and can attest to humorous moments with these critters. They're fluttery and feathery, and they have minds of their own. On the serious side in this story is the criteria for judging an elderly person's competence. We have all heard of cases where a family member pushes to get control of grandma's estate for their own benefit, but the question must be asked: How crazy is crazy? When does a person's right to independence become dangerous to their health and even the health of others? A word about the covers for the Sleuth Sisters series. I absolutely fell into a pot of gold when I went online and hired a young woman from Singapore to do covers for me. She was fast, she was creative, and she listened to what I wanted. She drafted a theme for the books, the fence with three rails, each with an object that represented a sister. First she used shoes, the...

  Books are all gone. Thanks for your kind comments!

   People often ask when the next book is coming out, and the answer at this moment is April 4th. This one is THIRD CRIME'S THE CHARM, and it's the 3rd installment of the Trailer Park Tales series. Some readers become confused about which books they've read and which they haven't. I have the same issue, and several times I've bought the same book twice. It seems to happen to me most often when I read it as an e-book. That doesn't sink in for me the way a print book does, so I realize about halfway through that I know exactly what's going to happen next and what this character or that one is going to say. Drat! Here's a helpful guide for my books. A la Seinfeld, I've made a list in which your memory is prodded by a statement beginning with "The One Where..." TRAILER PARK TALES (I was smarter with this series, using "once," "twice," and "third" as clues to the order.) Once Upon a Trailer Park: The one w...

If this were a typical day, I might have called my sister and talked about nothing for a half hour. She knew I love my husband, so I could gripe for a while about his foibles and she wouldn't judge. She was patient with my stories, which tend to weave a bunch of asides in as I struggle toward the main point. She shared my negative optimism about life: It isn't perfect, but it's what we've got. Instead of calling, I might have driven the 30 miles to her house so we could go out to lunch. Or we might have sat on her porch, sipped tea, and relived our childhood. Those things were typical, but they're impossible now, since my sister died suddenly at sixty-three. There are positives here. She often said she didn't want to linger into old age, and we agreed that a quick death is better than a slow decline. (Hence the deer suit in the Sleuth Sisters stories.) We'd been out together the day she died, and her last words to me were how much fun it was, doing n...

My plan was to do a series of sister posts leading up to National Sisters' Day, which is tomorrow. What happened involves two crews of men, each blaming the other for the fact that my internet line was sucked away from my house, across my lawn, and under the road, ending up somewhere in a field. I was 8 days w/o real internet, just the pitiful dribble my phone allows. Still, they're all being really nice to me: no charge for the re-install, and my bill has been reduced for the week I wandered alone in the world. The upshot is that my last week of sisterly essays couldn't  be posted. I'm sure life will go on without them. As to the mice, I've never had such a problem with them in the summer. Usually we get a few in the fall, when the weather turns cold and they look for a warm spot to spend the winter. This year it's been constant. If I'm quiet in the morning as I sip my coffee, they come out and skitter around the kitchen. If we catch one, two more appea...