The Twin Jinn

Two Days of Magic

THE TWIN JINN AT HAPPY JACK’S CARNIVAL OF MYSTERIES FREE ON KINDLE

Alas, I don’t have magical powers although I truly wish I did. So, instead I created magical characters in a book for middle-grade readers — The Twin Jinn at Happy Jack’s Carnival of Mysteries. And I want to cast a little magic on young readers by making the Kindle version free Feb. 1 and 2. Just click on the link above. No tricks. Just magic.

By the way, the second in the series — The Twin Jinn and the Alchemy Machine — will be out next month. Two more are in the works. I’ll tell you more in the near future.

My own childhood was filled by imaginative play with my sister. One of us would think up a fantasy to play with the start: “Let’s pretend.…” Another outlet was reading — spending hours and hours lost in those words. 

When I became a mother, I enjoyed watching my children do the same. (My son, Ezra, created the illustration for the cover, which I believe captures the playfulness of the characters.

Actually, the words “let’s pretend” is the motivation behind my fiction. I sit in front of my laptop and let my imagination take over whether I am writing for adult or young readers. 

My genies or jinn, as I prefer to call them, don’t live in lamps. In The Twin Jinn at Happy Jack’s Carnival of Mysteries, they perform a magic act in a traveling carnival. People may think they are doing tricks like human magicians, but jinn have many powers such as being invisible, flying, casting spells, oh, the list goes on. 

The twins are Jute and Fina, brother and sister who are 11 by human age but 111 by jinn age. They are sweet but mischievous and like so many siblings, competitive. Their parents, Jeffer and Mira, are protective, but that’s because they tricked their evil master into letting them go. Yes, he’s searching for them.

This series has a lot of what entertained me as a book-reading child: genies, magic, and family. Now I offer it to middle-grade readers, those who read to children, and perhaps adults who want a little magical realism in their lives.

Here’s the link again: The Twin Jinn at Happy Jack’s Carnival of Mysteries.

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Isabel Long Mystery Series

When One Mystery Inspires Another

Sometimes I love the characters I create too much for them to have only one book. That’s the case of Isabel Long and many of the characters in the mystery series named for her.

I started with Chasing the Case. Then came Redneck’s Revenge and Checking the Traps.

Currently I am working on the eighth in the Isabel Long Mystery Series. But those three books now have a home with Bloodhound Books, which re-released them Nov. 15. So I’m going to focus on them.

Each book features a cold case Isabel Long tries to solve in the fictional hilltowns of Western Massachusetts. In the first, she’s coming off a bad year — the untimely death of her husband and the loss of her job as editor-in-chief of a newspaper. She decides to put her free time and skills she learned as a journalist to good use solving a 28-year-old mystery in which a woman walked home from her family’s general store and was never seen again. It was also Isabel’s first big story as a rookie reporter. 

Since the disappearance happened in the hilltown where she lives, Isabel knows the people connected to the case and they know her. Besides, she has an unusual sidekick, her 92-year-old mother who has come to live with her. Maria may be up there in years but she as a keen fan of mysteries, she helps to bring insights. 

Other helpful sources include the men who gossip in the store’s backroom — she calls them the Old Farts. Isabel also takes a part-time job tending bar at the Rooster, the only watering hole in town, which is a great place to get people to blab.

Isabel does solve the case, but I’m not telling you anything more. 

With that case under her belt, Isabel is ready for another. Her next client is Annette Waters, who deservedly is nicknamed the Tough Cookie because she runs a junkyard and garage, and doesn’t take crap from anyone. (She is one of my favorite characters.) Annette hires her to investigate the death of her father, who allegedly was too drunk to get out of his shack of a house when it caught fire. I introduce new characters, such as Gary and Larry Beaumont, two feral brothers who are also drug dealers and it turns out, suspects. Plus, I keep many from the first. 

Oh, state law requirements for being a private investigator means Isabel has to work for a licensed one for three years. So Lin Pierce, who runs a seedy little P.I. biz, comes into her life. He pays her a buck a day for the arrangement and she shares what she makes with him.

Then Isabel and I moved onto our third case. Interesting that a drug-dealing suspect from the second case, Gary Beaumont, hires her to probe the death of his half-brother, who supposedly jumped off a bridge known for suicides. What convinces Isabel to take this case is that the victim was a highway worker who wrote poetry good enough for a well-known poet to steal. (It also meant I had to write poetry for this book.) Cyrus Nilsson aka the Big Shot Poet becomes a regular in the series as does Gary and Larry. 

From my experience of reading, watching or listening to a series, the trick is to give continuity but not drag down the story with too much from the previous one. No flashbacks. Just enough info so each book in the series is standalone. But if you read the ones before it, you can smile because you know a whole lot more than what I revealed.

Here are the links to Chasing the CaseRedneck’s Revenge and Checking the Traps.

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Northern Comfort, Uncategorized

Free Book: Northern Comfort

I’ve decided my book Northern Comfort needed more readers. So it is free for Kindle readers on Nov. 9 and 10. Here’s the link.

Northern Comfort is one of my Hilltown Books. It’s not a mystery, like my Isabel Long Series, but it is set in the familiar fictional hilltowns of Western Massachusetts.

This books is about the harsh realities of rural life — the haves and have nots in a small town. It begins with a tragedy and ends with reconciliation and hope. Let me tell you more.

Willi Miller is a single mother trying to raise her young son, who was brain-damaged at birth. They live in a cabin left to them by the loving grandfather who took them in after Junior Miller, the boy’s father, abandoned them. Willi’s situation is a desperate one. But she’s doing the best she can.

In the opening scene, Willi is home from her job cutting hair at a country beauty shop and hanging clothes on a line in her backyard. It’s the worst of winter, cold and dark, but the job has to get done. She doesn’t have a drier because she can’t afford one.

Willi tries to keep Cody close to her as she works. But then tragedy happens when the boy’s sled quickly takes him into the path of a truck driven by Miles Potter. Willi and Miles have known each other since they were kids, but until the moment her son dies, they were separated by their families’ places in town.

How Willi handles this situation demonstrates her resilience and the kindness of those living in her small town, including Miles. Then, there is Junior, who eventually faces his failings as a father.

That’s what Northern Comfort is about. It’s not the stuff for pretty postcards although I do include a lot of the hilltowns’ traditions like maple sugaring and making old-time music.

Here’s how the book starts. 

Willi Miller pinned her best blouse to the rope line, shaking her bare hands to keep the blood moving, as she reached into the broken plastic basket for something else. She should have done this miserable chore before she went to work this morning, but she didn’t have the time. Short and thin-boned like her mother, but yellow-haired like her father, Willi spun around for her boy, who stood a half foot away, staring at the dog whimpering and jerking its chain. “There you are, Cody. Stay near me,” she said.

Her boy, dressed in a one-piece red snowsuit, his mittens packed tightly on his hands, didn’t say a word. He only made noises that sounded like words, and he was seven. His ‘Ma,’ Willi had decided, was exactly as an animal would say it.

Earlier this afternoon, she got Cody at the babysitter’s house, where the van took him after school. Willi was a hairdresser at the Lucky Lady Beauty Shop in nearby Tyler although the running joke among the gals who worked there was it should be called the Unlucky Lady because of the stories the customers told about their men. Cheaters, drunks, and bums, the whole lot of them, it seemed, by their complaints.

The Lucky Lady was busy today with high school girls who wanted their hair curled and piled high for the semi-formal tonight. They were fun customers, so excited about their dates and the big Friday night ahead, she didn’t mind their lousy tips. Willi remembered not that long ago she did the same.

She fed Cody cereal after they got home just to hold him until she made dinner. He ate a few spoonfuls before he began playing with it, making a mess as usual, so she dressed him in his snowsuit and took him outside after she lowered the damper on the wood stove.

Now he walked beneath the hanging laundry toward the dog, named Foxy by her grandfather, who used to own the brown,short-haired, pointy-eared mutt. Willi called to her boy, who moved step by step across the snow, breaking through its icycrust until he sank to the top of his boots. He turned toward his mother. His green eyes peered from beneath the brim of his cap. Yellow snot bubbled from one nostril.

“Yeah, I’m watchin’ you,” Willi said, bending for a towel.

Snow seeped through a crack in her right boot. Cold numbed her toes. She should put duct tape over the brown rubber, but it was her only pair, and it’d look like hell.

“Hey, Cody, where’re you goin’?”

Her boy marched with fast little feet past the junked truck to the back of their house, where his sled, a cheap thing she bought, was propped against the wall. “This is a red sled,” she told Cody in the hardware store.

Her boy uttered a sound that might have been “red” but only she would know. She understood his ways most of the time. He wanted things tick-tock regular when he ate, what he wore.

Her eyes followed her boy, dragging his sled, grunting, toward her. He dropped it at her feet and sat inside. The heels of his boots kicked up and down. “Maaaaa,” he called.

Willi sighed. Cody wouldn’t let up until she gave him a ride. Her boy liked it when she towed him in his sled along the driveway to get the mail. He made happy chirps and flapped his mittens. She wiped her hands on her black jacket, a man’s, too big and open in the front because the zipper was broken. Its bottom swayed against her legs as she walked.

“All right, Cody, but just a little ride.”

She reached for the towrope and pulled Cody in a large circle. His mouth formed a wide, sloppy smile, and he let outgleeful sounds as Willi went slowly, then gained speed. Her feet sank through the snow although the sled glided easily on its surface. She was careful to stay on the flat part of her land, away from the edge of its tabletop, where it plunged onto her neighbor’s property then to one of the town’s main roads below. When she squinted, she could see the Mercy River flowing through its snowy valley like a blue vein on a woman’s wrist.

Round and round Willi towed her son. She slipped on the packed ring of snow, and her straight, yellow hair dropped to her jaw when her knit cap fell. Cody’s head rocked back as he yelped in pleasure. After a while, she stopped, out of breath.

“I gotta finish hanging the clothes before it gets dark. Alright?” she told Cody although she did not expect his answer.

She picked her hat from the snow. The sun was low in the sky, and the dark smudge spreading from the west likely carried more snow. Willi frowned. It would be too much trouble to take the clothes down again. She hated this part of winter, mid-January. It snowed every day, not much, but enough to keep the road crews going with their plows and sanders. Winteralways has a week like this, unsettled weather, the worst of the season, of the year, as far as she was concerned. Often, it happened after the thaw, so that brief warm spell seemed like one cruel joke.

She bent for one of Cody’s shirts. She had to work faster because the clothes were stiffening inside the basket. After she hung them, they would freeze into thin slabs, like shale, and after a day or two, they’ll be dry. If she had any money, she would buy a dryer. She glanced toward her house and saw missing clapboards. She’d fix those, too.

When she was a girl, she used to keep a mental list of what she’d get if she were rich: stuff like pink high heels and a long white coat. None of them seemed practical for a town like Hayward, where half the roads were dirt and fancy things were in other people’s houses. Now she would buy a car that worked without worry and hire a lawyer to make her ex-husband,Junior, pay child support.

Her boy bucked his body while he lay on his belly inside the sled, wailing as if he were wounded. Willi shook her hands and grabbed a pair of jeans from the basket.

“Shit, I hate this life,” she said.

My other Hilltown Books? The Sweet Spot and The Sacred Dog.

Here’s the link again for Northern Comfort.

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Hilltown Books

The Sacred Dog is Free Nov. 2-3

Right now, I feel like I’m the mother of several children who all need my attention. Certainly, as the mother of six, I’ve had good practice, but I’m talking about the books I have written. I  decided needs some love from readers. So I am making it free for Kindle readers on Nov. 2-3. Here’s the link.

The Sacred Dog, set in 1984, is not part of my Isabel Long Mystery Series. But I am hoping fans of that series will want to read this one. Afterall, the setting is very familiar — the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts. And once again, I try to capture its flavor through the characters I’ve created. I call it one of my Hilltown Books.

I feel I know the area so well from my many years living here and certainly when I was a reporter and then an editor. Of course, that includes stories about personal conflicts and feuds between people who live there, but none so dark as between my book’s two main characters, Frank Hooker and Al Kitchen. 

Frank is an all-around good guy who runs the town of Holden’s only bar, The Sacred Dog. But he has a fault. He hates Al because he blames him for the death of his reckless brother Wes. And Al hates him for the way he’s been treated. Al grew up in one of those rough households with an abusive grandfather and a loyal although faulty grandmother.

If that weren’t enough, there is Verona Hooker, Frank’s ex, who will be returning to town with their daughter — and a secret. 

All is about to come to a reckoning.

The Sacred Dog is fast-paced and as those who have read it already have said, suspenseful. Here I will give you a look on how it starts.

Frank Hooker, tall, broad, and as handsome as an aging cowboy actor, lit a cigarette from the pack he kept beside the bar’s double sink. The rain fell hard, and it had started lightning. The storm, he was certain, would finish off tonight’s softball game at the Rod and Gun Club between the team he backed and Glenburn Sanitation, sponsored by a guy in the next town who pumped out septic systems.

Right now, Frank figured the men were sitting in their pickup trucks and cars, drinking beer, and waiting to see if the weather broke until the ump made the official call. Then, rather than go home to their families and ruin a good night out, they’d head to The Sacred Dog, or The Dog, as the regulars called his bar. Taking a drag of his cigarette, Frank anticipated their early arrival. He made a quick check inside the cooler, satisfied to see it filled with cold bottles of beer.

A pickup truck pulled into the parking lot, its tires grinding into the crushed stone Frank had put in this past spring, and Early Stevens, the only customer in the bar, twisted his head toward the door to see who would be the second. Early, his given name Ernest, had been sitting on his stool since 4:45 that afternoon after he was done hauling the day’s outgoing mail from the Holden Post Office to the one in Butterfield. He drank his usual: a Budweiser with a peppermint schnapps chaser. His topic of discussion today was a story he read in a magazine he found at the toilet in the Holden General Store that claimed the world was going to go to hell in 2000. 

“The way it looks, we’ve got about sixteen years to get ready,” Early said. “What do you think, Frank?”

“I think you should find better readin’ material,” Frank answered.

Minutes later, when Al Kitchen came through the bar’s front door, Early muttered under his breath, “Shit, here comes trouble.”

The muscles around Frank’s mouth tightened as Al lumbered across the room to take a stool one over from Early. Al was all-smiles because he thought maybe he was on decent terms with Frank these days. But Frank stared at him blankly as he stubbed out his smoke. “What’ll it be?” he asked as if this wasn’t Al but someone else in front of him.

“Give me a Bud,” Al said, as he retrieved his wallet.

No tabs for Al. That was one of Frank’s rules. Another was a two-beer limit. Frank came up with the second after Al’s grandma, who raised him, begged to let him have some place to go closer to home, and considering The Sacred Dog was the only bar in town, this was it. For years, Al didn’t have the nerve to show his face in his bar. 

“Two beers. He won’t be stayin’ long at your place if that’s all he gets,” Jenny Kitchen had said. “Besides, what’s the harm in two beers?”

Frank wanted to tell this old lady, who smelled like kerosene, what harm her grandson had already done. Jenny only came up to his chest, but she made her eyes small and defiant when she faced him. He told her if there was a lick of trouble, Al was out for good, and he’d call her and the cops.

Besides, Frank reasoned it was better to keep someone he disliked at close range. Actually, disliked was too soft a word to describe his feelings for the man, considering what happened to his younger brother, Wes. 

The Sacred Dog is free for Kindle Readers only two days: Nov. 2 and 3.

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Isabel Long Mystery Series

Your Next Mystery: Missing the Deadline Free Oct. 26-27

Yes, Isabel Long is hard at work trying to solve a case in the sticks of Western Massachusetts. Missing the Deadline, no. 7 in my series, can be all yours for free Oct. 26-27 if you’re a Kindle reader. I’m offering my book for free since I feel this book needs a little love and more readers. Here, I will make it easy. Here’s the link: Missing the Deadline.

As it has happened before, Isabel finds her next case in an unlikely place — at a poetry reading. Cyrus Nilsson, aka the Big Shot Poet, is trying to make amends to the late Cary Moore, who you might remember was a highway worker who wrote poetry good enough for him to steal. He was even a suspect in that case, Isabel’s third. But the reading is to promote Cary’s book, Country Boy, which Cyrus worked hard to get published.

Cyrus asks Isabel about taking on a case after the event, which was SRO at Penfield Town Hall. So, what’s this one about? Cyrus’s first literary agent, Gerald Danielson, was found shot in the head and near death outside his home three years ago. Gerald survived but is not the same hotshot literary agent who moved from New York City to the village of Meadows Falls. Police ruled a failed attempt at suicide. But Cyrus has serious doubts. 

And as Isabel pursues this case, she quickly accumulates a list of possible suspects, such as a vindictive ex-wife, a jilted local writer, and even an apparently devoted sister who lives with him. 

Isabel also delves into the often frustrating world of publishing, which includes a trip to a literary conference in Vermont. By the way, Gerald takes an instant liking to Isabel, who he calls “Izzie,” the only one allowed.

(By the way, Maria, Isabel’s mother and “Watson,” is glad to have a case once again. She says it’s boring without one.)

Here’s the link again to Missing the Deadline. Read it for free and hopefully you will give it a rating and maybe even a review on Amazon. It sure helps, something Gerald Danielson would certainly understand.

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