Mystery We Write Tour ~ Larissa Reinhart

HALO, GA: A FICTIONAL TOWN YOU KNOW WELL

PORTRAIT OF A DEAD GUY is set in the fictional, small town of Halo, Georgia, home to the artist Cherry Tucker, her nutty, dysfunctional family, and the recent murder of Dustin Branson. Halo is in the northeast corner of the fictional Forks County, cattywampus from the county seat of Linecreek where folks’ noses tend to raise a smidge when talking about poor, little Halo. That’s damn irritating if you’re from Halo.

Halo’s not big enough for a Walmart, but they’ve got what they need -- the TruBuy, BBQ, and a Sonic. Unless what they need can only be found at Walmart. Then they’ve got to suck it up and go to Linecreek.

At one time, Halo had been a train stop, like many towns in the South. On two main avenues running off the town square like spokes, the remnants of their whistlestop heyday can be seen in the turn of century homes -- a few Georgian Foursquare mansions and around two dozen small bungalows, including Cherry’s studio, her Great-Gam’s old cottage. A few old families still occupy these homes, other houses have been converted into commercial property for doctors, lawyers, small shops like Cherry’s, and Cooper’s Funeral Home. The avenues are lined with trees and azaleas, but the sidewalks suffer from tree root upheaval and crumbling curbs. The streets are wide but patched with blacktop that has a tendency to sink in comparison to the paved, narrow roads on the outskirts of town.

A few blocks more and you’ve crossed the old town line and found Red’s County Line Tap, an old tavern that has been revived into a sports bar. Red’s promises cold beer, hot wings, and tables that can be shoved together to accommodate Little League teams after their Saturday afternoon games. Stretching beyond the rough town boundaries are the commercial properties you find in most small towns such as JB’s pristine Ford dealership and Mather’s begrimed Tire Shop. Follow the county highways in any direction and they’ll lead you to newer developments of finer homes, like the Bransons or Max Avtaikin’s, or even Cherry’s Grandpa’s farm which is neither fine nor new.

Although it had a different name, you’ve been to this town or driven through it, right?

In my mind, Halo is a synthesis of various small towns I have known and lived, some in Georgia, some in the midwest, and even one in Japan. The characteristics of a small town are similar the world over in terms of the older center and newer outskirts. Other common small town characteristics lie in town pride, interesting characters, and love of gossip.

Halo is not unique in these matters, and that’s on purpose. When I write about Halo, I want the reader to already know her. The reader should feel comfortable following Cherry and her motley crew of family and friends through the streets of town and know that when Cherry shops at the TruBuy, it will have dusty shelves and crowded aisles. When she goes to Mather’s Tire Shop, there will be a nudie calendar from 1982 stuck on the back wall of the garage. And when she enters JB’s Ford Dealership, you already know the glass windows showcasing a Mustang and F-150 are immaculate and the showroom is permeated with new-car scent.

Does Halo remind you of another town? I hope so. And I hope you want to visit Halo again.

Contest:

I’d like to encourage readers to enter my giveaway contest. Up for grabs is an e-copy of PORTRAIT OF A DEAD GUY, book one of the Cherry Tucker Mystery Series. Leave a comment and you're automatically entered. Include your email addy so I can get in touch with you should your name be selected at random. The winner will be announced on my blog (http://theexpatreturneth.blogspot.com/) on December 12, 2012. Good luck!

Bio:

Larissa began her writing career in second grade when she sold her first publication to a neighbor for a nickel. After moving around the Midwest, Japan, and the South, she now lives in Georgia with her husband, daughters, and Biscuit, a Cairn Terrier. She loves small town characters with big attitudes, particularly sassy women with a penchant for trouble. PORTRAIT OF A DEAD GUY is a 2012 Daphne du Maurier finalist, a 2012 The Emily finalist, and a 2011 Dixie Kane Memorial winner. STILL LIFE IN BRUNSWICK STEW, A Cherry Tucker Mystery #2, releases in May 2013. When she’s not writing about southern fried chicken, she writes about Asian fried chicken at her blog about life as an ex-expat at theexpatreturneth.blogspot.com.

She and her writing friends also chat weekly about books on their Little Read Hens Facebook page and littlereadhens.com. You can find Larissa chatting on Facebook;

Twitter; and Goodreads. She loves pinning on Pinterest. Her character, Cherry Tucker has her own Pinterest site now, too, for her love of DIY clothing, art, and Southern food. You can also find more information on her website at larissareinhart.com.

Blurb:

In Halo, Georgia, folks know Cherry Tucker as big in mouth, small in stature, and able to sketch a portrait faster than buckshot rips from a ten gauge -- but commissions are scarce. So when the well-heeled Branson family wants to memorialize their murdered son in a coffin portrait, Cherry scrambles to win their patronage from her small town rival.

As the clock ticks toward the deadline, Cherry faces more trouble than just a controversial subject. Her rival wants to ruin her reputation, her ex-flame wants to rekindle the fire, and someone’s setting her up to take the fall. Mix in her flaky family, an illegal gambling ring, and outwitting a killer on a spree, Cherry finds herself painted into a corner she’ll be lucky to survive.

Buy Links:

Amazon Kindle     B&N Nook     Kobo

Amazon Paperback     B&N Paperback

Mystery We Write Tour ~ Earl Staggs

Madison, thank you for letting the Mystery We Write Tour Bus stop here on our blog tour. You asked us to talk about our settings and what makes them unique.  I’m afraid the settings for my latest novel aren’t unique at all.  TALL CHAMBERS: JUSTIFIED ACTION takes place in Washington, DC, and in Afghanistan.

So, instead, I thought I’d offer a trip back through the pages of history to see how the publishing industry we’re all involved in arrived at the point where it is today.  I’m sure you won’t find any verifiable facts in this story, but you may find a chuckle or two.

I originally wrote this about a year ago, and a lot of people enjoyed it them.  For those who saw it before, here it is again.  For those who haven’t seen it before, here it is.

THE HISTORY OF PUBLISHING

. . .according to Earl

Long, long ago, a bunch of guys were sitting around the cave telling stories to each other and a guy called Hiero came up with an idea.

“Hey,” he said, “we should preserve these stories on rocks.”

So Hiero came up with a bunch of symbols for animals and fish and birds and people and other things. They invented a hammer and chisel and started chiseling their stories on rocks using the symbols. Since Hiero made up the symbols, they called them Hieroglyphics.

I was just a kid then, but I studied hard and became a chiseler.

Then one of the women fell on a basket of grapes and squashed them into liquid and one guy said, “Hey, we can use that to draw our stories on the cave walls.” We took some hair from a mastodon’s leg, tied it to a stick, and called it a brush. Soon we learned to drop women on other fruits and berries and came up with other liquids. We named it ink, and soon were drawing our symbols all over the cave walls.

That went fine for a while until some guy invented something he called paper. He said, “Hey, let’s paint our stories on paper.”

A guy over in the corner named Webster said, “Hey, that’s fine, but enough with the symbols. Let’s use words. I just made up a whole lot of them and someday everybody will be using them.”

So we invented pencils and pens and started drawing words on paper. That became very popular, once you got the hang of picking the right words.

Now, some people were better than others at picking words. Webster came up with a name for what we were doing. He called it writing. The ones who were good at picking the best words became known as writers. I was tired of chiseling, so I studied hard and became a writer. It was tedious work doing one page at a time, though.

A few months later -- and you’ll notice I’m condensing the time frame to make this move a little faster – a guy named Gutenberg invented a machine he called a printing press. What a boon that was! Put words in a flat plate, smear ink on it, and print thousands of pieces of paper. Oh, my. We were on a roll.

Then another guy had the idea of putting those pieces of paper in a pile and gluing them together. His name was Booker, so we called them books.

About the same time, a couple of guys named Royal and Underwood invented gadgets called typewriters. That made it a lot easier for writers to write the books.

That was great. Soon we had stacks and stacks of books. Remember Webster, the guy who came up with all those words? Even he got into the act. He gathered up all his words, put them in a book, and called it a dictionary.

But what to do with all those books? A guy named Barnes said, “Hey, I have a friend named Noble. We’ll go in together and open a store to sell the books.”

Before long, we had huge companies called publishers cranking out books, and we had bookstores all over the world selling them. The whole system needed more people to make it work, so editors, distributors, shippers, and warehousers were born. Another group of people said, “Hey, we’re agents. You writers send us your stuff, and we’ll sell it to the publishers.”

Yes, a lot of people were involved in the system, but it worked. Everybody was reading books.

Meanwhile, up in Seattle, a couple of kids named Jobs and Gates were putting things together called computers. Not the huge things big companies were using. These were small enough to sit on a desk, and soon everybody had one. This made it even easier for writers to write. These machines could even communicate with each other over a web that covered the whole wide world called the Internet. Wow! Talk about progress.  Before long, these machines were small and compact enough to hold on our laps.

Things were about to change, though. A guy named Amazon started selling books over the Internet. You didn’t even have to go to the bookstore. Just order them through your computer, and they’d be shipped to your door. This Amazon guy went one step further. One day, he said, “Hey, look what I invented. I call it a Kindle. I don’t have to ship the books to you anymore. I’ll just send you the words and you read them on this thing. Let’s call them ebooks”

Remember those guys named Barnes and Noble? They said, “Hey, we have one of those, too. We call it a Nook. Soon, there was a bunch more of them. A lot of people weren’t reading printed books anymore. They were reading ebooks in the palm of their hands. Talk about change!

More changes were coming, though. A bunch of writers were sitting around one day and one of them said, “Hey, we don’t need agents and publishers and distributors and all those people. Let’s publish our ebooks ourselves. Since all those other people won’t be getting any of the pie, we can sell them for less money and still make more per book than before.”

And that’s how it all happened and that brings us to where we are today. Writers have a choice of going the traditional way through agents and publishers or we can publish our own ebooks.

No one knows what changes the future will bring. It could be the entire publishing industry will crumble, and we’ll go back to preserving our stories on rocks. If that happens, I’ll be okay. I still have my tools and I can be a chiseler again.

Thanks for reading all the way to here.  Now you’re invited to visit my site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com . . .

. . .where you can read Chapter One of my novel MEMORY OF A MURDER, which gathered a long list of Five Star reviews.  You can also read a short story called “The Day I Almost Became a Great Writer,” which some say is the funniest story I’ve ever written.  There’s also “White Hats and Happy Trails,” a true story about the day I spent with a boyhood idol, Roy Rogers. There’s even a picture of my wife and me with Roy to prove it’s all true

You might also click on Short Stories at the top for information about my collection, SHORT STORIES OF EARL STAGGS, 16 tales of Mystery, available in all ebook formats, on sale for 99 cents.

Thanks, Madison, for being so gracious and thanks to everyone who dropped by.

Please leave a comment before you go and you may win a free book.

At the end of the tour, I’ll draw two names from those who left comments.  The first name drawn will receive a signed print copy of MEMORY OF A MURDER, a mystery novel with a long list of Five Star Reviews.  The second name drawn will receive their choice of a signed print copy or an ebook of SHORT STORIES OF EARL STAGGS, a collection of 16 tales of mystery from hardboiled to humorous.

Earl Staggs

Email: earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net

Website: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com

Mystery We Write Blog Tour ~ Anne K. Albert

Frank, Incense and Muriel takes place in western New York State, in and around Niagara Falls. I chose this setting because I’m familiar with the area, and I imagine a majority of my readers will be as well.

Not only is it a popular tourist destination, but just the mere mention of “Niagara Falls” conjures images of love and intrigue. Four seasons add to the mix. Winters can be brutal with plenty of snow and blinding winds that cause whiteouts. And since the story itself takes place the week before Christmas, I added a holiday feel to the story.

Here’s an excerpt:

Frankie pulled into a parking space on Glendale Avenue and cut the engine. I peered past the windshield to the glimmering tower of glass and steel in front of us.

“This is Rachel’s building?” I asked.

“Impressive, huh?”

“And then some. I’ve been here before. With Val when she returned from Melbourne and was apartment hunting. The bird’s eye view of Niagara Falls is spectacular.”

Equally spectacular was the uniformed man at the door who greeted us beneath the burgundy canopy that marked the entranceway. In his twenties, he looked as if he’d stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine.

I expected Frankie to ask him questions about Rachel. But other than a quick nod, he bypassed him completely. We rode the elevator to the twelfth floor in silence. I could feel Frankie looking at me, but I feigned interest on the control panel and watched the buttons light up one by one.

When the elevator doors opened, he pulled a key from his pocket. “She’s in 1224. It should be the last unit on the right.”

“You seem to know your way around. Have you been here before?”

“Nope.”

I pointed to the key. “Then where’d you get that? The key fairy?”

He grinned. “You really are jealous of Rachel, aren’t you?”

Duh. Admitting I’d harbored an image of him and a certain sixteen-year-old temptress on the dance floor for the past fifteen years would only inflate his ego. But the truth is I did, and each time I saw red. 

Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with the color of her dress or her platinum dyed hair. And not once had I considered the possibility of Rachel becoming a responsible adult, having a successful career, or living in a prestigious downtown building.

All that changed when Jack asked me to keep an eye on Frankie and report on his actions.

“Where’d you get the key?” I repeated.

Frankie unlocked the door and gave it a shove. “Jack gave me it this morning when we met in his office.”

I frowned.  Why would Jack have a key to Rachel’s condo? Before I could ask the question aloud, Frankie gestured for me to step inside.

I slipped past him into the apartment, kicked off my boots and soaked up the ambiance. White Italian marble floor tiles ran the entire length of the large foyer. A massive crystal chandelier shimmered high overhead. Crown molding topped walls painted a warm, relaxing beige. A print from Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe series hung on the wall. A large gilded framed mirror hung on the opposite wall. Beneath it stood an antique hall console table.

Three doorways stretched along the right side of the foyer, two more on the left. A quick peek inside the first room to the left indicated I’d found a bedroom. The kitchen and den were to my right. I bypassed them all, however, for the living room. My feet sunk into the plush, mushroom-colored carpet. A sofa, love seat and upholstered chair–all covered in luxurious, matching silk, brocade and leather–took advantage of the panorama beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Spellbound, I studied the Falls. A cloud of mist hung in the air.

Bio: Anne K. Albert’s award winning mystery and romantic suspense stories chill the spine, warm the heart and soothe the soul…all with a delightful touch of humor. When not at the keyboard she loves to travel, walk on a beach, visit friends and family, and of course, read using ‘Threegio’ her beloved and much cherished Kindle 3G. She can be found online at Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Pinterest, Amazon and her blog.

Thanks for featuring me today, Madison. I’d like to remind readers to enter my giveaway contest. Up for grabs is an e-copy of FRANK, INCENSE AND MURIEL. Leave a comment and you're automatically entered. The winner will be chosen at random and announced on my blog on December 12, 2012. Good luck!

-- 

Anne K. Albert

Website, Blog

Mystery We Write Tour ~ Susan Claridge

BIO

My name is Susan Claridge and I write under the name, S.R.Claridge. I'm a mom,
a wife, a daughter, a sister, a niece, an in-law and friend; but no matter what
hat I wear, I’m always the same simply, complicated woman beneath. I love autumn,
moonlight and Grey Goose Vodka martinis with bleu cheese olives. I believe
Friday nights were made for Mexican food and margaritas and Sunday mornings
warrant an extra-spicy Bloody Mary. I love Jesus and know that any good in me
comes from God. I believe in the power of prayer, in the freedom of forgiveness
and that people can change. I have a terrible temper and a tender heart, and somehow they balance. At times I may appear teetering on the edge, but I'd rather walk dangerously where there's a view than let life pass me by. Relationships intrigue me and so does the loyalty of Mafia families, which is why I chose these topics for my novels.

BOOKS

No Easy Way  (debut novel; nominated for The Molly Award from the HODRW 2010)

Tetterbaum’s Truth (book 1 in the Just Call Me Angel series)

Traitors Among Us (book 2 in the Just Call Me Angel series)

Russian Uprising (book 3 in the Just Call Me Angel series)

Death Trap (book 4 in the Just Call Me Angel series)

Petals of Blood (short story; Pushcart Prize Nomination 2013)

UPCOMING RELEASE

House of Lies (political/cult suspense, to be released October 2012)

LINKS

Website:  www.AuthorSRClaridge.com

Blog:  www.FeelingTheFiction.blogspot.com

Twitter:  www.Twitter.com/SRClaridgeWrite

Facebook:  www.Facebook.com/AuthorSRClaridge