Maggie Pill Mysteries

As you might have noticed, I don't post much when I have nothing to report. Just my philosophy, but I see no point in writing about nothing. 

 If you're a newsletter subscriber, you already know that Once Upon a Trailer Park is the giveaway on Bookfunnel right now, but only until August 11. If you're not on my newsletter list, you can still get your free e-copy HERE It's Book #1 of the Trailer Park Tales series, followed by Twice the Crime This Time and Third Crime's the Charm. If you've ever lived in any type of closed community, you'll enjoy the characters who show up in these books. I'm at work on Book #3 of the Cats & Crimes series, Have Cats - Will Crime-Solve. Lorilee and Jess have new adventures when a stranger moves into the neighborhood with the help and interference of Ditzy Mitzi and her son Nasty Greg.   The book goes on sale October 1, 2024, and you can pre-order it HERE .

BEFORE I FORGET YET AGAIN: Now is your best chance to find my entire ebook collection for a promotional price at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! Find my books and many more at https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/ all month! #SWSale2024 #Smashwords.  I tell myself I'll be better about blogging, but...I probably won't. I do try to keep readers up-to-date on where the next book is in the pipeline, so here it is. Have Cats - Will Crime-Solve, Book #3 of the Cats & Crimes series starring Lorilee Riley, is with the content editor (That's the person I pay to make me frustrated). Content editors tell authors what needs to be changed in a book. People often ask, "Do you have to do what she says?" No, I don't, but when an objective, well-read editor says, "Look at this again," a writer should do that. Editors point out where we repeat ourselves, where we don't explain enough, where the plot gets hinky, and where charac...

  First, here are the answers to the quiz in my May newsletter. A.         26 Letters of the Alphabet B.          7 Wonders of the Ancient World C.          1001 Arabian Nights D.         12 Signs of the Zodiac E.          54 Cards in a deck (with the Jokers) F.          8 Planets in the Solar System G.         88 Piano Keys H.         13 Stripes on the American Flag I.          32 Degrees at which Water Freezes J.           18 Holes on a Golf Course K.         90 Degrees in a Right Angle L.          200 Dollars for Passing ...

 There's less than a week left to get Cats and Crimes as a free e-book from Bookfunnel either here: https://books.bookfunnel.com/cozymysteryseptember/viw7z3gxs5 or here: https://books.bookfunnel.com/cleancozybooks/vqudav7vmv The way Bookfunnel works is that readers are offered free e-books of a certain genre, bundled together to suit the reader's taste. I signed up for two cozy mystery giveaways this month. Clicking on the link will get you a list of free cozies you can choose from. Cats and Crimes is the first of the Cats & Crimes Mysteries, and the second, Raining Cats and Cats , is available for purchase all over the place. https://books2read.com/u/mK7JAV   They're both also in audio from Amazon (Audible). If you'd like a code for a freebie on either, I have them, in hopes (of course), that you'll submit a review somewhere when you're finished listening. Oddly, the fourth book of the series is banging around in my head, but not the third. Not sure what I...

 I try to blog monthly, and the "experts" advise blogging weekly. Yeah, right. No way is my life that exciting or my advice that critical to world peace. I will say that CATS AND CRIMES is doing well. I've had compliments on the cover and the characters, particularly the cats. If you're getting desperate for Christmas gifts and you have a mystery/cat lover on your list, buy it HERE . On the philosophical side, I've been considering why cozies are so popular. I think there are several reasons: they're funny, they're not scary, and, possibly most important, the bad person gets punished in the end. We live in a world where the guilty get away with far too much. (No, I don't believe it's worse now than it was before. We just get it shoved in our faces all day, every day.) The guilty have often escaped punishment with their money, their fame, lies and deceit, and, for whatever reason, the inaction of the rest of us.  But in a cozy, some amateur with not...

I found a better image online of my imagined version of Albert, a cat shaped like a soccer ball, but I couldn't reach the rights holder to get permission to use it, so here's my second choice. He's based on a combination of cats I've known, some large, some black, and some too lazy to move. Albert is huge. We've all seen a cat like him, one that looks more like a blimp than a pet. Albert's weight makes him lethargic, which creates a loser's circle: too heavy to move around much, the only exercise he enjoys is eating, overeating adds to his weight problem. Lorilee, the protagonist in Cats and Crimes , blames Albert's former owner, who equated food with love. Once any being, cat, dog, or person, gives in to gluttony, it's very hard to change. I guess what I'm saying is that Fat Albert will never be svelte. Once again, here's the link to the book. Pre-order now or buy it on November 15, 2022: https://books2read.com/u/3LVEz7

 Cat lovers hate to admit it, but there are cats who are just plain mean. I submit they have reasons for it, some of which we can figure out, some we can't.  My daughter adopted a cat in Bahrain that was a perfect example of meanness. Like Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, he hated everyone. The reason, she was told, was that he'd been kept in a box for the first few years of his life, and probably mistreated as well.  He was beautiful, much like the cat in the photo above, though he was a gray. My daughter was good to him, and he learned after a few months that he could move around the house (He spent a long time hiding in a closet.) and trust her not to abuse him. This led the cat (Taz, short for Tasmanian Devil) to bond with her AND HER ALONE. The rest of us were fair game. If we walked along the upstairs hallway, he was liable to be lurking, and he'd jump out and slice our ankles bloody. If we came too close, he hissed and growled like a movie monster. And we knew never...

 Cats and Crimes is a labor of love in that the cats in the book are animals I remember from a lifetime of being a cat lover. While I never had a one-eyed cat, I had friends who did, so I shamelessly borrowed him for the book. The protagonist, Lorilee Riley, adopts cats that others won't take, since she doesn't mind adapting to their disabilities. In the story, Mayson is a kitten (his mother is May, get it?) who's deaf and has only one eye. He makes life interesting by making up his own rules, as kittens tend to do. Mayson wants to be outside, but like many youngsters, he doesn't think very far ahead, so if and when he gets his way, he find reality more difficult than expected. Like Tigger in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, he's lovable but sometimes exasperating. In case I haven't mentioned it often enough, here's the link to pre-order Cats and Crimes, which releases in print and e-book Tuesday, November 15, 2022. https://books2read.com/u/3LVEz7

All cats believe they're superior beings. Siamese cats take it a step farther--whatever is beyond superior, that's them. Maew, the Siamese in Cats and Crimes, is based on a guy we shared lodgings with in my youth. I have no idea where Ching-a-Ling came from, but he was a force to be reckoned with. I grew up on a farm, so our cats were mostly the outdoor kind, given shelter in exchange for keeping down the number of mice in the barns and grain sheds. How Ching got to be an indoor pet I don't recall. He probably just willed it that way. As Maew does in the book, Ching could reach the top of a built-in bookshelf in the living room without making a noise or letting anyone see him do it. (Looking back, he probably liked the warmer temperatures up there, because our house was drafty.) He spent his days looking down on all of us, seldom moving, so he often appeared to first-time visitors to be a large cat figurine. Ching had the yowl typical of Siamese, and he used it to let us k...

  Cat lovers love their cats, but sometimes we have to admit that they aren't all Einsteins. A relative adopted a stray who came to her door, a beautiful short-haired gray. It soon became obvious that he was either developmentally disabled or had had a traumatic head injury. The unkind would say that he was dumb, like Lorilee's Special Ed. The cat, which she called Dickie, could not learn and did not have an apparent thought process. He existed in the Now, and the Now was hungry and unhappy with where he was. If he was inside, Dickie wanted to be out. If he was outside, he wailed to come in, only to turn around and sit by the door, asking to go out again. Dickie liked his food cheap and smelly, and any time his hostess entered the kitchen, he became convinced he was starving. He'd go in and out between her feet until she gave him something--or pretended to. He'd follow her to the food dish, watch her mime dropping something into it, and look eagerly into the bowl when s...

  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...

 Being two people is tough, and lately, Maggie took a back seat while Peg worked on her upcoming release. Yesterday, I went back to being Maggie and took up the 3rd Trailer Park Tales book, Third Crime's the Charm . I had done a rough draft and then set it aside, which I find is very helpful, though sometimes scary: "What? I actually wrote this? What was I thinking?" In addition to Peg's book, Maggie got ahead of herself when her idea for Cutest Little Killer came along. I try to finish one series before starting another one, but sometimes the muse does what the muse wants. CLK was lots of fun to write, and from the readers' response, I expect there will be more of those. NOTE: This is why I will never be a household-name type writer. I can't write endless stories with the same characters, even if I like them a lot. So. Yesterday I went back to the rough draft of Third Crime's the Charm , and I was happy to find that, yes, I still like it, and surprise! I...

 I've been plagued by the cover for the first book of my upcoming new series. In concerns a private detective working with two kids who are uber-smart but were raised in the jungle. They're all fun characters to write, and I hope they appeal to my readers. The problem was that I didn't like any cover for very long. I'd look at it and think, "That might work," but then a few days later I realized it didn't. I put two possibilities up for fans to react to, and I got some excellent results. Though they didn't know what it was, I could tell they weren't impressed with what we'd done so far. When this happens, I have to stop thinking about it for a few days and then...think about it. I discovered that trying to picture the main character, the "Cutest Little Killer," was not going to work, and that's what was making me uncomfortable with what we had. So. Here's the direction we're going now, and I'd love some reactions. I th...

  The second Trailer Park Tale is available for pre-order everywhere I can manage it. So far I only have an Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HJHQ7D5 . I'll add the links to B&N, Kobo, etc. when they're available. This one continues the adventures of four couples in a Florida Over-55 RV park and, as advertised in the title, there are two crime threads. First, Ron & Julie are asked to see if they can pin down which man living at the park might be the guy who murdered two people back in 1967. While they're working on that, rumors circulate that someone's peeping in trailer windows at night. Of course there are humorous interactions between characters: husbands and wives, neighbor to neighbor, and senior citizens against the world. Shopping for lingerie, getting a confused old man to his doctor's appointment, and dealing with a guy who believes aliens run the government are everyday occurrences for the residents of the Beautiful Bird Over 55 RV Park.  ...

I've been working on the second installment of Trailer Park Tales, which will follow Once Upon a Trailer Park sometime in the next few months. The same four couples you met in Book #1 will investigate a cold case, finding a man sought by police for two fifty-year-old murders. The word is he lives at B-Bird, but he's changed his identity, so the cops ask Ron & Julie to do some digging. They involve the other couples, because really, how much danger can there be with a crime from 1967? The book is almost together, which means I'll soon be sending it out to beta readers, editors, book reviewers, etc. What I don't have is a title, and that's where you can help. I'd planned to follow Once in the first title with Twice in the second. But when readers search for mysteries, they use keywords like murder, crime, suspects, death, kill, etc. I can't come up with a way to do both and come up with a catchy title. I've been spitballing ideas all morning, hopi...