Moments In Crime

A Good Kind of Tired

READERS AND WRITERS

From year to year, I forget what the spring “book season” is like: lots of travel, lots of chances to talk about books with readers and to buy new books to add to my to-be-read stack … and not much sleep.

My husband and I made the two-hour drive back from the South Carolina Book Festival in time to drive an hour north of Charlotte to Statesville’s Iredell Public Library. I got to spend Sunday afternoon with a North Carolina Humanities Council “Let’s Talk About It” reading and discussion group on Mysteries: Clues to Who We Are.

Over two months, they’ll read six books, including Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress and Tony Hillerman’s Dance Hall of the Dead before they come together to talk about it with a “scholar.”

Sounds silly to call me the “scholar” for this discussion because I learned a lot listening to how the 25 people who attended responded to Sara Paretsky’s Burn Marks. I was just the fellow mystery fan who kept the conversational ball rolling. What could be more fun than a foggy afternoon spent with mystery readers talking about good books?

Frankly, I’m really tired from the Festival and the book discussion – the kind of tired that comes at the end of a fun, full weekend.

At the Festival, on one of the panels, some of us were asked about our writing lives. Was it what we’d dreamed it would be? The answer is yes, with an equivocal chuckle. Initially we had all dreamed of the isolated mountain or beach cabin where we would write, removed from the world. That part hasn’t actually come true.

What has come true – and what we couldn’t have foreseen – was the opportunity to spend time with readers. Not just in the form of words on the pages of a book, but to spend time in person. Meeting some of my favorite writers [see photo!], talking about books, blogging about books, chatting on-line and at libraries and bookstores and book clubs.

A DREAM PANEL:
Here I am (in red) with MARGARET MARON, JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING, and JOAN HESS

It’s a delightful kind of tired. But I’m looking forward to today. I’m back in my study again, alone, just me and the words. I’ve brought with me a head full of memory pictures of readers and writers passionate about stories. And I have a stack of books on my reading table that I brought back from the Festival, other people’s words I’m anxious to visit.

BOOK CLUBS

Before I close my study door, though, I’d like to issue an invitation. If you’d like me to visit your book club or civic group, either by phone, on-line chat, or in person, email me from my website and we’ll see if we can set something up. It’s always fun.

Surrounded by Books

Ah, the smell of books. New books, used books, kids books, unsolved mysteries, untasted recipes, unexplored history. What’s more fun than walking into a bookstore full of books? Walking into a convention center full of books, from bookstores large and small, new and used.

The South Carolina Book Festival offers just such a smorgasbord of books.

So what prompts my excitement? Seeing booksellers that I know from years’ of shopping in their stores? Studying the intent faces of bibliophiles in earnest search for a long-sought volume? The sense that, within the covers of all these books, lurk stories and pictures, adventures, experiences, all waiting to be shared. I can’t quite hear them speaking, but there is plenty of noise.

Is it the memories of my own special finds? Last year, I found a copy of Southern Fried Spirits: a Guide to Haunted Restaurants, Inns, and Taverns. How fun is that? Another year, it was an obscure volume about Pee Wee Gaskins, South Carolina’s famous redneck serial killer. You can’t find things like that just anywhere, you know.

I hope a few people will leave the Book Festival this year pleased to discover Avery Andrews and the Southern Fried Mystery series that features her, along with mysteries by Gwen Hunter and Carla Damron. We’re sharing a panel at 11:20 on Saturday.

I’m also looking forward to moderating a panel featuring food and cookbook writers Kim Sunee, Sallie Ann Robinson, and Nathalie Dupree. It would really be nice if they could bring samples of some of their recipes: Nathalie’s shrimp and grits or Gullah Sweet Tada Muffins.

Realistically, I know we’ll have to be content with listening about how the cooks in Sallie Ann’s family “throw down a meal” or how shelling garden peas in France turned Kim’s fingers green.

Just as being in a room full of books holds the promise of reading and adventure, so too does hearing about food hold promise. Sharing time with writers and readers, though, is more than promise. It is a delightful adventure of its own.

I’ve got to wander across to the Convention Center and see what’s in store.

New Book Trailer!

A MINI-MOVIE

In an interesting cross-media phenomenon, books now have "trailers" – a mini-movie much like those that entice us to see the latest Hollywood release. They're popping up on YouTube and the like.

Not to be outdone, imaginary Dacus, South Carolina, and attorney Avery Andrews are featured in their own book trailer on YouTube. Click here to get a preview of Hog Wild, now available in paperback.

SIGNED COPIES

If you’d like a signed copy of any of the Southern Fried Mystery series and you can’t visit one of the appearances listed on my website, just call Park Road Books, my wonderful neighborhood bookstore, at 704-525-9239. The nice folks there can help you. If you’d like the inscription personalized, just let them know what and to whom.

BACK TO WORK

Enough chatting. Got to go finish next year’s book. Okay, a book is never really finished until my wonderful editor Ruth Cavin and her assistant Toni Plummer gently ease it from my tight grasp and tell me I’m forbidden from tinkering with it further. Until then, I got to go back to work. More tomorrow from the South Carolina Book Festival!

Well, Hush My Mouth

The 4th in the Southern Fried Mystery series, Hush My Mouth, appeared in bookstores yesterday.  At least I think it did.  I’m locked in my study finishing the next book, the one I hope you’ll be looking for in 2009.  So could someone go check a bookstore and see if Hush is there?

I’m working like a dervish so I can spend the weekend hanging out with other readers and writers at the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia.  If you’re anywhere near the Palmetto state this weekend, head to the Columbia Convention Center for one of the best free book events in the country.  Several St. Martin’s writers, including Julia Spencer-Fleming, will be there.

Here are some folks waiting to get their books signed a couple of years ago:

South Carolina Book Festival 2005

I’ve already made lunch plans for Friday – Yesterday’s in Five Points for some chicken-fried steak.  If you’ve read any of the Southern Fried series, you’ll know South Carolina attorney Avery Andrews loves all her four basic food groups fried – and none better than chicken-fried steak at Yesterday’s.  In fact, it features prominently in both the first book (Southern Fried) and the latest, Hush My Mouth. 

This is a completely unpaid endorsement of some of the finest eating around.  I’ve been visiting Yesterday’s since I was a law school student.  I’ve been known to eat there three or four times a week, when I could arrange it.  And I’ve never once ordered anything but chicken-fried steak.  It’s that good.

A disclaimer about the books: they contain NO RECIPES.  Avery’s too busy dealing with her family, friends, and real cases to spend any time cooking.  But she knows all the best places to eat.

So if you can make it this weekend, February 22 and 23, come on down to Columbia.  What can be better than good books and good food?  Not much, in my book.

For other events on the Hush tour schedule, click here.

Blogging This Week: Cathy Pickens

Cathy Pickens, an attorney who specialized in complex civil litigation, teaches law and ethics in the McColl School of Business, Queens University of Charlotte. Cathy grew up in South Carolina, where her family has lived for generations.  Visit her web site at www.cathypickens.com.

A spring day brings attorney Avery Andrews a new case. Fran French comes from Atlanta looking for her friend Neanna, who’s more like a sister to her. Neanna went to Dacus looking for information on the unsolved murder of her aunt Wenda, and now she’s missing.

Twenty years earlier, Wenda’s body was found posed on a memorial bench in the cemetery, her packed luggage at her feet, as if ready for a journey. When Neanna is found in her car, dead from a shot to the head, the police want to call it suicide. Fran insists it’s impossible that Neanna killed herself and urges Avery to help her prove it.

While Avery is sifting through Neanna’s and Wenda’s confused past and present, her office mate Melvin Bertram is befriended by a trio of ghost hunters who arrive in search of ectoplasm from the long-dead. The trio, christened “the ghosters” by Avery, hope to talk Melvin into investing in their TV pilot, oblivious to the fact that someone is baiting them with increasingly ridiculous ghost sightings. In no time at all, the ghosters are having altercations with the resident biker gang and with Avery’s private investigator. Let no one say life in Camden County is uninteresting.

In this latest in Cathy Pickens’s Southern Fried Mystery series, Avery explores the nature of family—the ones we’re born into and the ones we find—and learns about the haunting power of the past in the process. Hush My Mouth offers an original blend of humor and mystery, peppered with quirky characters and boasting a decidedly Southern flavor.