How much trouble can an American schoolteacher get into while on sabbatical in the Lake District of England? When the schoolteacher in question is Grace Hollister, and when ex-jewel thief Peter Fox is involved, the result may be disaster.

Verse of the Vampyre opens with Grace Hollister hiding in a graveyard, late at night, waiting for—well, spying on—Peter Fox, who’s to meet with a mysterious woman. (more…)

It’s a writing day for me. The coffee is brewing, and my mind is busy working out scenes, turning over words, trying out new ideas and word combinations. I think about why I write. Why is it I feel so driven to share my words?

Words are a human phenomenon. They’ve exploded with our population into every part of this planet, even into space. Each of us has so many words they spill over into others’ lives, more today than ever. We may not write letters the way people used to, but we remain an utterly wordy species. Email, blogs, cell phones, text messaging, personal websites, 40,000 people a year participating in National Novel Writing Month. Books, films, songs, news, television, junk mail—all of these incorporate the written or spoken word.

This reminds me of the singing of birds. One bird sings a sweet song, but a hundred birds singing in one tree sound like pure insanity. It can be overwhelming. We live in an age of information overload, and much of it comes to us in the form of words. Why are we so driven to keep adding more? (more…)

Checking in, with apologies for not posting more this past week. After my motherboard went out on my laptop, and I lost a few days of work I hadn’t yet backed up, I acquired a refurbished laptop and spent some time setting it up. The refurbished one works better than the old one did when it was brand new, which is a nice surprise.

I don’t use my laptop to post here, but keep it disconnected from the Internet, to encourage focus on my fiction writing. So I haven’t been online much while getting the new computer set up and catching up on some of the lost work. (more…)

“The past has driven me back here,” Beth Gray says when she returns to Wilder with her little girl, fifteen years after being convicted of murder. Sheriff Les Kendall advises her to leave, but he doesn’t know Beth can’t escape her nightmares. (more…)

Diana Killian’s High Rhymes and Misdemeanors transports you to the Lake District of England, in the footsteps of the Romantic poets. Grace Hollister is there on vacation from her teaching position (more…)

Novels are mini-vacations, they take us on guided tours of new places, and introduce us to new people who are involved in occupations or activities other than our own, and who experience unusual circumstances. A good book pulls you in and holds your attention through the story so well that, when it ends, you want more.

Sharan Newman’s To Wear the White Cloak held me this way. (more…)

Before I Say Goodbye by Mary Higgins Clark started out slow for me, mainly because I don’t consider politicians all that intriguing. However, I kept reading and I’m glad I did. (more…)

He Shall Thunder In The Sky is the second of Elizabeth Peters’ books that I’ve read. I’m now planning to go back and read all of that series, as well as anything else of hers I can get my hands on. (more…)

In Canis, by Robert E. Armstrong, the head of Houston’s Bureau of Animal Regulation & Care is Dr. Duncan MacDonell, a man of compassion, intelligence and common sense who’s already doing what anyone will recognize as a difficult, depressing, and thankless job. Then street people begin to turn up dead (more…)

In Beacon Street Mourning, Fremont Jones, suspicious her ailing father is being neglected by his wife Augusta, returns to Boston to see him. Her father begins to improve, then suddenly dies. Fremont must solve what she believes to be murder by poison, while others, including his doctor, contend that her father died of natural causes. (more…)