Happy Friday, all! It’s winter again here in New York– with snow and sleet the other day– so I’ve retreated to the equivalent of a warm blanket with vintage cozy mysteries, finishing the last few books in Elizabeth Daly’s 1940s Henry Gamadge series.  I’ve heard the term “American Agatha Christie” uttered many times about many…

Happy Friday, all! It’s been something of a whirlwind of a week: I took my very first plane trip since 2020 to meet up with the other two thirds of Team W to plot the fifth (!!) Team W collaboration, Band of Sisters came out in paperback on Tuesday, All the Ways We Said Goodbye…

Happy Friday, all! I just sent the latest round of revisions on Smith Book II, aka the Cuba book– now tentatively titled Two Wars and a Wedding— to my editor, so I’m feeling thoroughly bewildered and bemused and desperately trying to remember all the things I’m meant to be doing but have forgotten about while…

Happy Friday, all! I’ve been back in the revision cave with Smith Book II, aka The Cuba Book, aka the Book That Will Not Die.  (At some point, this book will actually have a title!  And be done.)  I’ve found when I’m deep in the throes of writing or revising I need a very particular…

Happy Friday, all!  And happy almost Valentine’s Day! This week, the stand out read for me was an advance copy of Piper Huguley’s By Her Own Design, about dress designer Ann Lowe, who designed dresses for Olivia de Havilland and Jacqueline Kennedy among many, many others.  Biographical fiction is tough to do well, but this…

Happy Friday, all! I’ve spent another week immersed in the late 18th/early 19th century with the Manhattan Well Murder– but I did sneak away from 1800 New York to 1960s England with the latest in Elly Griffiths’s Brighton Mysteries, The Midnight Hour, in which an aging theatre impressario is murdered with rat poison and the…

Happy Friday, all! Is it embarrassing to admit that I don’t remember what I read this week?  Mostly, I’ve been in a happy research haze, devouring anything I can find about the Manhattan Well Murder of 1799– the topic of the book I’m working on now.   The case was New York’s first big sensational murder…

Happy Friday, all! Do you ever have those weeks where you just can’t settle to a book?  I started the week with an Agatha Christie anthology, Midwinter Murder, which suited my lack of attention span perfectly since the stories were short enough to read one by one in little snippets, and included a few Poirots…

Happy Friday from the frozen Hudson Valley where I’ve been working on Cuba book revisions and supervising Zoom school! Between revisions and remote school, I’ve been going in heavily for comfort reads this week.  I kicked off the New Year with a theme read of Patricia Wentworth’s The Clock Strikes Twelve, in which Miss Silver…

Happy Friday, all! It’s hard to believe we’re only a week from Christmas when it’s sixty degrees in New York.  Between that and my preschooler being back in quarantine, there’s a bit of a Never Never Land, which-day-is-it-again? feel right now, and this week’s reading is equally without theme. I started off with Margaret Rogerson’s…