January Killer Questions to WWK Bloggers

 

 

Since it is January, I thought asking about New Year’s Day, but then decided to widen the question to snow storms—which I think are hitting everyday now!

 

Have any of your main characters run into murder while trying to fill a New Year’s Resolution?

If not, have any of your fictional murders occurred on New Year’s Eve or Day?

 

E. B. Davis: Not one!

 

Kait Carson: Not yet, but it’s a thought!

 

Connie Berry: Nope!

 

KM Rockwood: Not really. But my "little" (6'3") brother was a NYC cop who patrolled Times Square on the overnight shift, and he has some interesting stories from New Years Eve.
I do have a tentative tale of a murder near midnight, which wasn't noticed for a while because the press of the crowd kept the victim upright, but it's in my "Interesting but I don't know if I'll get back to it" file.

 

Margaret S. Hamilton: “Three Corpse Meal” is a short story set on New Year’s Eve and the following days, concerning three murders that occur during or after a sumptuous NYE dinner party. Published in WWK and Kings River Life. A Lizzie Christopher Jericho story.

 

“Fire Alarm on First Night” is a short story set on the afternoon of NYE about a ten-year-old sleuth and a nefarious landlord trying to commit arson. On submission. A Lizzie Christopher Jericho story.

 

James M. Jackson: James M. Jackson: I don’t recall any of my main characters making New Year’s Resolutions, and no fictional murders in my works have occurred on New Years’ Eve or Day.

 

Sarah E. Burr: The first full-length Court of Mystery novel takes place at the start of a calendar year -- however, it's set in the fictional Realm of Virtues, where the concept of New Year's Eve or Day doesn't exactly exist as we celebrate it. 

 

Grace Topping:  None of my characters have dealt with, committed, or even contemplated murder around New Years. But I could imagine a crazed killer making a New Year’s resolution to knock off someone who has crossed them. Food for thought. 

 

Paula Gail Benson: I don’t have a story about a resolution, but I just reworked a story that takes place on New Year’s Eve and it has been released in a new anthology (October 2024) from the Bethlehem Writers Group, Season's Readings: More Sweet, Funny, and Strange Holiday Tales (A Sweet, Funny, and Strange Anthology). The story is “The Star of the Party.”

 

I didn’t get a positive response to that question by most of our authors, so I changed the question: Has snow featured in your setting or murder scene?

 

E. B. Davis: In my short story, “Compromised Circumstances” contained in the anthology Homicidal Holidays, the murder took place during a snow storm in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Georgetown. The snow concealed evidence and delayed the authorities from processing the scene. 

 

Kait Carson: Not yet, but it will if I continue with the Maine Lodge series. It’s set in Northern Maine and snow is such a delectable ingredient in a murder scene.

 

Marilyn Levinson: A snowstorm features in the denouement scene in one of my Haunted Library books.

 

Lori Roberts Herbst: Yes! Since my Callie Cassidy series is set in a Colorado mountain village, snow often factors in — as do frozen creeks and icy sidewalks... For example, in Negative Reaction, book 5 in the series, a body tumbles off a ledge and rolls across the snow-covered mountainside. 

 

Connie Berry: Yes! My second Kaye Hamilton, A Legacy of Murder, is set at Christmas time. Kate dreams of a real English Christmas with a log fire, a cup of wassail, and snow falling softly outside. And she gets it!

 

Susan Van Kirk: Sorry, I don't fit into either of these. I guess I must have avoided holidays.

 

Sarah E. Burr: Yes! In Dearly Deleted, a Book Blogger Mystery, Winnie Lark's best friend Owen finds a dead body in the snow behind his bookstore. The snow also makes for hazardous driving, which may or may not put Winnie and her friends in danger!

 

Molly MacRae: I’ve got a lot of great Scottish, Appalachian, and barrier island weather but no snow so far. I do love the atmosphere that murk and mist or the smirr, blatter, and dreich of rain add to lousy weather.

 

KM Rockwood: In Steeled for Murder, a forklift driver is killed on the overnight shift in a steel fabrication plant. Jesse Damon, paroled on a murder conviction, is the obvious suspect. He sets out to investigate, and ends up snowed in at the rural home of the murder victim, where he finds the wife gravely ill and young children in desperate need of care.

 

Shari Randall: Shari: Yes, a perfect dusting of "mood snow" turns into a raging blizzard that traps a thief in my short story "The Queen of Christmas" which will appear in the December 22 edition of Black Cat Magazine.

 

Margaret S. Hamilton: The next in my Jericho series, What the Author Left Behind, takes place in snowbound Ohio during the long bleak month of January. Freezing temps, mounds of plowed snow in the parking lots, frozen pipes, each character identified by the color of their winter parka. 

 

Heather Weidner: In Christmas Lights and Cat Fights, animal tracks in the snow provide my sleuth clues that help her expose an endangered species smuggling ring.  

 

Grace Topping: So far, I have not included the weather, except to talk about fall colors. I have thought about how devastating weather, particularly a severe snow storm, could add a suspenseful element to a story.

 

James M. Jackson: Cabin Fever (Seamus McCree #3) opens with a blizzard in Michigan's Upper Peninsula during which Seamus McCree finds a naked, nearly frozen woman in the seat hammock of his guest cabin.

 

Mary Dutta: Snow hasn't featured in any of my stories. It could be an out of sight, out of mind thing due to living in the South for twenty years. At this point, I'd much rather encounter it in fiction than in fact.

 

Paula Gail Benson: While snow does not feature in my story, “Long in the Tooth,” it was published in Let it Snow: The Best of Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, Winter 2015 Collection (February 2015)