Guest Reviews by MADonnelly: MYSTERIES by Isabella Maldonado, Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Becky Clark. A. J. Mackenzie, Kirsten Weiss, Antti Tuomainen

MADonnelly is a published poet, a Vermonter, a good friend. As guest reviewer on this blog, she brings a hint of Irish delight to the space. And you know what the Irish say: May your home always be too small to hold all your friends. The same applies to a good review blog. Thanks for these pithy takes on six mysteries, Friend!

DEATH BLOW by Isabella Maldonado (A Veranda Cruz mystery, Midnight Ink)

If you like tough cop heroines and  chilling, gruesome hit jobs, this one’s for you.  Add a savagely cruel Mexican drug smuggling cartel, a violent family history, and fast paced, tense police work and you’re in for a wild ride.  The author, with over 20 years in law enforcement, joins intimate knowledge of criminality and  police procedures with considerable writing skills and  a gift for  creating some psychologically complex characters.   Occasionally some tender heartedness, devotion  or cop loyalty shine through rough exteriors to relieve the horrors and appear at the right time.

TRAP by Lilja Sigurðardóttir, trans. Quentin Bates (Orenda Books)

As if trying to get custody of her son away from an abusive and criminal husband weren’t enough, Sonja herself is part of an international drug smuggling operation and in an on-again off-again lesbian relationship with a money laundering cocaine addict.  As she realizes the connections between the  banking and  drug plots, she finds herself being drawn in deeper and deeper. The more she desperately wants to get out and live a normal life with her son, the more she finds herself with a target on her back and unable to extricate herself from the increasing corruption, danger and threats. (Note the translator, who's an Icelandic noir author himself.)

FOUL PLAY ON WORDS by Becky Clark (Midnight Ink)

Witty, self deprecating  and somewhat neurotic mystery writer Charlemagne Russo arrives in Portland  for a mystery writer’s conference thinking all she has to do is give a keynote speech, catch up with her best friend and fly home to her boyfriend.  Instead  she immediately discovers that she is in charge of the conference with no help, her friend’s daughter has been kidnapped and the conference hotel has  been double booked with a dog show. Her friend has told her to focus on the conference  but Charlee can’t let the kidnapping go.  She must find the daughter. Motive? Financial insolvency? drug addiction? family secrets? illicit romance?  Everything’s possible  with lots of barking dogs,  rendezvous in dark passageways under the hotel, suspicious looks and cryptic remarks by staff and attendees.  The  ransom, possible multiple murders and conference deadlines  are all looming.  A  frantic, comic tale.

THE BODY IN THE BOAT by A. J. Mackenzie (Hardcastle & Chaytor Mystery, Zaffre)

There are a number and variety of strong female characters in this mystery. Particularly astute and principled is Mrs. Chaytor, who with her close friend Reverend Hardcastle  have  not only multiple murders to solve  but  troubled parishioners and refugees to tend to.  They do so with fierce intelligence and relentlessness, while struggling with their own personal sorrows and demons..     
    Romney Marsh in Georgian England during a war with the French,  is the rough, gloomy setting for this story and   its smuggling and banking worlds — and the sinister ways they are connected. Mrs. Chaytor and the Reverend, with the help of a couple of the smugglers (there are both”good” and “ very bad” smugglers) keep going over  every angle and all take pretty daring risks to uncover the chain of complicated events, the slippery perpetrators, the mysterious contrabands.

CHOCOLATE À LA MURDER by Kirsten Weiss (Midnight Ink)

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  A Ghost Detecting resident cat  (named G.D.) and  a haunted Mexican molilnolo ( a stick for stirring chocolate) are just what you might expect in a “Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum”.  But a  dead chocolatier, found covered in chocolate,  is probably not your  typical murder victim.  Museum owner Maddie Kosloski, a self appointed amateur detective wants desperately to solve the crime. She goes about it steadfastly and with wacky humor, much to the annoyance of friends, family, and the local police. There’s not as much assistance or interference from the paranormal as the name of the museum suggests, but Maddie does well without it.
  And maybe the chocolate shop, billing itself as  producing the most high end best chocolate ever, (“ hand crafted, ethically sourced, organically grown ingredients”) is not all it’s cracked up to be.



PALM BEACH FINLAND by Antti Tuomainen (Orenda Books)

Here’s a mystery that starts with a murder and the reader knows right away who did it, how and why. The real entertainment , sustained, deepened and embellished beautifully and sometimes hysterically, is in how the assortment of characters figure it out, react, compromise, diabolically pursue, bungle, cover up. There are big themes too: Life’s dreams and plans, failure, greed, friendship, revenge, brutality, love - and the ridiculous.  The author focuses masterfully on the characters’ eccentricities and inner lives.  Psychological complexity, wild humor, romance-  it’s a rich mix in the new, garish, plastic-palm-trees-and -all   Palm Beach Finland resort, “the hottest beach in Finland.”

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.
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Guest Post: Vermont Thriller Author J.P. Choquette

We're pleased today to welcome J.P. Choquette, whose second book, DARK CIRCLE, was released on Valentine's Day -- a creepy confluence of calendar, and yet ... there's something in this suspense mystery that also touches on being surprised by how love and friendship hold on, even when the neighborhood is weird to the point of dangerous, and the woods behind the house are haunted. When you get to know J.P. a bit, indulge yourself in expanding your Vermont book collection by picking up a copy of her latest thriller, as well as Epidemic, her first one. You'll never look at the Green Mountains communities in the same way afterward (smile; shiver!).

1. Hurrah for your second mystery, published this month: DARK CIRCLE. This is a suspense novel featuring Sarah Solomon, and set "today" in St. Albans and Swanton, Vermont -- so it has some things in common with your earlier book, Epidemic. But that was a medical thriller, and this one has threads of the "paranormal." What made you switch directions like this?

Thank you very much for reading my books, first of all, and for the interview today. I appreciate it and enjoyed your book, COLD MIDNIGHT immensely.

I’d love to answer your question regarding the change in direction between the two books but honestly? I’m not sure what the answer is! Most of the time I don’t look too hard behind the “why” of an idea—if I’m excited about it, I run with it. So, this wasn’t an intentional switch but it was fun delving into both areas.

2. Sarah Solomon moves to Vermont, early in your book, in part because she's been the victim of a terrible crime. So she can see her neighborhood through fresh eyes. Has that happened to you? The moving part, I mean -- I hope you haven't been a crime victim!

I grew up in Vermont and when I hit my teen years I was DONE with living here. I hated the long winters, the quietness, the lack of excitement and drama. At eighteen, I moved to Tennessee. And you know what? It looked just like Vermont! I was so disappointed. But it was a great experience for me, living in Knoxville and Chattanooga and experiencing more of what “city life” had to offer for three years. It didn’t take me long to realize that the things I used to hate about Vermont, I now missed. I still love to travel and see things through “fresh eyes,” but now I love coming home, too.

3. I can see that you did plenty of research on northwestern Vermont's people of Abenaki (Native American) heritage for this book; did your research discoveries shape the plot, or did the plot push you to the research?

Learning more about the Abenaki people through my research was helpful in fine-tuning the manuscript. There are certain descriptions about the type of traditional dress an Abenaki woman would have worn, for example, and the wampum beads, etc., that I learned about during the research. While I love learning new things, I have to be careful not to get carried away in my research. It’s easy to spend more time reading than writing.

4. Sarah Solomon's interaction with her husband Cole and her part of Vermont are strongly colored by her sense of being an artist. How did you choose that path for her? Are you also an artist? If not, how did you figure this out?

I’m a dabbling artist. I have no formal training, save a few college art classes, but I love making  mixed media and doodling in my art journal and making art from “treasures” I find while out walking. And as writers I think we’re all artists, too.

5. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but I have to ask ... Have you ever seen a ghost or spirit? Do you expect to see one in the future?

That’s a good question. A few years ago I went to an author discussion by Joe Citro. He is my husband’s favorite fiction author and I really enjoyed his books, too. Joe said during the talk when someone asked him a similar question that he believes in spirits, but not ghosts. I share that philosophy. And no, I’ve never seen a spirit. At least, none that I know of.

6. The frightening things that happen to Sarah -- after that first terrible crime that brings her in recovery to Vermont -- are sometimes a little less awful than what Sarah herself may be expecting! What are your personal rules for violence and depiction of violence in your writing?

Hmm, another good question. For me as a reader there is little worse than getting completely caught up in a great book and having the plot take a depraved turn, something so disturbing that the entire book is ruined because I can’t stop thinking about how HORRIBLE that scene was! I screen the fiction that I read—I don’t want to read about anything horrendous happening to children or animals and stay away from really explicit torture/rape/etc. scenes involving adults.

That being said, there are some books in which these awful scenes are foundational to the book. Think about John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill.” The scene at the beginning involving the little girl was brutal to read, but everything in the story hinged on this horrific event. Other times though, it feels that authors add a lot of really disturbing stuff just to sensationalize the story. In my opinion this often ends up detracting from it instead.

7. Have you had any strange or even creepy experiences of material from either of your books seeming to appear afterward in real life?

Not afterward, but yes, in real life. Some of what inspired me to write this book was moving into a new-to-us house in 2011. While I don’t think our house was haunted, it had a feeling, an aura of sadness and anger which I believe was leftover from the previous owners. We also really did find what looked like a sack of hair hanging in the attic—I didn’t get a very good look because I was running to the trash can outside screeching! And I also found a creepy phrase etched into the wall of my office/art room which gave me goose bumps. Then, when my husband mentioned one day that we rarely saw any of our neighbors outside, my little mental wheels started spinning with that “what if” question.

8. When you craft your suspense novels, what comes first for you -- the character or the plot? And are you a "pantser" or a "plotter"?

So far it’s always been the plot. Maybe that will change in the future. And while I tend to be a pantser, I’m seeing more and more the benefit of plotting out at least a rough outline with a few major events early on. This helps in the re-writing process, in that there is less to re-write. Always a good thing!

9. You completed this book with a "critique partner," as you mention at the start. What does that mean, and how did it add to the experience of writing DARK CIRCLE?

Yes, Cori Lynn Arnold is a fellow Sisters in Crime member and we critiqued each other’s manuscripts last fall. It was wonderful. She had some interesting insights and a few questions about why this person was feeling this way or why this happened HERE when it was obvious that it already happened THERE. You know, the old, “She left the gun on the shelf,” but then later the character is holding the gun and the reader is like, “How the heck did it get off the shelf and into her hand?” Right now I’m part of a critique group (again with Sisters in Crime members) for the third novel I’m working on. It’s great and helps keep me on my toes. Plus, I love reading other writer’s work for free! (Smile!)

10. What did you discover in writing DARK CIRCLE that you wish you'd already known when you were writing Epidemic?

Definitely as I mentioned earlier, the importance of an outline, even a rough one. That helped the process flow more smoothly for DARK CIRCLE and also made the editing process a lot easier. Another thing that is an absolute live saver for me is my 15-Minute Rule. It’s been transformational in my writing career and keeping me passionate about writing. It’s simply this: Write fiction for 15-minutes, most days of the week. Some days I’ll keep going, surfacing an hour later and wondering where the time went, other days I’m literally sitting there and thinking, “I have nothing! I have nothing!” but I have to sit there in front of my screen for 15-minutes so I might as well write something. Just like exercise, there are plenty of days we don’t feel like going for the walk or run or getting out the yoga mat or weights. But usually if we get ourselves past that first 15-minutes, it’s great and we feel so much better afterward. And if it’s not? Well, you only have to do it for that very short amount of time—you can do anything for 15-minutes.

One thing I wished I had known early on about the publishing and then releasing process was what a good reception EPIDEMIC would have. It’s not a masterpiece by any means but so many people have told me that they’ve enjoyed reading it. And really, as a writer, there’s nothing nicer to hear. I literally almost had a panic attack just before EPIDEMIC was published and during my meltdown reached out to a writing friend. She thankfully talked me down from the I-just-want-to-throw-this-manuscript-in-the-trash ledge and reminded me that my fear in putting this novel out there was totally normal. And it was. This time the releasing part was easier. Not cake walk-easy, but easier.

11. For the second time, you've chosen to self-publish, and your books are easily ordered (would-be readers could start at your website, http://www.scaredEcat.com). You're a skilled writer of suspense. What are the advantages for you of taking your books to print this way?

Thank God for whoever dreamed up Print on Demand (POD)! I chose CreateSpace, a publisher which is an affiliate of Amazon and love the freedom that self-publishing gives me. There are different packages you can buy via most of these POD platforms, but so far I’ve chosen to do everything myself, from cover art to formatting the manuscript, to marketing the finished product. The only piece I don’t tackle is formatting the manuscript for e-book distribution. I hired someone to do that for me and it saved me lots of hair pulling and angst. At some point I may hire other pieces out (copyediting for example and perhaps a professional to take care of the cover art) but for now I’m happy to wear all the hats. Who else is going to love my book as much as me? And in that regard, who else wants to see it succeed as much?

12. Can you tell us something about what's ahead in your third book, the one we know you're already writing?

Sure, I’d love to. The book I’m working on now (just passed the 1/3 mark!) is again set in northwestern Vermont, this time in a fictional town outside of St. Albans. It follows a twenty-something year-old bounty hunter named Tatum “Tayt” Waters. While Tayt is trying hard to get her bounty hunting business off the ground, her estranged father is accused of the rape and murder of a young local woman. Tatum begins working with her previous mentor who is also a PI, to try to clear her father’s name.

Another idea I’m toying with is a series of novellas, likely set in post e-fallout New England. This series would be different in that while still suspense, it would include some futuristic/sci-fi aspects. If I go ahead with the series, I will likely release each as an e-book and then compile them into one long print book at the end. I’ve got a few other ideas I’m toying with as well, but there are only so many writing hours in the day!

Beth, thank you so much for your great questions and for the opportunity to talk about my writing here. I really appreciate it and all the hard work you do help writers and inform readers.  -- My pleasure! - BK

BIO: J.P. Choquette is a Vermont-based suspense author who maintains a website, Scared E Cat: For Readers and Writers of Great Suspense. Find sample chapters, book descriptions, more information about current projects and sign up for a FREE newsletter (with chances to win a copy of J.P.’s books) at the website (www.scaredEcat.com).

When a Suspense Novel Is "Gothic": Vicki Delany and MORE THAN SORROW

This evening we welcome Canadian mystery author Vicki Delany to the Kingdom Books blog, to talk about a subgenre of mysteries that's getting fresh attention. Delany's newest book, MORE THAN SORROW, is a stand-alone (a break from her well-loved Constable Molly Smith series set in British Columbia  and her Yukon historicals), and while all the necessities of suspense are present -- a compelling protagonist, Hannah Manning, whose traumatic brain injury may have ended her career as an international journalist and war correspondent; threats against property and life; criminals with pathological approaches -- there's also a haunting strand of something less common, something airing a scent of evil out of Ontario's past.

But I'll let Vicki tell you about this approach:

The Modern Gothic Novel

By Vicki Delany

Sept 2012

Mention Gothic novels to ten people and you’ll get eleven different interpretations of what that means.

About all we seem to agree on is that it doesn’t mean a cozy or a comedy.

In the mid-to-late Twentieth Century the Gothic novel was the sort written by the likes of Victoria Holt or Mary Stewart that I grew up loving. Think of penniless governesses, crumbling Scottish castles, brooding, handsome aristocrats.  A dark secret in the family’s past. Always a dark secret.

Today the Gothic has been updated and the novels I love are sometimes called Modern Gothic, or British Gothic.

First, what they are NOT: No vampires.  No ghost hunters. Not horror. And probably not anyone you might call ‘goth’.

I go with Kate Morton’s definition.  In the afterword to her hugely successful novel The House at Riverton, Kate Morton describes the Gothic:  The haunting of the present by the past; the insistence of family secrets; return of the repressed; the centrality of inheritance (material, psychological and physical); haunted houses (particularly haunting of a metaphorical nature); suspicion concerning new technology and changing methods; the entrapment of women (whether physical or social) and associated claustrophobia; character doubling; the unreliability of memory and the partial nature of history; mysteries and the unseen; confessional narrative; and embedded texts. 

The Modern Gothic can be a ‘dark mystery’ but usually only in the psychological sense.  Michael Koryta calls his brilliant novel So Cold The River a Gothic and it is because it involves many of Morton’s definitions, but in it the paranormal presence is malevolent.  That is defiantly not always, in fact not usually, the case. 

 “Haunting of a metaphorical nature.” The modern Gothic may not even have a ghost story or paranormal aspect.  If there is a supernatural element it serves as a device to reveal the secrets of the past to the characters and the reader. 

  Kate Morton’s books, for example, have no paranormal elements.   In many books the suspected paranormal turns out to have a rational explanation after all, as in Carol Goodman’s Arcadia Falls.   In Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison the protagonist is ‘haunted’ not by a ghost but by the story of a woman who lived in his new house sixty years early and was accused of a dreadful crime, a crime that had to do with ‘the entrapment of women’.   If there is a paranormal element it is more likely to be benign or even helpful as in, for example, Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane , rather than dripping evil.

Sometimes, that’s the question.  In my new novel More than Sorrow the protagonist, Hannah Manning, believes there’s something moving down in the dark damp root cellar. But Hannah is recovering from Traumatic Brain Injury caused by an IED explosion in Afghanistan.  So, both the reader and Hannah wonder, is there really a woman down there, or is she only the hallucinations of an injured mind?

 Which would be worse?

Contrary to popular opinion, Gothic doesn’t automatically mean romantic suspense. Romance is often a minor component, if there’s any at all, (e.g. The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton or Blood Harvest by S.J. Bolton.)  (Whereas in a Gothic romantic suspense novel, such as written by Susanna Kearsley, the romance is up front and prominent.)

The modern Gothic mystery novel can also be called a ‘psychological suspense’.  What defines it as ‘gothic’ I think is the centrality of setting. There is a house, a hotel, some old building with a long past, and most of the plot centres around and takes place in this building or property.  E.g. Michael Kortya again in The Cypress House .  Tana French’s The Likeness is set almost exclusively in crumbling Irish manor house and has very much to do with the “unreliability of memory” yet there is not the slightest hint of a paranormal element or romance.

Do you love the modern Gothic, or remember much loved books from the past? Why not share some names with us.

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Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most varied and prolific crime writers.  Her popular Constable Molly Smith series (including In the Shadow of the Glacier and Among the Departed) have been optioned for TV by Brightlight Pictures.  She also writes standalone novels of psychological suspense, as well as a light-hearted historical series, (Gold Digger, Gold Mountain), set in the raucous heyday of the Klondike Gold Rush.  

Vicki’s newest book is More than Sorrow, a standalone novel published by Poisoned Pen Press.  In a starred review, Library Journal called the book, “a splendid Gothic thriller.”

Having taken early retirement from her job as a systems analyst in the high-pressure financial world, Vicki is settling down to the rural life in bucolic, Prince Edward County, Ontario where she rarely wears a watch.

Visit Vicki at www.vickidelany.com , www.facebook.com/vicki.delany, and twitter: @vickidelany. She blogs about the writing life at One Woman Crime Wave (http://klondikeandtrafalgar.blogspot.com)