New Release — Murder on Black Mountain (A Black Mountain Mystery Series) by Ruben D. Gonzales

Forced to return to her Appalachian mountain home to bury her big brother, Police Chief Early Shaw, Emma Shaw finds the circumstances of his death a mystery that no one wants to talk about. For centuries, the Shaw family has run the small town with an iron fist—and Emma learns fast it doesn’t pay to ask too many questions—even though she is one of their own.  The facts don’t add up, and Emma will get her answers, one way or the other—even though her questions have stirred up a hornet’s nest.

There’s one thing the Shaw family doesn’t know: Emma possesses a mystical ability to read the energy auras that surround most people, and she can tell a lot about a person by the qualities of those auras. If they’re lying, she knows.  Will that gift be enough to help her solve the case of Early’s murder?

As the list of suspects grows—along with her frustration—Emma grapples with untangling her mysterious past from the dangerous present. Under the shadow of Black Mountain, Emma confronts the town’s ruling family and the secrets they keep. Can she manage to stay alive long enough to learn who killed her brother? One thing she knows for sure—Early’s death was no accident. She’s determined to prove it was MURDER ON BLACK MOUNTAIN.

EXCERPT

Growing up in Black Mountain, you could count the things for kids to do on one hand. The boys played football on the mill team and the girls got to play softball. Some boys played on the high school team, while girls could play volleyball—although being on the short side, Coach told me to stick with softball. A few of the boys from the high school team got to play in college.

Mama worried she birthed a boy. The opportunities for a boy in Black Mountain didn’t amount to much unless you counted working third shift at the mill as a career move. Year before Early went to Black Mountain High, a boy named Todd McCoy went on to college because of football. A big old boy that played center on the team, and slow as a snail, but he earned a football scholarship.

Football took on a whole new meaning for Mama after hearing that. She figured it could be Early’s ticket out of there. She thought I’d marry young, since I’m smart, pretty, and all. She thought I’d marry someone well-off, so didn’t worry about me.

      

New Release— A Menacing Brew (A Kirkwood Clues Mystery) by Kate Fellowes

With the summer off, Amy is at loose ends.  Since her husband is busy with work and her son is at college, she reluctantly agrees to accompany her mom, Barbara, on a trip to visit an old college chum, Carl, who became a journalist.  Amy knows their long drive will be filled with too many of her mom’s stories about her personal Summer of Love, but she never expects they’ll find Carl dead in his basement practically the minute they arrive.  Things go from bad to worse when Barbara becomes the prime suspect in the crime, since she’ll inherit the dead man’s estate.

To clear Barbara’s name, she and Amy delve into Carl’s most recent assignment and discover a link to Kirkwood’s biggest employer, family-owned Stutger Brewery.  More than one skeleton lurks in the Stutger closet.  But are these old secrets still worth killing over? Or was Carl’s death motivated by an incident with more recent roots?

One thing’s for sure—Barbara and Amy are making few friends among locals with all their questions. As the brewery’s centennial celebration fast approaches, it’s time for Barbara and Amy to bring things to a head and unmask killers, past and present.

EXCERPT

     A crashing and banging came from the kitchen. Mom, moving around.

     "Didja find it?" she hollered. "I’ll bet a fuse blew, or a circuit tripped or somesuch."

     "I’ll bet," I muttered.

     Squeezing the flashlight, I headed down the shadowed hallway, like a modern-day gothic heroine, to find Mom.

     She wasn’t in the kitchen anymore.

     "Out here," she called from the enclosed back porch.

     "Would you please wait for me? If you wander around in the dark, you could fall and break something else," I said, joining her.

     "This must be the basement," she said, ignoring me to point at the dark open doorway leading into even more darkness. "Fuse box’ll be down there."

     I played the flashlight over the yawning pit and shuddered.

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WHEN A MYSTERY WRITER CAN’T FACE MURDER, by Mollie Hunt, Cat Writer

Bank Robber Aiming at Security Camera, Cleveland, Ohio, March 8, 1975, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play,”

Whether you write cozies, thrillers, police procedurals, or suspense, the plot of a mystery most often revolves around murder. Suspicious death is endlessly fascinating to our readers, and therefore to us as well. Grisly and graphic or gentle and off-stage, it’s people killing people that makes a good story. Right?

But what if murder suddenly comes too close to home? A while back I was working on a cozy mystery in which someone was murdered in a small, coastal town. Then it happened— a friend was killed near our beach house in Ocean Park Washington. Suddenly I couldn’t face the words I’d so callously scribbled on the page. Suddenly murder wasn’t fun anymore.

Thankfully I came out of it after some time and went on to write many more stories involving violent crime. But that experience taught me to be gentle. I will never know how my writing affects my readers. They may be suffering in ways I cannot guess. 

When my last mystery was published, I requested a review from a well-known reviewer. She was happy to comply, but she asked first if there were any references to suicide in my book. Her son had killed himself, and this was someplace she didn’t want to go, even in fiction. I was thankful she could be so candid about her trigger.

Recently more and more bloggers are posting “trigger warnings” at the top of their posts so people with various issues know before they read that the content may be disturbing. I love this. I’m reasonably tough when it comes to reading material, but I appreciate knowing if the post will contain anxiety, rape, violence, harming of animals, or such so I can make the choice whether I’m up to it or not.

I write both cozy mysteries and sci-fantasy. Either way, I want my stories to make people happy in spite of their morbid theme. In a cozy mystery, the crime is a puzzle for the reader to solve while enjoying interesting characters, attractive scenery, and a few mild chills along the way. In my cat sci-fantasy, I shake it up a bit, but I still wish to leave the reader with a sense of hope. Other writers write other stories for other readers. For example, Stephen King made his millions pushing the horror envelope. But no matter what you write, be thoughtful. I still see no excuse for killing the pet.

8 WORDS FOR MURDER, by Mollie Hunt

What mystery writer can avoid murder? Most mysteries involve at least one homicide and often more. Many more! But even if it’s only the one, you can bet that despicable act will be mentioned multiple times. How do we keep from repeating ad nauseam the simple word, murder?

Well, that is the question, isn’t it? The answer seems to be, We don’t. Though there are many synonyms for the act of taking someone’s life, using them in a quotable sentence seems to be another matter. When I perused the web for apt passages, I found very few variations on the standard murder-murdering-murdered murderer.

 

1. Killing: “Killing is not so easy as the innocent believe.”  -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2. Slay: “Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” -William Faulkner

3. Exterminate: “Exterminate!” the Daleks, Doctor Who

 

 

4. Extinguish: “Kill me? Lex Luthor? Extinguish the greatest criminal flame of our age? Eradicate the only man on Earth with Superman's address?” -Superman II

5. Slaughter: “I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it. I've done it before. It's no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it's all right. That's all. It's easy. You just slaughter them.”  -Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class

 
 

 

 

6. Deathwork : “If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.”  -Dean Koontz, Brother Odd

7. Dispatch: “And the company shall stone them with stones, and dispatch them with their swords; they shall slay their sons and their daughters, and burn up their houses with fire.” -The Bible, Ezekiel 23

8. Snuff: “First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.” -Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

 

 

 

 

 

So, fellow writers, let’s purge, butcher, and erase our victims; let’s off them, terminate them, take them out; let’s waste them and put them down. Whether homicide, manslaughter, or assassination, there are plenty of words to describe besides tiresome and overused murder.

 

 

 

Check out more blogs by Mollie Hunt at:

Mollie Hunt: Crazy Cat Lady Mysteries and more

 

Happy reading!