New Mysteries to Add to Your Holiday Reading

'Tis the season to stock up on mystery novels for vacation reading. Here are a few highlights of my shopping list for anyone planning to cozy up with a good read for the holidays. At the top of my agenda is the best seller The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. The story is set in 1922 London, still reeling from World War I, where an impoverished widow and her spinster daughter live alone in their genteel villa and have been forced to take in lodgers. The arrival of a modern young tenant couple of the “clerk class,” disturbs their lives unexpectedly and profoundly, including a steamy lesbian love affair and a shocking murder. The tale has garnered reviews such as “a tour de force” from The Wall Street Journal, “unputdownable” from The Washington Post and “volcanically sexy, sizzingly smart, plenty bloody and just plain irresistible" from USA Today. Meanwhile, why not try out some debut authors to refresh the genre? For example, Shovel Ready, a debut novel from New York Times Magazine culture editor Adam Sternbergh, is set in a near-future New York City after the explosion of a dirty bomb has driven all but the very rich and very poor out of the city. It's the perfect dystopian hunting ground for the cynical Spademan, a New Jersey garbageman turned hit man (turned anti-hero). In contrast, M.P. Cooley's Ice Shear is a debut with a conventional small-town setting, but her single-mom cop is a refreshing change from hard-boiled bachelor/bachelorette detectives. June Lyons is a former FBI agent who left the Bureau to care for a terminally ill husband. Three years after her husband's death, Lyons is a cop in her upstate New York hometown, where she and her daughter live with her father, the retired local police chief. When Lyons finds a body impaled on Hudson River ice, a body that turns out to be the daughter of a local congresswoman, the political implications bring in the FBI--and Lyons' past with agents who doubt her abilities. Likable mom Lyons soon proves she's tough enough to handle an investigation loaded with surprise twists and gory deaths. No one does mysteries quite like the British, of course. So check out Precious Thing, a debut novel by Colette McBeth, a former BBC crime reporter. The story centers on Rachel and Clara, who met in high school when Rachel was the shy, awkward new girl and beautiful Clara was the popular one. The two disparate teens formed a deep bond that helped Rachel survive her mother’s alcoholism and school bullies. They lost touch after high school, but they've reconnected in their late twenties--only now Rachel is a television journalist with an apartment and a boyfriend and Clara’s life is the one spiraling out of control. When Rachel’s news editor assigns her to cover a police press conference, she is shocked to learn that Clara has been reported missing. Is it abduction, suicide or something else? McBeth's tale twists around stalkers, secrets, betrayals and CCTV images. To add more to your new-mystery reading list, take a look at the 2015 Edgar Award submissions (not to be confused with nominations or finalists) and then check out relevant reviews: http://mysterywriters.org/edgars/currentsubmissions/#novel

Foreshadowing: A Key Mystery Writing Tool

Foreshadowing is an important literary technique in all fiction, but it is especially useful in mystery writing. Foreshadowing hints at events to come and piques reader interest. It can create a mood of foreboding and dread, build suspense by aligning details to make the reader anticipate a climax, and advance the plot by linking present to future or past events and by planting clues that will be significant later. Foreshadowing can also be used to deliberately mislead the reader to create a surprise solution or culmination. Here are some foreshadowing examples: 1) the pre-scene anticipating a more spectacular scene (brief turbulence for an airplane flying into big trouble); 2) the unsubtle warning ("The weather was going to be bad, but he didn't know how bad."); 3) the irrational concern (Where's that misplaced letter opener? With the killer, of course.); 4) the unexplained apprehension (Why is he so nervous?); 5) the blunt narrator statement ("It was the last time he would see her."); 6) the ominous object (or "Chekhov's gun" after the Russian playwright's use of a seemingly irrelevant loaded gun to foreshadow events); 7) a character's opinion ("I think he's hiding something," said the detective.); 8) premonition or prophecy (when that creepy fortune-teller sees danger ahead); 9) symbolism (storm clouds on the horizon and a dead bird on the porch); 10) the red herring (a favorite device in Sherlock Holmes stories to misdirect reader suspicion); and 11) the flash-forward or flash-back (a jump in the timeline that builds suspense because the complete context and connection are unclear). For a useful article covering many of the examples above, go to http://www.novel-writing-help.com/examples-of-foreshadowing.html

Mystery Chills Can Be One of Halloween's Treats

Halloween, today's candy-fueled fest of costumed self-expression and safely self-inflicted shudders, has become a retail bonanza. But despite commercial hype, from costumes for dogs to excessively ghoulish decoration, the real human fears underlying the celebration's melange of Celtic and Christian traditions seep through. In earlier European society, Halloween reminded that harvest warmth would soon yield to the specter of icy hunger, that it was a small step from laughing children to silent graves, that there were dark forces untamed by prayer. In festive disguise, we still acknowledge the thin mental veil between living and dead, good and evil, safe daylight and stirrings in the dark. That's why Halloween, although it is more associated with the horror genre, is a great time to curl up in a warm, cozy place to read a mystery. A good mystery, like Halloween, allows us to unmask and conquer the monsters and ghosts that haunt us. To quote Emily Dickinson: "One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place." Of course, I would recommend my own book, Lies Agreed Upon, but for a list of especially Halloween-themed mysteries, check out http://www.cozy-mystery.com/Holiday-Mystery-Books/Halloween-Mystery-Book-List.html

Solving the Mystery of the Mystery Reader

As an avid mystery fan, and now the author of a mystery novel, I'm naturally curious about the profile of the average mystery reader. In 2011, Sisters in Crime, an organization for advancement of women crime writers, released its first survey of buyers of mystery books, based on data gathered by Bowker's PubTrack sales analysis division. It turns out that my fellow mystery readers look a lot like me in some ways: female (68%) and over age 55 (48%). They are also more likely to be Southerners (35%), to live in suburban areas (48%), and to have no children at home (77%). However, I depart from the norm when it comes to purchase behavior by embracing the digital age, making both print and e-book buys while shopping in book stores and online. In contrast, most mystery readers prefer retail stores (39%) over online (17%). And while 90% reported knowing about e-books, only 13% had read one (mostly those who were under age 30).  So how do I attract more mystery buyers to my online-only book distribution? Leading purchase drivers such as "well-known author" and "book series" aren't helpful, but one top-ranked purchase influencer is within reach: recommendations from friends and relatives, as well as other readers. So keep posting Amazon, Kindle and Goodreads reviews -- and talk it up, guys! For the full report, go to http://www.sistersincrime.org/associations/10614/files/ConsumerBuyingBookReport.pdf

A Basic Inspiration for Lies Agreed Upon

People have asked me what gave me the idea for the story of Lies Agreed Upon and why I chose a New Orleans setting. Like Tess, the main character in Lies Agreed Upon, I first encountered New Orleans as a tourist. In my visits to the city, I loved its historic architecture, its culture and, of course, its rich culinary heritage. But I chose New Orleans as the setting for a mystery about an inheritance and a family feud because of a real event in my own family. My maternal grandparents came from Louisiana, but I knew little about them except that they had once been well-to-do landowners and businesspeople. One day my mother and her siblings, who had grown up in very modest circumstances in Texas, were surprised to learn of inherited land near New Orleans. A legal dispute over ownership ensued between my mother's family and relatives still living in Louisiana. Eventually, the Louisiana courts ruled that the property belonged to all descendants of the original owner: a Spanish immigrant who arrived in Louisiana in 1838, like Antonio Cabrera in the novel. None of his many heirs benefited from the disputed property as far as I know. The life stories of the real people in my maternal family tree bear no resemblance to the events in my novel, but the surprise inheritance, its hidden history and its family feud inspired my mystery tale. For more detail, see my website at www.authorkatherinesharma.com.