Happy April!
No April Fool's jokes here. I'm too tired. We're right in the middle of a very busy lambing season and as I write this I've been up since two a.m. I've just gotten one of our ewes settled with her twins and am waiting on another one who is about to deliver her lambs. Whew. Lambing season is fun . . . and exhausting.
I'm also working very hard on the third, as yet untitled Maggie D'arcy mystery and looking forward to signs of spring here in Vermont. We are supposed to have a couple of days of cold weather and then, perhaps, we can bid winter adieu.
I have one piece of very exciting news this month, which is that The Mountains Wild has been nominated for the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, given by the International Association of Crime Writers/North America. The other nominated authors are all crime writers who I greatly admire and I am delighted to be in such great company. You can read more about them and the award here. Thank you to everyone who has read and shared Maggie's first adventure. It means so much.
The first reviews for A Distant Grave, out June 22, are starting to roll in and I'm happy to say we got a very nice one from Kirkus Reviews, which proclaimed that, "Taylor pulls out all the stops—subplots, threats, red herrings, warning bells—to keep the pot boiling till the end." You can preorder it here, in all its forms. Thank you! Preorders make a huge difference to the success of a book!
Boiling pots lead me to my recipe for the month. One of my favorite dishes for this time of year is avgolemono, a Greek chicken soup fortified with egg yolks and brightened up with lemon and rice. It feels like the perfect soup for this in-between season, hearty and warming for the cold days and lemony and hopeful for the sunny ones. It also uses up the glut of eggs our chickens produce as the days get longer. I've been making it a lot lately. Here's a good version from Food and Wine.
In the next newsletter, I'll hopefully have more reviews to share and also a giveaway!
I hope you and yours are well and safe. Things are starting to feel a bit more hopeful, with vaccinations rolling out and more on the horizon, though I know many of us are struggling too. I am sending a virtual hug out to you. Here's hoping that spring comes quickly for all of us.
Sarah
