What We're Writing

It's been a while since we caught up with Writer's Who Kill. Here's what we're working on.

 Sarah Burr: I'm currently knee-deep in caffeine and clues as I work on the next Book Blogger Mystery! It's been a joy jumping back into that bookish world filled with secrets, sass, and sleuthing. At the same time, I'm gearing up to pop the confetti for the release of #Throwback for Murder, book four in my Trending Topic Mysteries series. It's a whirlwind of witty twists and cozy chaos, and I can't wait to celebrate with all of you!

Kait Carson: I’m writing Death by Deception the fourth of the Hayden Kent Mystery series. Because I’m unwilling to leave the Keys behind, I’m also working on Pirates on Parade, a cozy mystery and the first of The Southernmost Secrets series. Wish me luck.

Debra H. Goldstein: I’ve been writing short stories. A collection of my work, With Our Bellies Full, and the Fire Dying was recently released. In addition, “Who Shot J.R.?” appeared in Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun and Opera Dinner Club was podcast and released in print in Anything But Murder: Larceny and Lies.

Margaret S. Hamilton: I am writing a longish culinary short story and tackling another round of edits on the second book in my Jericho Mysteries series.

Lori Herbst:  I'm about halfway through book 1 in the new Seahorse Bay Mystery series, set in a Texas cruise port town. Larceny at the Lighthouse is tentatively scheduled to release this fall (fingers crossed), and it features Shelley Shore, a cruise ship director who moves back to Seahorse Bay to help her great aunts save the aquarium they own.

Cover reveal coming this summer!

James M. Jackson: I'm currently working on the Niki Undercover series, which spins off one of the characters from my Seamus McCree series. I'm polishing book 1 (Niki Undercover), beta readers are providing feedback on book 2 (Niki Unleashed), and I'm writing the first draft of book 3 (Niki Untitled -- that is I don't yet know what the second word will be for the title, other than it will begin with "Un").

Marilyn Levinson/Allison Brook: I’m writing the fourth Rufus book in my middle-grade series called Rufus and the Right Side of Magic. The third book, Rufus and the Dark Side of Magic, has just come out.

I’m also plotting the second book in my new mystery series that I write as Allison Brook. The first book, Death on Dickens Island, is being released October 21, 2025.

Martha Reed: I’m having great fun finishing up The Seven Gates of Guinee, my third Crescent City NOLA Mystery with an eye on a summer 2025 publication date. Jane Byrne my disgraced ex-detective and Gigi Pascoe my transgender sleuth are ably assisted by an authentic NOLA Voodoo queen Aunt Babette Broussard as they work to uncover what really happened to the four university students who vanished in 1977 while playing the Intrepid Quest fantasy role-playing board game. Did a French Quarter Voodoo portal really swallow them up?

K.M. Rockwood: I'm having a great time working on a Christmas short story.

 Digby is a young elf who has a job in the office of a shoe factory. He suffers from dyslexia and makes mistakes which others mock. He has a crush on Edda, but is too insecure to let her know. He overhears a conversation in which she says she is nice to him because feels sorry for him. Humiliated and desperate to avoid seeing her, he writes a letter to Santa asking about a job at the North Pole. Only he mistakenly addresses it to Satan.

 Santa arrives at the gates of hell to rescue Digby. In the confrontation with Satan, he flies into a towering rage. This may go to the submission call for Santa Rage 2, although I know it's not really what the editor is looking for. Or it may end up as my contribution to the next round of Christmas stories on Writers Who Kill, if we decide to do that this year.

Susan Van Kirk: Fabric of Lies is the latest Endurance manuscript I'm writing. The Endurance mysteries follow retired teacher, Grace Kimball, and her former student and friend, Detective TJ Sweeney. After the last mystery, The Witch's Child, this latest manuscript finds Jeff Maitlin and Grace Kimball married for the past year and running Lockwood House as a bed-and-breakfast. A terrible event from the past shows up in the form of a visitor to town who brings with him memories for Grace of a mysterious disappearance and the bittersweet years when she was married to her late husband, Roger. Meanwhile, Jeff Maitlin is still the Editor-in-Chief of the Endurance Register, but perhaps not for long. Forces he hardly knows are conspiring to bring about the demise of his beloved local newspaper. 

Heather Weidner: Spring has sprung here in Central Virginia, and I’m hiding from the pollen in my writing cave. I just finished a short story for a mystery anthology with a musical theme. I also wrapped up edits on the Pearly Girls book 2, Murder Plays Second Fiddle.

Next up, I’ll be plotting the next Jules Keene Glamping Mystery. Jake, Jules, Bijou, and the gang are back for more mysteries (and mayhem).

Spooktacular Books by Writers Who Kill

Do you have a favorite spooky book? It doesn’t need ghosts, goblins, or vampires. The things that scare us may go bump in the night, but they often have plebian origins. Here’s our take on books that keep us up late at night, scary, mysterious, or true, it all makes for a great read. Especially around Halloween.

Heather Weidner: I have loved cozy mysteries since my whodunit habit started with Scooby-Doo and Nancy Drew. Some of my recent humorous Halloween favorites include Ellen Byron’s Bayou Boneyard and Libby Klein’s Mischief Nights are Murder. Both of these boast amateur sleuths who get themselves in and out of all kinds of sticky situations. Bree Baker’s Closely Harbored Secrets and Maya Corrigan’s Crypt Suzette are also great Halloween reads with a food flair. Baker’s series is set in a southern tea restaurant, and Corrigan’s sleuth creates recipes with five ingredients and solves murders with the help of her grandfather.

And our own Marilyn Levinson/Allison Brook’s Haunted Library series is another of my favorites. What’s not to love year-round –  books, a ghost, and mysteries.  

All of the books in each of these series are worth the read. Add them to your fall and winter reading lists.

Lori Roberts Herbst: I highly recommend The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow. Published in 2020, it's a riveting character study and exploration of societal norms and expectations. The tension is high, but the best quality is the characters' self-growth, insight, and the bond the sisters form. What are they willing to do to save each other, themselves, and women in general?

Grace Topping: One of my favorite ghost stories is The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. It’s the story of a seafaring captain who haunts the home of a widow and the affection that develops between them. Most people who are familiar with the movie and the television series may not realize they were based on the book by R. A. Dick.

Connie Berry: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Psychologists tell us human beings are the only creatures who enjoy frightening themselves. That’s strange, is it not? And true. We love scary stories, especially told on a dark night before a blazing fire.

As an English Lit major, The Turn of the Screw was always one of my favorites—the lurking presence of evil, the mounting horror, the ambiguity. So, you can imagine my interest when in 2019 one of my favorite authors, Ruth Ware, published what NPR called “a clever and elegant update to James’s story.”

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware begins with a young woman, Rowan Caine, about to stand trial for the murder of a child in her care. She writes to her lawyer from prison, proclaiming her innocence. But is she telling the truth? She isn’t exactly innocent as it turns out, but is she guilty of murder?

K.M. Rockwood: Chesapeake Crimes: Magic is Murder. (Wildside Press, 2022) Amazon says: Mystery and magic collide in this thrilling, all-new collection of short stories by some of the top talents in the crime-writing field. Tales of fantasy worlds and stage illusion, of magic-users and magic-abusers, fill these pages with a heady, deadly mix! An anthology of sixteen short stories.

Molly MacRae: There are too many great mystery stories and novels with ghosts, witches, black cats, Halloween, and bumps-in-the-night written for adults for me to choose favorites – even if I limit the field to those by my Writers Who Kill blog-mates. But I don’t mind reverting to my library background in the children’s department at the public library where I had the pleasure of tending (haunting?) the children’s mystery section.

My favorite is . . . Dying to Meet You, Book #1 in the 43 Old Cemetery Road graphic epistolary mystery series for intermediate readers (ages 8-11), a collaborative effort by sisters Kate Klise (story) and M. Sarah Klise (illustrations).

The set-up: Cantankerous children’s mystery writer Ignatius B. Grumply moves into a Victorian mansion (complete with cupola) at 43 Old Cemetery Road hoping to have the peace and quiet he needs to crack a case of writer's block that’s been haunting him for far too long. But the house is already occupied by eleven-year-old Seymour Hope (who’s been abandoned by his parents), Seymour’s cat, Shadow, and Olive C. Spence, the irritable ghost of a never-published children’s mystery writer. No one is happy. To say the least. Then Seymour’s parents return with a dastardly plan to sell the mansion.

 

Told through letters, newspaper articles, a work-in-progress manuscript, and the occasional tombstone engraving, this book (the whole series) is the kind of kids’ mystery that grownups get a kick out of, too.

 

Readers – What’s your favorite bump in the night book?