A Criminally Creative Quintet at The Poisoned Pen!

Once again, Denis had his nose slightly out of joint because he had to work while I amused myself at my favorite bookstore, The Poisoned Pen. I didn't blame him for having a sore schnoz because not only was I going to see Paige Shelton, Laura Bradford, Lynn Cahoon, and Chevy Stevens being hosted by Writer in Residence Linda Castillo, I was going to a nearby restaurant afterward with at least three of them. Poor Denis! 

I showed up plenty early to reserve my seat then found a quiet corner to read and people watch until the event started. The time flew by-- mostly because there were many interesting winter visitors coming in to browse the shelves. (Later on I discovered that one woman who had come from Chicago to watch her beloved Cubs in spring training heard about the event and hurried right on over to see some of her favorite authors. Gotta love it!)

L to R: Cahoon, Bradford, Shelton, Stevens

Linda Castillo

Linda Castillo began by introducing each of the authors and listing the series that they wrote. 

Chevy Stevens grew up on a ranch on Vancouver Island. She later became a realtor, and when she got the idea for Still Missing, she quit her job to write. She writes standalones of domestic suspense.

Lynn Cahoon is from the St. Louis area. She's had several different jobs but currently deals with car licenses and titles. She writes series in the cozy mystery and romance genres, the two cozy series being her Cat Latimer and Tourist Trap books.

Paige Shelton lives in Gilbert, Arizona, and writes the Dangerous Type and the Scottish Bookshop series. 

Laura Bradford lives in New York State and writes the Amish and the Emergency Dessert Squad mysteries, and the Southern Sewing Circle mysteries under the name Elizabeth Lynn Casey. She is also an advocate for those living with multiple sclerosis.    

Castillo then wanted to know about the authors' latest books.

Available Now!

Chevy Stevens' Never Let You Go started out as a different book, which was thrown out after she'd worked on it for nine months. (Everyone agreed that it wasn't working.)  Stevens had a father with a drinking problem and an ex-boyfriend who didn't take breaking up well-- once crawling through the dog door "to return some books." These experiences led to her current book, a standalone mystery about domestic abuse. 

It's written from the point of view of the mother and daughter, ten years after the abuse took place. Lindsey made a new life for them both, but her ex-husband walks back into their lives, saying that he's changed. Readers know that he's no good before Lindsey does, and Chevy let us know that the first part of the book alternates between the present and the past.

Available Now!

Paige Shelton's Bookman Dead Style is the second book in her Dangerous Type series set in Star City, Utah-- a fictional town loosely based on Park City.  It's set during the Star City Film Festival. (Think Sundance Film Festival.)

Castillo loved the book's setting as well as the shop that Clare Henry runs which specializes in typewriter and book repair.

Paige Shelton spent over twenty years in Utah, and-- pre-husband and son-- she'd always meant to get gussied up and go to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City to see as many movie stars as she could. Unfortunately she never did.

Available Now!

Lynn Cahoon's Fatality by Firelight is the second book in her Cat Latimer series set in a fictional town south of Denver, Colorado. Latimer has inherited a house and turned it into a writer's retreat, a setting that Castillo really liked.

Cahoon got the idea for the series while attending a lot of writers conferences, and finds writing the Cat Latimer series "good therapy" because she can include a lot of people she's met, and "kill off a few of the people" she's met during these conferences. (Sounds intriguing, doesn't it?)  

Available Now!

 The Silence of the Flans is the second book in Laura Bradford's Emergency Dessert Squad series. She originally pitched the first book as "Dessert 911," but that title was thought to sound too much like a cookbook. Her editor then came back with Éclair and Present Danger, a spoof of a Tom Clancy title (A Clear and Present Danger). As you can see, this second book follows the same theme.

Castillo commented that she loved the desserts and their names and hoped the Winnie and Lovey, the cat she inherited, can have their happy ending. (Lovey hates Winnie, which makes Winnie's life difficult at times.)

Linda then asked the authors about their writing processes-- something she always wants to know when meeting other writers.

Chevy Stevens signing a book for a fan.

Chevy replied that "sometimes it's like trying to rein in wild ponies to get me to settle down to write." Now that she has a young daughter, she usually gets in a good four hours of writing a day, but "sometimes it takes me eight hours to get it." She used to write in a travel trailer on the property until her daughter started walking. Now she writes in a coffee shop every day. She knew she'd "arrived" when she got a head nod from the old guys who are regulars there.

Paige told us that "I write at my desk on a desktop computer. I write on my laptop. I'm very mobile. I've now started outlining my books, which probably thrills my publisher. Yes, I'm pulling up my pants and becoming a plotter!" 

Lynn Cahoon said, "I write from 5 AM until 6 AM when I get ready to go to work. I write during my lunch breaks and at home after work. In all reality, I'm on Facebook in the morning and playing catch-up on my writing during work breaks and when I get home. After having a double hip replacement, I got my words in by noon and then 15,000 in a week! Then I had to go back to work...."

Linda asked her if she worked full-time, which Lynn does. "Do you need more hips?" Linda quipped and then said, "My hat is off to you!"

Laura Bradford

Laura Bradford said, "I try to write early in the morning. By the end of a book, I'm so into it that I will write all night."

Then Castillo wanted to know about the research these women did.

Chevy Stevens writes from personal experiences and has a friend who's a therapist and really understands how a story is written. She also has good police sources, telling us something that I've heard from other writers: retired police officers are the best because they really like to talk. 

Chevy now feels that she's "destroyed Canada" in her books, so her next book is set in Seattle, which means that she will need new contacts.

Paige researched several things for her Dangerous Type mysteries: the Gutenberg printing press, typewriters, geology-- "a little of everything"-- except calico cats. She's had numerous fans contact her to tell her that extremely few calico cats are male (like the cat in Bookman Dead Style).

Lynn Cahoon

Lynn Cahoon said, "I'm always worried that I won't get enough research done. Whenever I need more information about something, I mark an X in the manuscript where I need it so I won't fall down the Google rabbit hole. Then I go back and fill in the X's during the second go-round of the manuscript. All the towns I write about are fictional so I can do whatever I want to with them!"

Laura told us, "I'm a baker and an eater. Yes, I have made all the recipes in my books! The biggest area of research for me in The Silence of the Flans was the method of death. I also have to do a lot of research for my Amish mysteries." (Linda was nodding her head in complete agreement.) Laura, who lives in Westchester County, New York, also said, "I stay away from guns because I don't know much about them, and I also stay away from details about cars." All the authors agreed that guns and cars were two areas guaranteed to get the most complaints if something was written incorrectly.

L to R: Bradford, Cahoon, Castillo, Shelton, Stevens

Linda then wanted to know what's next.

Chevy said, "I had to let go of the idea of writing a book a year. Now I don't know when the next book will be finished because my daughter is slowing me down. Family comes first. I'm not pressuring myself and just letting an idea formulate in my mind. My editor is well aware of this. All I can say about my next book is that it's set in Seattle, and the female character's husband has a stalker, someone who's telling the woman, 'You don't deserve what you have, and I'm going to take it away from you.'"

Paige said, "The next Dangerous Type book, Comic Sans Murder, will be released in December. The second Scottish Bookshop mystery, Of Books and Bagpipes, will be released next month. I have a title for my third Scottish Bookshop mystery-- Scalpels, Tomes, and Old Scottish Bones-- but I don't know if they'll let me keep it. And I know that my fourth Scottish Bookshop mystery will be set in the Loch Ness area!"

Lynn said, "The next Tourist Trap mystery, Hospitality and Homicide, will be released in May. Of Murder and Men is the next Cat Latimer which will be available in November, and I'm working on a new series called Farm to Fork which is set in Idaho."

Laura Bradford's third Emergency Dessert Squad mystery will be out in January 2018, and it's called Dial M for Mousse. "There will also be new books in my Southern Sewing Circles series and my new Tobi Tobias series, but what I'm most excited about-- and can finally talk about-- is that I have a contract with Kensington Books for two Amish women's fiction novels. The first one will be released in the summer of 2018!"

No mystery bookstore is complete without this!

Then it was time for fan questions, and the first person wanted to know why these talented writers wrote multiple series. 

Laura Bradford: "I have multiple college tuitions."

Lynn Cahoon: "It's all about my characters and getting to know who they are."

Paige Shelton: "I work on multiple series in one day. For me, it's a matter of sanity!"

Chevy Stevens: "I write standalones, but I do keep track of the different concepts as they occur to me."

If you didn't write, what would you do?

Lynn Cahoon: "I'm always thinking of different jobs I'd like to try. I want to do everything!"

Laura Bradford: "I'd teach children about writing. I'd also love to have my own Dessert Squad."

Paige Shelton: "I was in journalism and advertising, and I'd hide out in the bathroom, writing and trying to get published. If I weren't a writer, that's what I'd do now."

Chevy Stevens: "I'd foster 600 puppies or bottlefeed tigers. Something like that!"

Someone then asked Linda Castillo what her next book is.

"Down a Dark Road will be released in July. It was a very difficult book to write. I was so afraid that I'd be late on my deadline, and when I turned it in, I wanted to hide because I thought it wasn't any good, but my editor said it was the best book in the series."

Another fan made us all laugh by saying, "You all look like a bunch of church ladies. You don't look like people who hold so much murder inside!"

Chevy quickly said, "I'm writing about what scares me, not about what I want to do!" which made Linda tell us that her husband has been asked if he sleeps with one eye open!

The event then adjourned to the signing line and to the food table. A very talented baker named Jen Sam created an Emergency Dessert Squad ambulance cake in honor of Laura Bradford's The Silence of the Flans. It was delicious!

Jen Sam's Emergency Dessert Squad cake complete with chocolate-filled IV bags!

And here's the talented dessert maker with Laura Bradford--

Laura Bradford and Jen Sam

When all the books were signed and all the fans had their fill of cake, I had the privilege of going to a nearby restaurant with all five authors. I couldn't believe my luck!


As we sat and ate our meals, talk and laughter flowed like a river. We joked and talked books and shared life experiences and funny anecdotes. I can't remember everything we talked about because I wasn't about to take notes. All I know is that it's a memory I shall always treasure. Paige, Laura, Linda, Lynn, and Chevy are wonderful, ultra-talented women, and I'm so happy to have been able to spend this time with them.




 

@ The Poisoned Pen with Ingrid Thoft and Chevy Stevens!

I have to admit that as the hour grew near to departure this past Saturday afternoon, I came very close to staying home and getting in the pool instead of heading to Scottsdale and The Poisoned Pen. Monsoon season is showing signs of rearing its sweaty head, and I don't much care for making the effort to put on makeup only to have it try to slide off my face minutes later.

But I made the ultimate sacrifice so I could see two authors, Ingrid Thoft and Chevy Stevens. I'd recently read Thoft's first Fina Ludlow novel, Loyalty, so I was particularly looking forward to seeing her.

The traffic was much lighter than I expected as I drove across town, and I have a feeling that a lot of people decided to stay home and escape the heat. I snagged my favorite parking spot and made a beeline for books and air conditioning. Several people were perusing the shelves, so I made my purchase (Shona Patel's Teatime for the Firefly, Eileen Brady's Muzzled, and Brynn Bonner's Death in Reel Time-- hey, The Poisoned Pen was having a 25% off paperbacks sale from 4 to 6 PM!) before parking myself in my preferred seat to read. Bookstore owner Barbara Peters walked in to put some prizes on the table, and as she looked around, she seemed to be a bit worried. "Trying to time these events is a crap shoot," she told me. "I'm going to go back to 2 PM for Saturdays instead of 5 PM [the time for this event]. I think too  many people have decided to stay home out of the heat by this time of day." As it happens, 2 PM suits me better-- although I had a feeling that staff would be putting out those extra chairs they had at the ready. Before she moved on to her next task, Barbara and I also chatted about calling numbers for the prizes that are often given out at these events. As Barbara moved on, she remarked, "Most authors choose the number seventeen. I have no idea why!"

The leaky blue cups...

L to R: Ingrid Thoft, Barbara Peters, Chevy Stevens

When Barbara and the authors took their seats and I fired up my camera, I immediately found another reason to be grateful for the upcoming change in time: the sun. At the angle it was shining through the bookstore window, I knew it would be a miracle if I could get any decent shots. (And I didn't.) Ingrid Thoft was sitting in a dead zone, and the light wasn't optimal for the other two either. So-- I apologize for the lousy photos I've included in this recap.

Before she introduced the two authors, Barbara let us know that there would be plenty of giveaways: four books, an American Express gift card, and a gift basket that had come all the way from Canada. The publishers had also provided tea and cookies, but she asked us to wait a bit before getting any tea: "It's been discovered that the blue plastic cups they provided are leaking, so someone's gone out to get replacements!"

Chevy Stevens

I looked around to see that the staff did have to put out those extra chairs. So far, events that Barbara has planned aimed more specifically at women have been very well attended, so something tells me that there will be more.

Peters then introduced Chevy Stevens: "This is Chevy's first visit here. She's from Canada, and she probably wishes that she'd stayed!" Everyone laughed-- including Chevy. "I spent most of the day working on my next book in my hotel room," Chevy said. "I looked outside and saw the beautiful sky and all the sunshine, so I stepped out on the balcony. I think my hair was dry in two minutes! And the heat!" (I wonder how many of us thought of that tired old line "But it's a dry heat"?)

"Somewhere north of Boston..."

Available Now!

Chevy then proceeded to give us short summaries of her previous three books: Still Missing, Never Knowing, and Always Watching. (Click on each book title for a short summary from Chevy's website-- very interesting plot summaries!) Her latest book, That Night, is about a woman and her boyfriend who were wrongly convicted of her sister's murder and sent to prison. After serving fifteen years, the miscarriage of justice is discovered, and they are released. The book is about what happens to the two once they get out of prison. It's based on a true story in Montana.

"That Night has strong elements of bullying in it," Barbara Peters commented, and Stevens agreed, but the thing that has stayed with the author the most is how it was written. Unable to write it in the order she'd intended, she remarked, "It's amazing how much individual chapters can travel in the evolution of a book!"

Ingrid Thoft nodded her head in strong agreement. "I wrote the first eighty pages of Identity rather quickly, but after I'd finished them I realized that they weren't the first eighty pages, they were actually the second eighty pages!"

Barbara wanted to know if Chevy had had any difficulties in writing when so many of her readers were Americans. "No," Chevy said. "Other than an occasional difference in spelling or changing the name of a business that's not known outside of Canada, I haven't had any. I like to think that my books are set in Canada, but they are not love letters to Canada."

After Barbara mentioned the huge tax the Canadian government adds to any books shipped from the United States into Canada, Chevy was somehow reminded of something one of her readers had told her: "In my mind, the book takes place somewhere north of Boston!"

"She sounds just like my...."

Ingrid Thoft

Since her main character is a private investigator, Ingrid Thoft took a year-long certification class so she would know how to be one. She also decided to set her series in her native Boston because, as a recent transplant to Seattle, she didn't feel as though she knew the area well enough to write about it.

The certification class went over everything. The first semester was spent with a defense attorney, the second with a criminal investigator, and the third with a civil investigator. Thoft learned crime scene reconstruction, laws... just about every single thing she would need to know to be a private eye.

Thoft's main character, Fina Ludlow, is a P.I. for her family, which runs a large successful law firm specializing in personal injury cases. "I have to admit that I was biased against personal injury law because my father is a surgeon," Ingrid said. "This certification class opened my eyes." 

Just as she did in her acknowledgements in her first book Loyalty, Ingrid assured us that her own mother is nothing whatsoever like the matriarch of the Ludlow clan. "So many readers come up to me and say, 'She sounds just like my (fill in the blank)!' Mother-in-law is one of the most common fill-ins," Thoft said with a wry smile.

Available Now!

In Thoft's latest book Identity, a woman wants to sue a sperm bank in order to learn the identity of the father of her child-- even though she signed all sorts of waivers stating that she wouldn't. The conversation then segued into some of the things Ingrid learned while doing research for the book.

When sperm banks first came into being, they were not well regulated, and today some men are discovering that they've fathered up to seventy-five children. This can have huge implications in a small community, especially since there are now online databases which young people are accessing-- and learning how many half-siblings they have. In the beginning there also weren't as many tests run, which means some genetic abnormalities have unwittingly been passed on. 

"Everything I know I learned

 from crime fiction!"

L to R: Ingrid Thoft, Barbara Peters, Chevy Stevens

"Everything I know I learned from crime fiction," Barbara Peters said. When we all laughed, she did, too, but insisted, "No, it's true! I was made aware of some of this by Tony Hillerman when he explained why the Navajo wouldn't let Jim Chee marry anyone from certain clans. The Navajo were already aware that certain genetic traits could be passed on."

"Some people 'buy in bulk' so their children will be full siblings," Thoft added. (See what you can learn at these author events?) In Identity, Fina's father is gung-ho to take the woman's case. Fina is reluctant because she knows the daughter does not want to know the identity of her donor father.  "I like to write about topics that have social, economic, or political implications," Ingrid told us. When asked, she told us that she had the third book in her series written, but she wasn't allowed to talk about it.

Chevy loves to write about family dynamics, and her next book is "Those Girls," about three sisters who are very close. They escape from a very bad situation at home only to find themselves in an even worse one. This is the book that she was working on in her hotel room. 

One reader in the room asked Chevy if she had a background in therapy because she writes about it so well. Stevens replied, "No, but my mom is a psych nurse, I have a psychiatrist that I can talk with, and I read a lot of psych books."

In doing research for That Night, Stevens had to "fill out massive amounts of documents in order to learn things about the corrections system. The Canadian corrections system is not open to talking." Chevy also shared a bit about the first book she ever wrote: "It was one long monograph with no quotation marks or paragraphs. I was in real estate at the time and I had a second house. I sold that second house at just the right time, and the money from the sale gave me the breathing space I needed so I could have time to learn how to write."

Ingrid Thoft's husband has supported her writing endeavors, and she told us that one of the best learning experiences she had was taking a screenplay writing class at the University of Washington.

"With each book, you get to learn something new," Chevy said.

Ingrid told us that she and her husband live in a small condo, and her research books for Identity were stacked all over the living room. One evening when they were expecting friends over, her husband pointed to the books and said, "Do you think you could move these? I think we're sending mixed signals to our guests...." (One of the books more prominently stacked was titled Knock Yourself Up.) Ingrid looked around at the books and asked, "What's the problem?"

Research can be a problem from time to time. Chevy once tried to ask a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer about information she needed in order to write a book. It was difficult to keep her face from turning red as the man became more and more incredulous at her questions. 

"Can you imagine what someone would think if they pulled up my internet search history?!?" Ingrid exclaimed.

"I do have a good piece of advice for any of you who are thinking of writing. Retired experts are much more willing to talk!" Chevy confided.

After many things learned and much laughter, Barbara, Chevy, and Ingrid then began parceling out the goodies. What a fun evening! (And one of the numbers called was seventeen.)