Planning a Wedding by Guest Blogger Edith Maxwell

Thanks for inviting me over, Annette and the other Writers Who Kill! I’m delighted to be back.

I am also a writer who kills, of course, although my sleuths or others in town find the already-dead body. But for this post I want to talk about the wedding that anchors the action in Murder in a Cape Cottage, which comes out Tuesday.

Tim Brunelle has been Mac Almeida’s boyfriend for the entire series. He’s been eager to marry and start a family. While Mac is worried about her orderly life being thrown into turmoil, she does love him deeply, and family is important to her. She says yes.

While planning a fictional wedding for book four isn’t as complicated as a real-life one, I had all the same things to think about. When will it be? Where? What are the bride’s colors, who are her attendants, what will guests eat and in what décor? SO many details. My older son was married four years ago, and my younger son will tie the knot in February, so I guess I have weddings on the mind!

I remember when Annette was planning Zoe Chambers’s wedding a few books back. Annette presented dress after dress and quizzed fans on which would be right for Zoe. It was a great promotional scheme, but I didn’t copy it. Here’s a bit from the book describing how Mac found the dress.

With the high metabolism I’d inherited from my tiny dynamo of a grandmother, I still sported a slender figure at thirty-seven. When Gin and my mom and I had started looking for wedding dresses this fall, I’d been worried. I so wasn’t the lace-and-ruffles type, and I also didn’t want some strapless extravaganza.

By some miracle we’d happened across a simple, body-hugging satin dress cut on the bias, and we’d found it right here in Westham at Cape Bridal, a new shop on the outskirts of town. The cream-colored dress—also comfortable, as it turned out—had a flattering scoop neck, pintucked short sleeves, and a short train that could be buttoned up and out of the way for dancing.

I wish I could show you a picture of the dress – except I made it up!

I also had fun thinking of colors – purple and yellow – to accent Mac’s New Year’s Eve wedding. She invites her five-year-old niece Cokey to be flower girl, and Cokey is thrilled. Gin is Mac’s only attendant, for which she wears a purple tea-length sheath dress in a shimmery fabric. Mac’s mom finds a pale yellow dress with a swirly skirt that falls below the knees and a short lace sweater in the same color. After the ceremony at the Unitarian Universalist Church where Mac’s father is the minister, the reception will be at the Westham Hotel, with yellow and purple flowers.

Rosendahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Also fun was dreaming up the wedding cocktail to be served before the reception. As the series is set on Cape Cod, where cranberries are grown, I wanted it to include cranberry juice. Mac’s grandmother Reba works with her to refine the ingredients. I presented the scene and recipe over at Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen earlier this month.

Mac will meet Tim’s parents for the first time the day before the wedding, and you can believe she’s nervous. Mac’s father, brother, and Tim take charge of cooking up a Cape Verdean meal for the rehearsal dinner, and it all turns out fine.

You can be sure this book isn’t only a lovely little tale of the week before the wedding. Being crime fiction, the story must include a big old wrench in the works. In this case, the wrench smacks the reader on the head in the first chapter. Five days before their wedding, Mac and Tim discover a decades-old skeleton in the wall of their house – an imprisoned skeleton wearing a wedding dress.

Readers: What’s your favorite wedding story – success, mishap, or fictional? I’ll send one commenter a signed copy of the new book!

Murder in a Cape Cottage

ʼTis the day after Christmas, following a wicked-busy time of year for Mac’s bike shop. It’s just as well her Cozy Capers Book Group’s new pick is a nerve-soothing coloring book mystery, especially when she has last-minute wedding planning to do. But all pre-wedding jitters fade into the background when Mac and her fiancé, Tim, begin a cottage renovation project and open up a wall to find a skeleton—sitting on a stool, dressed in an old-fashioned bridal gown . . .
 
As Mac delves into the decades-old mystery with the help of librarian Flo and her book group, she discovers a story of star-crossed lovers and feuding families worthy of the bard himself. Yet this tale has a modern-day villain still lurking in Mac’s quaint seaside town, ready to make this a murderous New Year’s Eve.

 

“She’s handcuffed to the wall,” I whispered. “The poor thing. Somebody seriously didn’t want her to get married.” My heart broke for her, but this was also feeling like a horror movie. My own wedding was only days away.

Maddie Day pens the Country Store Mysteries, the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries, and the new Cece Barton Mysteries. As Agatha Award-winning author Edith Maxwell, she writes the Quaker Midwife Mysteries and short crime fiction. Day/Maxwell lives with her beau and cat Martin north of Boston, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook. Find her at EdithMaxwell.com, wickedauthors.com, Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen, and on social media:

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