Maggie Pill Mysteries

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...

     To be honest, the path of least resistance for a writer is to keep churning out her most popular characters in book after book...like the Sleuth Sisters Mysteries. I had fun with Barb, Faye and Retta for years, and they're still my best sellers. Then my sister died, and suddenly the series wasn't fun anymore. The last book was written but not finished editing when the news came, and each time I had to read it again made me sad. How could those sisters have each other when our trio was now a duet? I decided to put the series on a shelf and try something else.   The people in our trailer park in Florida had for some time encouraged me to write mysteries in a similar setting. In condos and trailer parks all over the southern United States, residents come together for a few months each year from many different places. They live in close proximity, in small spaces. And they're retired, which means lots of free time. The old adage says, "Idle hands are the devil's w...

Preorder HERE Do you and your spouse disagree on *Who decides if the room temperature is "comfortable"? *What the car seat/mirrors/steering wheel placement should be? *Where things should be kept? *When it's time to go home from a party? *Why tomatoes need/don't need to be refrigerated? These and other spousal questions will be addressed in the Trailer Park Tales Mystery Series. What the Sleuth Sisters Mysteries does for relationships between sisters, this new Maggie Pill series does for spouses, making those little irritations funny by revealing their universality. (if that's not a word, I just laid claim to inventing it). Set in an over-55 RV park in Florida, Trailer Park Tales begins with Once Upon a Trailer Park.     Home Is Where the Trailer Is Beautiful Bird RV Park is a haven for snowbirds coming to Florida in the winter months as well as the home of permanent residents. Everyone is shocked when a corpse is found on the property ...

Writers often gripe about people asking where we get our ideas from. That's because we often can't articulate how a story goes from a germ to a book. Sometimes an idea shows up almost full-blown. Other times it has to be teased along. Sometimes it changes over time. For example, the plot for the last book, Captured, Escape, Repeat , came from a discussion I had with my sister, who lived for a long time in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There she read about a piece shown at a local maritime museum that turned out to have been taken illegally from Lake Michigan. "Maybe one of the sisters could recognize a stolen object and get into trouble," she suggested. How did that change? Why? I can't tell you, but the item that was stolen is in an antique shop, not a museum, and the setting isn't Manitowoc but Green Bay. The person who recognizes the contraband is Lars, not one of the sisters. The result is still trouble, so that's all good for a mystery. Buy now My nex...

Lots of places I go, I hear, "When's the next Sleuth Sisters book coming out?" (I also hear, "Who's Maggie Pill?" but that's a topic for another day.) As to the where, it's in my head, and I'm hoping it's like cheese, getting sharper with age. As to the when, sometime in 2019 if my cheese-head comes together as it should. I say "cheese-head" because the book is set in Green Bay, WI, the home of the Packers and many, many cheese-heads. I've always liked the Packers, a team that's different from all the others in that the fans own it. I was with them in their down years, and there was a time I could probably have named all the starters. The only time my loyalties are tested is when they play Detroit, my home-state team. So the sisters will travel to Green Bay. I know why. I know the crime and the bad guys who must be caught. I know the season and the subplots and where the dogs are going to be. All I don't know is...

There was some concern after PERIL, PLOTS, and PUPPIES came out that the Sleuth Sisters series was finished, and to be honest, I wasn't sure myself. I've said many times that I don't want to write the next book just because. I need a story that I want to tell, because it's very hard work to write a book (at least one people will want to read). Sister anecdotes can go on forever, of course. There's always fodder for more humor in the way we interact with each other. Cute animal items are also easy to come up with. The fact that the real-life Styx almost broke my leg last week while trying to tell me he was glad to see me demonstrates that. Setting can become a problem in a series; call it the Cabot Cove Syndrome. How many murders can a small town expect? I felt that if there was a Book 7, it should take place somewhere else. Series writers will admit that after a few books it's also difficult to get all the secondary characters in if the characters remain ...

Working Cover Files If you keep up with my adventures, you know I was conflicted about a sixth Sleuth Sisters book. I do NOT want to be the author who stretches a series beyond logic, and I feel strongly that if I'm not interested in the plot, my readers won't be either. That was reinforced this past week as I read a book by one of my favorite authors, who has a long-running series I've always liked. The new story was beyond belief, with the detective getting naked in front of a crowd of people to force a confrontation that made very little sense and wasn't believable, at least for me. I never want the Maggie Pill name attached to a book just to have a new one out there. With that said, I found myself interested in the sisters again somewhere in August, and the questions began. What if Barb is caught, or almost caught, doing her Grammar Nazi thing? What if it's because there's a murder nearby, so the Nazi is a suspect? That was the germ of the idea for Boo...