Romance—Suspense—Mystery

I create stories full of romance, suspense, and mystery. Seasoned romance where love has no age limit. Stories that prove second chances can happen, enemies can become friends, and friends can become lovers. Stories that show no two happy endings are the same. And at the core of every story is love.

At First Sight (Global Security Unlimited 1)

Coming October 22, 2021

Ebook preorders available now

Newsletters will be monthly, with an occasional special edition.

Meet the Author

For much of my life, I was a heavy consumer of mysteries. Even though I write romance, I like to add mystery and suspense to my books. Why am I a mystery devotee? Read on. (This was originally featured in the July edition of the Chicagoland Sisters in Crime Newsletter.)

1) What do you like about mysteries? 

I like traditional mysteries where the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. No ambiguity for me. Psychological mysteries are definitely not in my wheelhouse. While I love Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford books, I can’t read her Barbara Vine mysteries. I don’t like too much blood and gore. And for the most part, I want interesting characters, interesting settings, and clever puzzles. If I can figure out who the murderer is by the middle of the book, there better be something else interesting or I’m done. However, there is another, more intangible hook for me.

While I read Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Beverly Gray, and all those other YA mysteries when I was young, my real introduction to the genre was Agatha Christie when I was about ten. I found a paperback version of Murder at Hazelmoor and I was hooked. In fact, Christie’s novels made me want to not only live in England, but be English. That dream died hard but I have finally come to the realization that I will never be English and I should just be happy with my Central and Eastern European ancestry. When I discovered Dorothy Sayers, I crushed hard on Lord Peter. Rare books, bell ringing, and a manservant named Bunter. What’s not to love.

Later I expanded geographically to Venice and Sicily, Brunetti and Montalbano. I was even in Ragusa while an episode of Montalbano was being filmed. I fell in love with academic mysteries even before I became an academic. But English mysteries are the ones that pull me in.

As a young reader I gravitated to all the Golden Age mysteries, primarily British but some American authors too. My teenage years were filled with Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, Margery Allingham, Rex Stout, and Nicholas Blake among others. How exciting to find out that Edmund Crispin, author of the Gervase Fen books was, in his other life, the composer Bruce Montgomery. I couldn’t resist a book with a title like The Case of the Gilded Fly. What reader’s heart didn’t beat a bit faster when Ellery Queen’s famous challenge came up. So for me it was the setting, the puzzle, the sleuths. I felt like a winner every time I guessed the murderer before the reveal. But if an author really wants to hook me with a mystery, set it in England and make it a puzzle.

2) If you could have dinner with 3 writers, living or dead, who would they be?

Unfortunately, I need four. Two are queens of crime, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. I would want to talk to Christie about her experiences at archeological digs in the Middle East as well as what it was like to stay at the Pera Palace in Istanbul. I’ve read a lot about how she wrote her mysteries but I might still have a few questions about those and why she wrote the Mary Westmacott books under a pseudonym. Sayers is of interest partly because of her scholarly endeavors in translating medieval literature and her career in advertising. Of course Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane would be on the docket as well. How would she have liked Ian Carmichael and Edward Petherbridge’s portrayals. And The Documents in the Case, what a tour de force that was. We’d definitely have to talk about that.

For the not mystery writers, my choices are Dorothy Dunnett (who had plenty of mystery strewn through her historical novels) and Deborah Harkness. To me, Dunnett was the best writer of historical fiction and I would love to talk to her about her school days with Muriel Spark, her portrait painting, sailing, favorite scotch, and how she came up with her Johnson Johnson plots, as well as the whole fifteenth-century world of The House of Niccolò.

Deborah Harkness is the only living author in the group. Because we are both historians and work in adjacent time periods, once I finally read her All Soul’s Trilogy, I went from skeptical (witches and vampires, not so much), to obsessed with the world she created. Fortunately the relationships trump the paranormal. As a late medieval historian, the first paragraph of A Discovery of Witches hooked me and I never looked back. Then I watched the television series and became a serious Matthew Goode fan.

“The leather-bound volume was nothing remarkable. To an ordinary historian, it would have looked no different from hundreds of other manuscripts in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, ancient and worn. But I knew there was something odd about it from the moment I collected it.”

Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches, page 1

3) And what local restaurant would you take them to? 

I don’t know how well sushi would go over, so I think Monteverde. I loved the meal I had there a few years ago. Of course the other choice would be an authentic Chicago Hot Dog, fluorescent green relish and all, maybe at the Vienna Factory.

4) What are your favorite types of mysteries (cozy, thriller, etc.)? 

I read cozies and police procedurals.  Some favorites at the moment are Ellery Adams, Ann Cleeves, Jane Cleland, and Donna Leon. Murder at the Mena House is on my Kindle.

5) What TV shows/movies in that subgenre do you recommend? 

Back in the day, Masterpiece Mystery was a constant. I can always watch Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. As a recent subscriber, I was excited to see that “Waking the Dead” is on BritBox as is “DCI Banks.” I’ve watched a couple of seasons of  “Vera” and “Grantchester.” I read the Grantchester books and loved the fact that James Runcie based the main character on his father, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. “Midsomer Murders” used to be a real favorite as was “Pie in Sky.” These days I don’t watch much TV—mostly hockey and The Wine Show.

6)    What’s one thing that we forgot to ask you?

How many cats do you have? Two. Sybil and Nico appear in my forthcoming book, At First Sight, as Dorothy and Thorfinn. And I can’t tell you how many times I had to do a search and replace because I typed the wrong names.