Describe the first time you pictured Kate McGuire in your head. In my mind (and my very first, toss-away draft), I showed a bit of Kate’s life in Manhattan—including that one momentous day when the restaurant where she’d worked for two years shuttered (embezzlement), she lost her tiny, homey apartment (gone condo), and she broke off…
You are most well-known for your bestselling holiday fiction writings such as The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Town, but what inspired you to move in a different direction and blend fiction with biblical prophecy for The Time of Jacob’s Trouble? People are wondering, “What in the world is going on?” I heard a poll…
Would you like to live in the setting you created for the Casey Duncan novels? Temporarily, yes. Permanently…probably not. Rockton is off-the-grid in every way. A tiny hidden town deep in the Yukon forest. No electricity, no internet, no contact with the outside world. It would be an adventure, but I suspect the isolation would…
Describe the first time you pictured Joanna in your mind. It occurred while I was reading Sherlock Holmes’s description of Irene Adler in Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia. As you may recall, she was threatening to release very compromising photographs of her and the King of Bohemia unless he ended his engagement to the…
Describe the first time you pictured Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne in your head? I had decided to write a mystery, naive thing that I was, and to educate myself, I read every book I could find in our city library that had won, or been nominated for one of the big three mystery…
Describe the first time you pictured Buck Schatz in your head. Buck Schatz is a 90-year-old World War 2 veteran, and a retired Memphis detective, whose colorful past has a tendency not to stay in the past. The idea I had when I started writing this character was that I wanted to convey to readers…
Preface The revolution that transformed the Thirteen Colonies into the United States was in many ways one of the great mysteries of human history. This wasn’t simply because no one knew what the outcome would be—there was no precedent for a successful democratic uprising against a powerful government—but also due to the extraordinary new threads…
Describe the first time you pictured Lucy Lancaster in your head. Lucy first popped into my head when I was at a writers’ conference in Austin, Texas. I was listening to a panel about writing characters with interesting day jobs and this idea for an amateur sleuth who was a professional genealogist kept going around…
Describe the first time you pictured Ellery Hathaway in your head. Ellery Hathaway came into being twenty years ago with the first draft of what would eventually be The Vanishing Season. I’m a linear writer, so Ellery’s first appearance would have been in the prologue, when she’s fourteen years old and riding her bike alone…
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.…
