Maggie Pill Mysteries

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...

Book Two Animals play a big role in the Sleuth Sisters Mysteries, starting in Book 2. I didn't get how much pets and livestock affected me until I started writing this series. In my life I only spent one span of time without a pet, and that was my freshman year of college, when I lived in a dormitory. Other than that I had chickens, cows, horses, pigs, geese, dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, and a few temporary "pets" like an baby raccoon or a fawn whose mother was killed by violators. Like Faye in the Sleuth Sisters books, my younger sister was a horse nut. We started with ponies in the '60s and graduated to horses. Dad wintered a few cart horses that worked on Mackinac Island in the summers, and we learned to ride on their wide backs. We also learned about their tough mouths and distinct personalities. Eventually my sister was allowed to keep one for her own. Soon that horse was going to shows all over northern Michigan, and she often won top prizes despite some j...

When I go places to promote my books, I usually begin with an introduction to the Sleuth Sisters , explaining that Barb and Faye start a detective agency but don't want Retta involved because she's so very bossy. Audiences get a kick out of Barb's penchant for secretly correcting grammatical errors around her home town. S ome who've read the books tell me what a sweetie Faye is, and a few have confessed that though they didn't like Retta at first, she's become tolerable because her strengths contribute to the agency's success. What's most rewarding about talking to audiences about the books is that women tend to compare their own sibling relationships to my characters' situation. "I have a sister who--" or "There are four of us and--" and interestingly enough, "I'm the bossy one in my family. I'm Retta." They see their own families in the Sleuth Sisters, and they try to decide which sister they're mos...