cozy mystery | Chelsey M. Ortega

New Release: Railroad Ties: the Marmion Grove Murders by M.S. Spencer

I would like to introduce M.S. Spencer to you. She has had a long academic and writing career, and would like to share her latest release with you, which came out yesterday.

Thank you so much for having me today! I’d like to introduce you to the setting of my new mystery, which happens to be my hometown!

Railroad Ties: the Marmion Grove Murders, is the only one of my novels set in my home town and in the house I grew up in. Marmion Grove is modeled after a town near Washington DC. Founded in 1891 next to the B&O railroad line, it was developed as a getaway for DC dwellers during the hot and humid summers. Filled with hundred-year-old trees, including the majestic swamp magnolias, there are no sidewalks and no through streets. Fifty-four houses, including mine, are on the National Register of Historic Places. The town is peopled by a quirky assortment of academics, scientists, and eccentrics. Writing Railroad Ties reminded me of what a great place to live.

Another autobiographical detail is my heroine Sophie Childress’s involvement with the Vassar Book Sale. Now closed down, for forty years it was one of the largest and most successful used book sales in the country, raking in an average of $100,000 for scholarships. The sale lasted a week, but preparations, including book pricing, had to be done year-round. She follows in my footsteps to learn rare book evaluation—which leads her into the mystery.

Librarian, anthropologist, research assistant, Congressional aide, speechwriter, nonprofit director—M. S. Spencer has lived or traveled in five of the seven continents and holds degrees in Anthropology, Middle East Studies, and Library Science. She has published eighteen mystery or romantic suspense novels, and divides her time between the Gulf Coast of Florida and a tiny village in Maine. Follow M.S. Spencer on her blog: https://msspencertalespinner.blogspot.com

When Sophie Childress discovers a letter written in 1920 by the witness to a murder, she enlists Noah Pennyman—owner of the house where it took place—to investigate. Who was the victim? What did the killer do with the body—not to mention a carpetbag full of money? Together they expose a complex web of family ties and lies that has persisted through four generations in the historic village of Marmion Grove. When two more corpses are unearthed, Noah and Sophie are faced with too many victims and not enough murderers.

Excerpt: Sophie and Noah Meet

She parked at the curb, where a hedge of yellow forsythia marked the property line. The front lawn led up to a porch completely engulfed in a reticulated wisteria vine as thick and complex as fine lacework. Halfway up reared an ancient tree, its knobbed and serrated trunk perhaps five feet in diameter. The pendulous branches were the size of fully grown trees and were only kept from falling by a steel chain wrapped around them. Its broad leaves were gigantic. They must be almost two feet long!

As she sat gawking, a pleasant male voice said, “It’s a swamp magnolia. At least a hundred and fifty years old.”

Startled, she knocked her knee on the steering wheel. “Ouch!”

A young man came around the car and peered in her window. “Are you all right?”

She looked up into cornflower blue eyes partially obscured by a shrubbery of sandy hair. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just… I’ve never seen such big leaves before.”

“We used to use them as dinner plates, but they’re a bitch to wash.” He leaned in. “May I help you?”

She left off gazing at him and shook herself. “Oh. Oh, yes. Is this”—she checked Connie’s directions—“Peveril Hall?”

“It is indeed.”

“Do you live here? I’m supposed to collect a load of books for the Vassar Book Sale.”

“Ah. No. I mean, no, I don’t live here. Anymore. I used to. I grew up here, but I’ve been away a long time.”

“Then you can’t help me?”

“Huh? No! I mean, yes, I can help you. This is my house.”

“But you just said…”

He pointed to his left. “Head on up the driveway there. I’ll meet you out back.” And he loped off across the grass.

Okey doke. Sophie followed a lane along the side of the house to a gravel lot fronting a two-story garage. The backyard was dotted with small buildings. She got out and scanned the area. A small octagonal hut stood near a stately sycamore. Next to it crouched a one-room shanty with a chimney. That must be the servants’ quarters. She looked up at the garage. A huge hook painted green was attached to the wall just under the gable. “I wonder what that’s for.”

Just then the young man came around the corner of the house. “Hey there. I’m Noah, by the way. Noah Pennyman. My mother was the Vassar grad. And you are?”

She took a moment to admire his mobile, angular features. He seemed always on the verge of speaking…or maybe singing. The shock of blond hair fell negligently across his brow. When he shook her hand, a very masculine aroma of citrus and spice enveloped her. She suppressed the urge to inhale. “Sophie Childress. I’m from the—”

“Vassar Book Sale. So you said.” He reached out and flicked her hair. “Nice French braid. I never could figure out how it’s done. Come on inside.”

Railroad Ties is available at Books2Read, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple/IBooks, Goodreads, and Bookbub.

New Release: A Sour Note by Jill Piscitello

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Chelsey M. Ortega

When murder provides a welcome distraction…

On the heels of a public, broken engagement, Maeve Cleary returns to her childhood home in Hampton Beach, NH. When a dead body turns up behind her mother’s music school, three old friends land on the suspect list. Licking her wounds soon takes a back seat to outrunning the paparazzi who spin into a frenzy, casting her in a cloud of suspicion. Maeve juggles her high school sweetheart, a cousin with a touch of clairvoyance, a no-nonsense detective, and an apologetic, two-timing ex-fiancé. Will the negative publicity impact business at the Music Box— the very place she’d hoped to make a fresh start?

What inspired your story?

I wanted to write a mystery for quite some time but always veered into sweet romance territory. The summer of 2019, I was strolling along the beach in Hampton, NH when the idea to drop my next book into that setting took shape. The idea snowballed into the realization that a cozy mystery could include elements of sweet romance while staying true to the cozy mystery genre. My hope was for readers to enjoy following the trials and tribulations of a relatable character as she navigates a new path while managing a variety of family dynamics and extracting herself from a limelight she never planned on stepping into.

Give us a brief look at your writing process. Are you a plotter or pantser? How much time did you spend on this project? What is your writing schedule like?

I begin each manuscript as a pantser but eventually make periodic stops to draft and update an outline. I spent a few years writing and editing A Sour Note. The summer of 2020 limited social activities, so that allowed for more time for writing. I am also a teacher and am limited to nights and weekends during the school year.

Enjoy an excerpt of A Sour Note:

With his mouth set in a grim line, he waited.

If anyone else had enough nerve to presume she owed them an explanation, she would respond with a solid mind your own business. Instead, the seventeen-year-old still inside her refused to tell him to get lost. “He was hiding money in his office.” This was one of those times when learning how to wait a few beats before blurting out inflammatory information would come in handy. Each second of passing silence decreased her ability to breathe in the confined space. She turned the ignition and switched on the air conditioner.

“How do you know?” His volume just above a whisper, each dragged-out word hung in the air.

“I found it.”

“When were you in his office?” He swiped at a bead of sweat trickling down the side of his face, then positioned a vent toward him.

“Last night.” When would she learn to bite her tongue? Finn’s switch from rapid-fire scolding to slow, deliberate questioning left her unable to swallow over the sandpaper lump in her throat.

“Where was Vic?”

She stared at the back of the building, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. “He’d left for the night.” If she averted her gaze, she could pretend his eyeballs weren’t bugging out of his head, and his jaw didn’t need a crane to haul it off his chest.

“You were at the town hall after hours? Did anyone see you?”

“A custodian opened his door for me.” She snuck a glance. Sure enough, features contorted in shock and horror replaced his boy-next-door good looks.

A Sour Note can be purchased at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Jill Piscitello is a teacher, author, and an avid fan of multiple literary genres. Although she divides her reading hours among several books at a time, a lighthearted story offering an escape from the real world can always be found on her nightstand.

A native of New England, Jill lives with her family and three well-loved cats. When not planning lessons or reading and writing, she can be found spending time with her family, trying out new restaurants, traveling, and going on light hikes.

Follow Jill at her website: https://jillpiscitello.com/

Meet the Characters of the Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series

Posted on June 30, 2023 by Chelsey M. Ortega

If you enjoy cozy mysteries, you might have seen these skeletons floating around the internet:

Shortly after the second book, Death by Pins and Needles was released, it became apparent that the cover skeleton needed a name. Ms. Black put the naming in the hands of the readers and set up a contest. The winning name got a free digital copy of Death by Pins and Needles.

As you can see by the cover for the third book, Death by Surfboard, Susie now has a male skeleton that needed a name. She created another contest with the same prize. Well, I helped name the male skeleton (Susie will be sharing the details of these two contests down below), and I got a free copy of Death by Surfboard!

So, here is my review of Death by Surfboard:

Holly is a swimwear executive, and she has a new colleague who she does not trust. She tried to warn her boss about him, but she got shooed out of his office instead. Well, quickly into this new hire Holly is proved right. And who does her boss assign to clean up terrible-colleague’s mess? Holly, of course!

Lucky for Holly, and unlucky for terrible-colleague, his body is found on the beach, attached to his surfboard. But the issue is not over for Holly because the detective, who also happens to be Holly’s friend, accuses not one, but two innocent suspects. So, Holly, being the nosy do-gooder that she is, can’t just sit back and let the detective figure things out. She then spends page after page doing crazy things that risk her job and her life on her quest to discover the real murderer.

This is my first time reading a cozy mystery, and I’m in love. Even though it’s the third book in the Holly Swimsuit series, I was able to jump in and figure out who everyone is and the layout of Holly’s world. Holly reminds me of a grown-up Hanna Marin (Pretty Little Liars): fashion forward, blunt, and she can’t pass up an opportunity to solve a mystery. I thought it was a great challenge for the victim to be such an unlikeable character. I mean, the reader is made to feel he deserves what he got, so why try to solve his murder? Because the two suspects the police are looking at Holly knows are innocent. So, it becomes less about justice for the victim and more about protecting the innocent from being framed. I was determined to figure it out before Holly did, and I’m proud to say, I was half right. I’ll definitely be reading the first two in the near future.

Reading a series out of order is not new for me. I do it all the time. So, I have teamed up with Susie Black herself to introduce the recurring characters of the Holly Swimsuit Mystery series. That way, no matter where you start in her books, you will know who is who.

Hello, please allow me to introduce myself. I am Susie Black, author of The Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series. I’ve been asked to share what entails writing cozy mystery series.

As a sales exec, I am a people person. So, naturally, my primary focus is on character development. Once the characters are created, the plot easily falls into place because it reacts to the characters in the story, not the other way around. I chose to write my stories as part of a series, but because I like to give options, each book can be read on its own out of order without the reader getting lost. Pretty cool, huh? So, how in the world did I accomplish this? By making references to the background of the story setting and the main characters. I make each plot, the murder method, the victim, the murderer, and the minor characters different in each tale. But I anchor the continuing main characters with consistent and distinct histories, personalities, and quirks that readers invest in and root for because they appear real.

Here are some of the important continuing main characters who appear in every book and a bit about them:

HOLLY SCHLIVNIK: Wise-cracking, irreverent Holly is the protagonist of the series who is patterned after yours truly…Holly is the me I always wanted to be. Loyal to a fault and fearless, Holly is a ladies’ swimwear sales exec/nosy amateur sleuth who can’t mind her beeswax and sticks her nose everywhere it doesn’t belong. Holly has a quirky personality trait. She inherited her nana’s fear of death. They both respond to death by laughing. And Holly does when she discovers a corpse. Holly is famous for this quirk and all her friends ask if she laughed whenever she has discovered a corpse. Holly’s pet phrases to describe her feelings are Yikes, Cripes, Holy Guacamole, and Merde.

QUEENIE LEVINE: A compact dynamo equipped with a razor-sharp wit and sharper tongue, Queenie is Holly’s close friend and professional colleague…and her erstwhile crime-solving sidekick. Queenie has a distinctive habit of pushing her index finger up on the tip of her nose whenever she’s thinking out loud. When trying to flesh out the murderer, Queenie is always the one who asks “Who has the most to lose?”

JOAN BINDER: Quick-witted, sarcastic Joan is the oldest of the Yentas- four of Holly’s colleagues she meets with for coffee every workday morning at a coffee shop in the California Apparel Mart lobby to kibbitz and compare notes and opinions. Joan has a habit of looking over her eyeglasses perched on the tip of her nose in her “kindergarten teacher” disapproving pose whenever she delivers one of her acerbic zingers.

Dr. Sophie Cutler: Los Angeles County Assistant Medical Examiner Sophie Cutler is Holly Schlivnik’s lifelong friend and not your typical Coroner. For a medical doctor, “Snip,” as Holly calls Sophie, has atrocious eating habits. She is a pizza and cheeseburger lover as well as a desertaholic. Sophie refuses to share any of her cheesecake and is known to use a fork as a weapon to fight off Holly’s attempts to swipe a bite.

Smart Alec Snip has caller ID on her phone. When Sophie sees it is Holly calling, irreverent Snip answers the phone with hilarious greetings: such as “Good afternoon. This is Los Angeles County Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Sophie Cutler. You stab ‘em we slab ‘em.”

Sigmund Freud AKA Siggie: Introduced in book three of the series, lovable, nosy Siggie is Holly’s male standard-size Poodle/assistant sleuth, and Psychiatrist. Holly discusses everything with Siggie-her love life, her friends, how to deal with pain-in-the-patootie customers, as well as viable options to flesh out a killer with her four-legged companion. Siggie might not speak but he gets his points across just the same. If he likes Holly’s game plan, he barks his approval. He shows his disdain for some of Holly’s crazier sleuthing ploys by rolling his eyes or shaking his head from side to side.

The book cover Skeleton: Whodathunk that a skeleton wearing a swimsuit would ever garner such a huge amount of attention? I’ve had countless numbers of readers tell me they found the book cover with the skeleton so intriguing; they bought the book to see what kind of story was inside! The skeleton on every book cover was so popular it took on a life of its own and became the face of The Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series brand and became a successful marketing ploy.

Before the release of Death by Pins and Needles, the skeleton demanded she is given a name so I ran a contest to name the female skeleton and was inundated with hundreds of entries. So many great names were submitted that I ended up using several of them as a first name, middle name, and surname: Mizz Bone-ita Skelemina Bonz.

Before the release of Death by Surfboard, Mizz Bonz informed me she had a boyfriend and insisted he needed a name. So, to make our girl happy a second contest was launched and her boyfriend is now known as Mitzer Skeltor Bone-Jangles. Writing a standalone book requires a goodly amount of character development and plot planning. Writing a series requires the same. But by having a cast of long-term continuing characters an author must create one with distinctive histories, personalities, and quirks for them to keep readers interested enough so the series successfully continues.

The series continues in Holly’s next adventure, Death by Cutting Table, which publishes August 2, 2023.

Follow Susie Black and her journey at https://authorsusieblack.com/

New Release: Death by Surfboard by Susie Black

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Chelsey M. Ortega

Susie Black’s complimentary Swimwear Fit Guide will certainly come in handy with summer just around the corner. Click the link at the bottom to grab your copy!

Death by Surfboard is the third book in The Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series. The submitted manuscript took me about five months to complete. Set in the competitive Los Angeles apparel industry, Death by Surfboard is the story of how one man’s life of lies, delivered by smoke and mirrors, cost him everything. No one is more stunned than Mermaid Swimwear sales exec Holly Schlivnik when a fisherman hooks her unscrupulous colleague’s battered corpse attached to a surfboard and hauls it onto the Washington Street Pier. The ME ruled Jack Tyne drowned, but “had help dying”, and Holly’s boss is wrongly arrested for the crime. To save the big cheese from a life behind bars, the wise-cracking, irreverent amateur detective dons her sleuthing hat to find Jack’s real killer. But the trail has more twists and turns than a pretzel, and nothing turns out the way Holly thinks it will as she tangles with a clever killer hellbent for revenge.

Like the protagonist in my Holly Swimsuit Mystery series, I am a ladies’ swimwear sales exec. From the beginning of my career, I have kept a daily journal that chronicles the quirky, interesting, and often challenging people I’ve encountered as well as the crazy situations I’ve gotten myself into and out of. The journal entries are the foundation of all my writing. The most critically important skill a sales exec must have to succeed is to be a good storyteller. Fortunately, I’ve been telling stories since I learned how to talk. Since I’d never written a novel before, the only thing I knew to do was to apply the same story-telling skills I’d successfully used hawking bikinis to writing a tale. Lucky for me, both types of stories require the same construction: A beginning, a middle, an ending, and most important of all…a point of view. So, it turns out that showing a line of swimsuits is no different than plotting a manuscript. Both need some planning, but there is a need for flexibility. So, I am neither a planner nor a pantser. I am in between. I plan the beginning and the ending, but I allow my characters to take the storyline from the middle to the end. Of course, the characters know they must not monkey with the ending I’ve devised. Generally, they behave…or face being written out of the story or worse…killed off.

One thing I’d been told over and over as a sales exec was to know your product inside and out. I heard the same thing when I started writing cozy mysteries: write what you know. If you don’t know it, either do the research and learn it or don’t dare to write it. Whether you’re an author or a sales exec, you’re selling yourself, and readers, like buyers, can sniff out a phony in a heartbeat, and then you and your story are toast. So, where did my story ideas come from? I paid attention to the mantra. Write what you know. With a dollop of imagination, a pinch of angst, and a decades-long career chocked to the gills with juicy characters, I had more stories in my daily journal than time to write them.

I don’t have a set writing schedule. I write when my creative juices start flowing. I sometimes write for four hours straight and other times only for an hour. Since I am a night owl, I rarely write in the morning. I came to write in the cozy mystery genre because I love solving puzzles. My parents would certainly confirm I have always asked a lot of questions, and I am naturally curious (some narrow-minded people say I am nosy…go figure…LOL). So, writing mysteries was the natural next step for me to take. Who could push a sales exec to dream of murder and mayhem? Who else but a pain in the patootie buyer or an unscrupulous colleague? After concluding a rather challenging conversation with a co-worker whose ill-conceived actions had put both me and our company in a precariously dangerous position with our biggest customer, I silently wished him a slow and painful death as I imagined how good it would feel with my hands around his scrawny neck, squeezing the life out of him. While the notion of knocking off a colleague whose carelessness threatened to destroy the company we worked at was wildly appealing, a horizontally striped prison uniform would make my petite body look like it was the product of a barbershop pole and a fire hydrant having a child. The viable alternative? Writing humorous murder mysteries set in the Los Angeles garment center. Brilliant and cathartic! In one fell swoop, eliminate a pain-in-the-patootie colleague, avoid life in prison, and still get the order. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Named Best US Author of the Year by N. N. Lights Book Heaven, award-winning cozy mystery author Susie Black was born in the Big Apple but now calls sunny Southern California home. Like the protagonist in her Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series, Susie is a successful apparel sales executive. Susie began telling stories as soon as she learned to talk. Now she’s telling all the stories from her garment industry experiences in humorous mysteries.

She reads, writes, and speaks Spanish, albeit with an accent that sounds like Mildred from Michigan went on a Mexican vacation and is trying to fit in with the locals. Since life without pizza and ice cream as her core food groups wouldn’t be worth living, she’s a dedicated walker to keep her girlish figure. A voracious reader, she’s also an avid stamp collector. Susie lives with a highly intelligent man and has one incredibly brainy but smart-aleck adult son who inexplicably blames his sarcasm on an inherited genetic defect.

Looking for more? Contact Susie at:

Website: www.authorsusieblack.com

E-mail: mysteries_@authorsusieblack.com

As a thank you for reading about Susie and her debut series, here is a free swim suit fit guide:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7lerp4cy1al2j0l/CHOOSING%20THE%20RIGHT%20%20SWIMSUIT.pdf?dl=0