Jane K. Cleland On Writing Jane Austen’s Lost Letters I was born loving Jane Austen—I mean that literarily. Some expectant mothers play classical music to their unborn children. Others sing lullabies. My mother read Pride and Prejudice to me in the womb. To say my mother was a Jane Austen fan is like calling the…
As with all the Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries, Hidden Treasure, the thirteenth entry in the series, uses genuine antiques to tell a fictional story. The questions that surround antiques are fraught with mysteries. Who designed it? Why? What was going on in their world that made this artifact appropriate or desired? Who produced it? Who…
Would you like to live in the setting you created for the Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series? Oh, yes. Rocky Point is a special place, a quaint town on the rugged coast of New Hampshire. It’s a sweet and decent community, the kind of place where local bands play familiar tunes on warm summer nights.…
Discover (or remember to order) your next cozy with a delightfully convenient shopping list of upcoming soft-boiled mysteries! Last month, we welcomed spring with great March cozies; this month, April showers bring awesome reads! Let us know in the comments how you like it and what you can't wait to read next! Like this shopping…
The Mystery Readers International have announced the nominees for the 2017 Macavity Awards. The Macavity Award—named for the “mystery cat” of T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats—is an annual award celebrating the year's best in the mystery genre.
Saturday night, Malice Domestic presented the 29th annual Agatha Awards at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bethesda, Maryland. The Agatha Awards honor the traditional mystery, a genre loosely defined as mysteries that contain no explicit sex or excessive gore/gratuitous violence. Newcomers and veterans in the genre gathered to celebrate the best of the best of…
Malice Domestic, an annual convention held in Washington, D.C., honoring the best of the traditional/cozy mystery genre, has announced the nominees for 2017's Agatha Awards. Loosely defined as “mysteries which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence,” the Agatha Award salutes the books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie. This year,…
Every Wednesday, we here at Criminal Element will put together a list of Staff Picks of the books that published the day before—sharing the ones that we are looking forward to reading the most! This week, we get another Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery from Jane K. Cleland! See what else this week brings in the…
Glow of Death by Jane K. Cleland is the 11th Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery (Available November 29, 2016). It’s the Fourth of July in New Hampshire’s picturesque seacoast town of Rocky Point, but the patriotic celebration is outshadowed by real-life fireworks when murder trumps merriment in Jane K. Cleland’s 11th Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery, Glow…
Glow of Death by Jane K. Cleland is the 11th Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery (Available November 29, 2016). As a warm ocean breeze ruffles the tall grass along Rocky Point’s sandy dunes, Josie Prescott visits the house of a wealthy local couple, Edwin and Ava Belcher. She’s been called in to appraise their Tiffany lamp,…
