Something For The Easter Basket By E. B. Davis

  

Since 2018, I’ve been reading Leslie Meier’s holiday themed anthologies. Each anthology contains novellas or novelettes of about 100 pages each. It’s hard to estimate length on Kindle where locations are given without page or word counts. So far, Lee Hollis has consistently written one of the two other stories. Peggy Ehrhart or Barbara Ross have provided the third. The start of this year’s anthologies is Easter Egg Murder, which was released yesterday by Kensington Cozies.

 

The authors write within the perspective of their series’ main characters, providing side trips to different venues, historical background details, and the continuation of backstory. Leslie Meier’s main character is Lucy Stone, part-time reporter in Tinker’s Cove, Maine; Lee Hollis’s is Hayley Powell, restaurant owner in Bar Harbor, Maine; Peggy Ehrhart’s is Pamela Paterson, textile expert, and Bettina Fraser, small-town newspaper columnist, both of Arborville (we assume Maine).

 

Prior to 2018, the anthologies featured authors Joanne Fluke, Leslie Meier, and Laura Levine. Reading the anthologies always gets me into the spirit of the holiday celebrated within. Some of the older ones are now on Kindle Unlimited.                                                                                                                        E. B. Davis

 

 

EASTER EGG MURDER by LESLIE MEIER

 In Provence to visit her daughter, part-time reporter Lucy Stone is soaking up the atmosphere, even if it includes one Carole Capobianco, the empty-nester she encountered on the flight over. Not exactly two peas in a pod, they’re both amused by the tale of a neighbor’s chickens refusing to lay eggs. The decoy eggs he’s set out to encourage the egg-centric hens are not only gorgeously Faberge-style, they’re being stolen! That’s confusing enough, but what’s happened to the cook is deadly serious. 

 

DEATH BY ANOTHER EASTER EGG by LEE HOLLIS

When an ambitious young reporter dies mid-meal at Hayley Powell’s Bar Harbor restaurant, Hayley is horrified. Determined to save her eatery’s reputation, Hayley scrambles to crack the case wide open like an egg, discovering that the victim was about to break a juicy story—one that a number of people (er, suspects) did not order off the menu. Which makes finding the killer more than devilishly hard . . .

 

AN EGGY WAY TO DIE by PEGGY EHRHART

Cleaning up after the Easter egg hunt in the Arborville park, friends Pamela and Bettina are startled to find something else hidden—the dead body of a local cookbook author, surrounded by broken shells and slippery yolks. The pair are far from hard-boiled detectives, but as they search for clues, they find that the whole case smells distinctly like rotten eggs . . .

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The Mysterious “M” Panel at Malice

by Paula Gail Benson

Last Thursday, thanks to Gloria Alden, those of us who attended this year’s Malice Domestic put together our happy remembrances along with regrets at having too little time to spend together.

One of the great privileges at Malice is to be able to participate on a panel. This year, I was fortunate enough to be assigned as moderator for “Oh, to Be in Britain!” My authors names all had the letter “M” as an initial: Molly MacRae, G. M. Malliet, Leslie Meier, and Melinda Mullet. We figured I got to be moderator since my name had no “M.”

Being a moderator allows you to learn about a wonderful group of writers. I had interviewed G.M. (“Gin”) previously and was familiar with Leslie’s books, but Molly and Melinda were new to me. I began studying to see the similarities that brought us all together.

As I looked through the Malice schedule, I noticed it contained another panel featuring authors who wrote about Great Britain, called “Murder Most English.” Its participants were Stephanie Barron/Francine Mathews, Frances Brody, Susanna Calkins, and Charles Todd (both Charles and Caroline) with Verena Rose as moderator and it would take place the hour before my panel.

My challenge became how to showcase the “M” panel, particularly for those who attended the previous session about British writers. Then, I realized, the writers in the first panel wrote from a historical perspective, while the authors I would moderate featured contemporary settings and characters. In fact, the more I considered it, I concluded that the “M” panel truly represented Agatha Christie’s legacy because they wrote the type of novels that she had written.

G.M. Malliet

Gin writes the St. Just and Max Tudor series. Her St. Just mystery, Death of a Cozy Writer, was selected for a Malice grant, then won the Agatha for best first novel. With Max Tudor, she combined in her protagonist two quintessential British character types: an Anglican priest and former MI5 agent. He lives in the village of Nether Monkslip, which is illustrated in the books and on Gin’s website.

Leslie Meier

I was initially surprised that Leslie had been included in the panel. I was familiar with her Lucy Stone mysteries that involved a mother and small town reporter from Maine and usually took place during holidays or seasons. In her more recent novels, Leslie follows Lucy’s adventures with travel groups in England and France. The two that take place in Great Britain are the English Tea Murder, which features the Grim Reaper in a Mary Poppins’ pose on the cover, and the British Manor Murder, which gathers the suspects in a very traditional setting.

Molly MacRae

Molly MacRae’s Haunted Yarn Shop mysteries take place in Blue Plum, Tennessee. Her Highland Bookshop mysteries follow four American protagonists as they purchase and operate a book store in the small town of Inversgail on the west coast of Scotland. During our panel presentation, she was quizzed by an audience member about the exact location of the store. I think her protagonists have a potential customer or at least a devoted fan. Plaid and Plagiarism is the series debut.

Single Malt Murder, the debut novel in Melinda Mullet’s Whiskey Business mysteries, was inspired after many tours of whiskey facilities Melinda took with her whiskey collecting husband. Her protagonist, an English photographer living in London, inherits a Scottish whiskey distillery. Melinda, a child of British parents, is a lawyer and children’s literacy advocate. At her signing, she treated guests to delicious truffles heavily laced with the beverage.

Melinda Mullet

The “M” panelists were a true delight. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and learning about them, and I highly recommend their books as wonderful reading.

They were encouraging to any in our audience who might be unpublished authors. Gin Malliet mentioned how helpful her association with the online Guppy Chapter of Sisters on Crime had been in teaching her about the writing business. I completely agree with her endorsement.

What modern writers of British mysteries do you enjoy? Any names that begin with “M”?