Fresh and Lively Summer Reading, THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER, by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“How could a former US President finally be able to take over an action-hero team? And what might the costs of that effort become? Or even, dare we imagine, the rewards?”

 

A fresh release of this lively thriller from master author James Patterson and presidential expert Bill Clinton comes just in time to add gusto to the summer reading stack. The President’s Daughter offers a quick and believable trip into the lives of a former President and his family, tucked into a secure compound in the White Mountains of New Hampshire—but no longer protected the way a serving President’s home would be, in any sense.

 

Bill Clinton’s humor and persistence peek through the narrative every couple of pages, making double-takes common all the way. For example, Matthew Keating is far from resigned to a quiet post-importance life, despite losing his slot to the maneuvering of the woman he’d brought in as vice president: “Unfortunately, I went into a tough presidential campaign with more experience as a Navy SEAL in battles overseas than in political wars at home. And I was still angry about it, so angry I was tempted a couple of times to resign and let her have the d*** office before she rode to victory in the November election. But I couldn’t do it. No current or former SEAL would ever give up before the job is one. And no president should, either.”

 

Between the pithy statements of a former President commenting on his own role, and the page-turning plot with James Patterson’s quintessential crime threats and villains, there’s barely room for the “President’s daughter” of the title to exert her own leadership. Off for a romantic hike with Tim, a possible long-term partner, Melanie Keating no longer has any Secret Service coverage—and a Muslim terrorist with a personal vendetta against Mel’s father can access other resentful global allies as he aims to torment the Keating family.

 

Still, Patterson knows the drill, and when Mel can finally take the lead in this action thriller, she does so from her own form of strength, having practiced and prepared in advance in case she was ever taken hostage: “Me feels the SUV stay on a dirt road for a good length of time, and she resumes counting one more time, going one thousand one, one thousand two, and keeping focused. The tears have stopped. No time for tears. Her legs and arms are cramped, her mouth is dry-raw with the cloth stuck inside, and she’s wondering how long it will be before Tim’s body is found.”

 

One of the delights of this partnership of authors is their expertise—there’s no moment of doubt about a proposed weapon or strategy, because Patterson is an established pro. And the insights into POTUS emotions and actions are surely as authentic. In The President’s Daughter the former President takes opportunities to spring into action himself (“former SEAL” = “always SEAL,” right?), which is worth a few chuckles, imagining that Clinton couldn’t resist putting himself into a landing party. In fact, much of the plotting for this exhilarating novel must have put that aspect front-and-center: How could a former US President finally be able to take over an action-hero team? And what might the costs of that effort become? Or even, dare we imagine, the rewards?

 

One small flaw to all this imagining is the way the book’s villains are painted as vulnerable in terms of emotion, intelligence, and insufficient planning. That’s the part that shouldn’t be taken as a portrait of the real world of global threat. War isn’t a game when real lives are engaged.

 

But that’s a minor complaint, compared the skillful and well-paced plot of this entertaining thriller. An easy and enjoyable summer read, this book from a pair of clever and often humorous authors makes a great addition to the summer reading menu, and leaves a bright lemony aftertaste. May every President’s daughter get to be the hero of a global interchange and family survival, despite the often soiled politics of American life.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

Scary and Compelling Thriller from Carter Wilson, MISTER TENDER'S GIRL

Coupled with the title, the cover on Carter Wilson's fifth book, MISTER TENDER'S GIRL, scared me -- in fact, I found the combo so creepy that I almost skipped reading the book. And that would have been a mistake, because this is one of the smartest, well-twisted, enjoyable thrillers I've read this year.

Wilson's area of the mystery/thriller genre has been labeled "dark domestic thrillers." In MISTER TENDER'S GIRL, the action opens in Manchester, New Hampshire, a gritty, once-industrial city that now hosts a fine crop of tech firms and coffee shops, along with a charmingly diverse population. It's the coffee shop aspect that matters here -- Alice Gray, whose name was originally Alice Hill, owns a coffee shop, and in addition, a  colonial-style, century-old building nearby where she lives: In one building, her low-keysecond-floor apartment where she lives (quirkily, she has no knives in her home), and a third-floor space rented to a quiet tenant she barely knows. Things are going along reasonably well for her. She rarely misses England, where at age 14 she was brutally attacked by a pair of teens like herself ... and her carefully constructed new life lets her mostly hide from her past.

Until, one day, an online dating site she's signed up for, to satisfy a friend who thinks her life looks lonely, gives her a match from a name deep in her past: "Mister Tender," the name of the most outrageous character in a graphic novel series created by her now-dead father. The horrors are about to open up once again.

The creepiest part of the disaster Alice is walking into is the sense, even in Manchester, NH, that she's being watched by some evil linked to her past. Someone online knows about the crime against her, the killing of her father, and even where she was this week -- in fact, it looks like she has multiple stalkers, and no safe place to go or person to be with. Add her very odd mother to that list, and an ex-boyfriend, and people back in England, where the bizarre and cruel changes of her life began.

Wilson's skill places the creepiness smack in the middle of our ordinary modern lives, where our computers are close at hand and our past is increasingly incapable of being erased from the Internet.  For Alice, that means there's no safety possible:

Today is the fourteenth anniversary of my attempted murder. I had almost forgotten, but my phone screen reminds me. October eighteenth. I remember it mostly as it was referred to in court, the solicitors repeatedly saying, "On the night of October 18 ..." I will hold no memorial on this day, carry no special reflections. I'll just try to get through it as I do every other.

So she lets her employees know she'll get to work late, and almost without thought, she follows the one clue she's been given to the stalkers in her life: She enters a site called "www.mistertender.com" where there's a message board of people obsessed with her life. She wants to type "LEAVE ME ALONE" and she enters the site, without identifying herself yet --

But before I type a single thing, a direct message appears in the inbox of this forum. It's from the master of ceremonies himself, Mr. Interested.

I click to open it. The message only has two words:

Hello, Alice.

This level of threat soon puts Alice on the run, back to the site of the original crime and colliding with her would-be killers. Yet someone, or maybe multiple someones, continues to track her and communicate.

This is a true page-turner, an assembly of threats that feel so close to home that the twists of plot become both chilling and agonizing -- who could be knocking at our own social media doors?

Wilson's finale provides even more twists, and a threat level that's over the top, but mercifully quick to resolve. Whether Alice will survive is always in doubt. Along with whether she'll ever feel safe again.

A must-read for anyone who can handle the suspense of wondering whether their own Internet-connected life might be, shall we say, just a bit risky after all? Best of all, Wilson's created a tie to graphic novel work that's stunning. I'd recommend this one for all thriller readers, with the reassurance that in spite of the terrifying aspects of the cover and what "might" happen, the book's resolution is highly satisfying -- go for it.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH by Katherine Towler

When I asked for a review copy of this book by Katherine (Katie) Towler, I had in mind her lovely literary novels placed on an island between and during world wars. Somehow I thought THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH would be an old-fashioned tale of a long-ago poet who made rhymes and stood on the street corner to sell them.

Nope. If I had looked more closely at the book's subtitle -- A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship -- I might have made a better guess. But all's well, because I found myself blissfully engaged, page after page, chapter after chapter, in one of the most wonderful surprises of my literary year.

Katherine Towler's life focused on writing from an early age; she was writing poems at 10, and as a young adult she craved both solitude (for writing) and diversion, the kind that comes from moving often. To her own surprise, after years of learning to spend time alone in pursuit of her best writing, she married Jim when the two of them were 35, in a midlife marriage with a great deal of gentleness and ample space to be herself. The couple settled into a rented space in an older home at the edge of the tidal waters of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in a neighborhood where their cat, at least, felt immediately at home.

And it was through a neighbor's cat that she first exchanged word with Robert Dunn, a poet himself, living nearby in far less comfort than she had. Katie's slow dance of becoming acquainted with her coastal town and its residents needed to balance with her urge to withdraw, to create for herself the solitude she felt her writing demanded. Her early perceptions of Robert gave her an ideal to look toward: a man who walked slowly around the town keeping to himself, not making conversation, not even meeting anyone's gaze, living the life Katie believed that her craft -- and his -- demanded.

I admired the nimble grace with which Robert navigated this territory, his ability to maintain a guarded privacy while, in a limited fashion, letting people in. He appeared to have mastered something fundamental I wasn't sure I ever would, though I was feeling my way toward my own kind of balance. For the first time, I appeared to have found a place to live where my warring impulses could coexist, and in my marriage a relationship that could accommodate, although not always easily, my need to disappear.

To Katie's surprise, a connection she formed with Robert through Portsmouth choosing to select him as the town's second Poet Laureate -- she was in the selection group -- tugged her into Robert's circle of friends. It wasn't just the surprise of being chosen for this, but even more so, the discovery of  how many people considered themselves Robert's friends that startled her. Then came the biggest surprise of all: Robert's decision, step by prickly step, to involve Katie in his efforts to stay alive and keep writing while struggling with the diseases that poverty and aging (and cigarettes) put into place.

The struggles that ensue will seem achingly familiar to any creative person agonizing over how to manage enough privacy while also contributing to a family or community. In Towler's book, the frictions of two writers in need of inner solitude -- she with her novels and Robert with his poems -- also come laden with New England revelations about how difficult poverty can be, and how embarrassing and humiliating the lack of power in a personal life becomes.

The slow pace of discovery of Robert's life and secrets mingles with Towler's own slow movement into strength as a published author, a tide of rising and falling parallel to the nearby ocean's. The two poets also intermingle their life lessons in terms of spirituality and religion. Although none of Tower's own poems appear here, those of Robert's often call upon familiar texts while simplifying the language to paint the New England town life accurately, like this one:

Vesper sparrows, turnable of bellbirds,
the small owls have called from tree to tree.
No need to comfort or be comforted.
Pitched high or low, grief is a kind of love
and so must be. Or no one else will know
when the sparrow falls, least of all the sparrow.
       --- Robert Dunn

I ached with Towler in both the beautiful unpeeling of her own life here -- that of Katie the writer adapting to settling in one place -- and the slow realization of Robert's life through his requests to her and her own discomfort in filling his needs. Suspense builds in the telling, as we readers realize, with Katie, the inevitability of Robert's illness and oncoming death, and the enormous efforts of personal sacrifice that both he and Katie choose to make in the long and unpredictable process.

Make time for this one. Pick up a copy or two now (if you've read this far in the review, it's likely there will be people you love, to whom you will want to give this book), but set it on the shelf or table for a quiet rainy afternoon when you can relinquish Ordinary Time and settle into the deep, long sweeps of the narrative.

I will never face writing in the same way again. And the next time I visit Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I expect to be haunted by the ghosts of Robert Dunn and the younger, struggling writer who was Katherine Towler before she stepped forward into her own strong ability to evoke such a portrait as THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH.

[From Counterpoint Press, and available through bookstores and online.]

Local Author: AN UNCERTAIN GRAVE, Cathy Strasser (New Hampshire)

Yes, Kingdom Books is in Vermont -- but New Hampshire is only seven miles from us. And we're happy fans of a New Hampshire traditional restaurant, Polly's Pancakes, in Sugar Hill, NH, about 25 miles away. Pulled together, that explains why I'll say that Cathy Strasser, who lives in Sugar Hill, NH, is "local" to Kingdom Books ... and it also explains why a copy of her 2014 mystery AN UNCERTAIN GRAVE reached me through a neighbor on the ridge here.

Strasser's first mystery (her "day job" is occupational therapy) is a good one, well plotted and paced. The first few chapters are the only ones that show up as "early writer" work -- and an attentive editor might have suggested trimming the last few pages. As the narrative swings around from a couple of directions, the story is both of police solving a crime and journalists pushing their way into it. Front and center in the book is Mt. Lafayette, for the ordinary hiker a pretty challenging mountain, visible from most of the town of Sugar Hill. When a first-time visitor literally stumbles over a decomposing body on the mountain, nearby NH State Troopers Cliff Codey and Mike Eldritch investigate. A couple of vacationing urban newspaper reporters on scene push into the investigation, looking for a hot story, or at least a way to memorialize what turns out to be a young woman's senseless death in the North Country.

I enjoyed Strasser's clever and entertaining storytelling style, and although her changes among points of view -- including that of the killer -- can be a bit distracting, she's a pro at demonstrating multiple levels in her characters, including the junk-collecting but educated hermit Bonwit Felton and an intriguing side character, Kurt, whose willingness to hire emotional misfits for his lodging and rescue business turns out to be central in both the crime and Trooper Codey's growing uneasiness with the situation. There's a haunting back-story to Codey, and Strasser uses it to add to the suspense.

Readers who prefer to avoid gore will find this traditional mystery a good fit -- and for those collecting New England crime fiction in particular, AN UNCERTAIN GRAVE is a must. I look forward to more from this author, and especially to more about the State Troopers she's conjured into position on her Investigative Services Bureau in one of the wilder sections of the Granite State.

LEAVING TIME: Jodi Picoult Wraps Family, Grief, and Love in a Mystery, with Elephants

The teaser stories released ahead of the publication of Jodi Picoult's newest novel, LEAVING TIME, are small polished gems: "Where There's Smoke" enters the world of the has-been fortune teller Serenity Jones, who'll come to teen Jenna Metcalf's assistance in the novel; and "Larger Than Life" steps inside the scientific life of Jenna's missing (presumed dead) mom, Alice, in her work with elephants in Botswana. It's tempting to see the stories as exercises along the way to the overall "big book" -- character studies, where action reveals an interior landscape. I expect to read them over again, with as much pleasure.

LEAVING TIME is in many ways a traditional mystery: Jenna turns 13 and decides to hire the only private investigator she can afford, Virgil Stanhope, whose connection with Alice's disappearance a decade ago means he's easy to recruit to rescue the failed case. And Jenna struggles to believe her mom may still be alive somewhere, even though she can't believe her loving mother could have voluntarily left her at the family's elephant sanctuary in New Hampshire.

Picoult's active author tour and rich author website (http://www.jodipicoult.com) reveal much of the emotional ground of this novel: the love between elephants, which she explored herself in her research, and the time for letting go of her own teenage daughter to college. The book is sure to resonate with those who are already caught by those two themes -- it's a love story across generations and across species, written with her usual swift-paced storytelling. As a mystery, it has the scent of an early private investigator (PI) narrative, mingling with that incense of the mysteriously correct fortune teller tagging along on the case.

There's a major twist near the end of the book, which of course I won't reveal -- except to say that if you're looking for a traditional mystery that follows all the rules, you'll just have to loosen up and go with the flow on this one. And, heads up to you Picoult traditionalists, it's not a medicolegal thriller this time. It's a pleasure to read. But for re-reading, I'm going back to those two stunning stories. Better download them (at a token price) while they're still available, if you'd like the added insight into the craft of this bestselling author.

THE ARSONIST, Sue Miller

A Boston author, a New Hampshire setting, a crime in progress (serial arson), and potential insight into how communities react to multiple fires -- how could I not read THE ARSONIST by Sue Miller? Plus, I've had the pleasure of listening to Miller in person (her earlier novel The Good Mother may be the most well known of her work). And summer reading should expand to more than one genre, right?

Best to say it right away: THE ARSONIST is not, in spite of its name, crime fiction. Nor does it provide insight into the criminal mind, or even the crime. The title is a masterpiece of misdirection. Still, the novel is vivid and intriguing, and I enjoyed all of it except the ending (if you find you like the ending, please DO place a comment here and explain your reaction, would you?).

Frankie Rowley is home from her aid work in East Africa, for what her family expects is her usual short breathing-space visit -- in this case, to the family summer home in a small New Hampshire village, where her aging parents have just settled to become year-round residents. But Frankie already knows she may never return to Africa. In the midst of an early midlife crisis, questioning her easy-loving lifestyle, her relationship with the ex-pat community abroad, and even the value of her humanitarian efforts, Frankie is more than jet-lagged. She's life-lagged.

On her first, mostly sleepless, night "home," Frankie's out walking when a whiff of smoke hints at the first of the summer housefires. She tunes in gradually to what's going on, as she simultaneously (and with many levels of doubt) begins an affair with the editor of the local paper. And the final strand of tension comes from what's happening to her parents, as her father's "forgetfulness" races toward an inability to recognize his family and himself. Is Frankie supposed to walk away from her own complicated life to become the family caregiver?

I loved the questions raised in THE ARSONIST, about self, about our parents and our communities, about the symbiosis and sometimes the painful clash of "summer people" and year-rounders. (It's not really an issue where I live in Vermont, but there are similar frictions that root in social status and education and power and other life choices.) And the writing kept me enraptured until, as I mentioned, the final few pages, when I felt that Miller tossed out the "show don't tell" rule and hurried to complete the book in a "glimpse of the future" that felt awkward as well as sad.

I'm really interested in other opinions on this one. Yes, get the book -- but don't expect a mystery, right? I can't say much more than that without throwing spoilers into this write-up. Let me know what you think, and whether you've enjoyed this. I certainly did.

Guest Post from Tempa Pagel, Author of THEY DANCED BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON

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Have you traveled around New England much? Visited old farms and other relics of the region's history? In today's guest post from Tempa Pagel -- whose second mystery They Danced by the Light of the Moon releases tomorrow (Feb. 19; review here) -- it's clear that the writer's eye finds mystery and suspense in that landscape ...

Derelict Buildings as Muse

by Tempa Pagel

I’ve always been fascinated with vacated buildings. I think many people are. We can’t resist peaking into an abandoned house and wondering about its former inhabitants.  Faded wallpaper around an outline of a bureau, smoke smudged walls above an old stove, imprints of lives lived here and now gone. Who were they? Where did they go? Why? Mystery hangs in the air.

Once, a long time ago—I forget the circumstances—I was walking along a remote sandy strip of beach that separated woods and the rolling waves of Lake Michigan.  I came upon a house, no more than thirty feet from the water, almost swallowed up by trees and brush. It had been a stately place at one time, but was now in a serious state of deterioration: roof partially gone, windows broken out, walls falling down. A large room looking out onto the lake was now open to the elements, its elegant black and white tiled floor merging with the sand. I lingered there, at first trying to envision it the way it had been. And then, pondering the mystery of it: Who had lived there? What had happened to cause its owners to desert it?

During my teen years there were stories—perhaps urban legends, but believed non-the-less—of an old deserted tuberculosis sanatorium out in the countryside somewhere. Everyone knew somebody who had broken into the TB San, as we called it, and had found creepy things and (of course) felt the presence of ghosts. Despite the fact that I never ventured near it, vivid stories of the TB San’s lab, with its shelves of glass jars containing human organs floating in formaldehyde, created images that fooled my memory into believing I had seen it all for myself.  A vacant house holds secrets of a family, but an institution holds the intersecting stories of numerous individuals who have been isolated from society.  How did they come to be there? Did they survive?

Danvers State Hospital: http://opacity.us

When I moved to New England, two iconic buildings in my general vicinity quickly became known to me: the Danvers State Hospital, its gothic silhouette high on a hill reigning over Route 1 in Danvers, Massachusetts, and the Wentworth Hotel overlooking the Atlantic Ocean near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A mental institution and a grand hotel, they shared nothing in common other than the fact that both were prominent examples of 19^th century architecture on the decline. Within a few years of each other—shortly after I learned of them—they closed. Then, because what to do with them could not be resolved, both were boarded up and allowed to deteriorate through the years.

I became fascinated with them in the same way I had been by the house on the beach and the TB San years before. When I drove by Danvers, traveling south to the mall, or passed Wentworth while meandering north along the coast, I thought of the stories distilling within their respective walls. My imagination was nurtured by tales of those who had snuck into the deteriorating Danvers hospital and scared themselves silly, as well as by stories of those whose parents had known the opulent Wentworth during its heyday. I knew I wanted to put these places in novels someday. I envisioned an historical mystery for the Wentworth. For Danvers, I didn’t yet know.

Over time, I read about grand hotels, visited one in the Midwest, and let ideas stew. When I finally started writing They Danced by the Light of the Moon I set the first scene in 1901 at a hotel inspired by the Wentworth Hotel. Immediately, my historical character, Marguerite, took over, creating some surprising twists along the way, the most unexpected being the incorporation of Danvers State Hospital. I had not planned on putting Wentworth and Danvers into the same book, so I resisted at first. But then, since both buildings had been at their peaks during that time period—in prestige and architecturally—I decided to go with it.  

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I began researching facts in which to imbed Marguerite’s story. There was an abundance of information on Wentworth, including a wonderful pictorial history by Dennis Robinson, but I found little, other than online articles with small black and white pictures, on Danvers.

Then I came across an intriguing website. Before it was torn down, an urban explorer had done something I’d yearned but hadn’t dared to do: he had sneaked into the crumbling buildings of Danvers. And better yet, he’d documented them.  His spectacular pictures highlighted architectural features inside and out and even atop roofs. He photographed rooms, hallways, tunnels, stairwells, basements, auditorium, and sometimes just objects: a torn curtain, a chair, a rusty metal bed, a 1970’s calendar, news clippings on the wall. This virtual tour raised the hair on the back of my neck, and gave me goose bumps.  Inspired, we set to work, my present-day protagonist and I, climbing through a basement window, circumventing debris in underground tunnels, ascending a caged-in staircase, sidling around rotting floors, getting lost and terrified, seeking answers to the mystery of Marguerite.  How did she get here? What happened to her?

Meanwhile, the real fates of the Wentworth Hotel and the Danvers State Hospital were playing out. After a number of wing amputations, the main section of the Wentworth finally had a buyer with a plan to restore it. Danvers was not so lucky. Its buildings, one by one, were demolished. Attempts to save the last and most distinctive one, the Kirkbride, failed, and only a small section of the entire complex survived the wrecking ball to be incorporated into the new condominiums that now sit atop the hill.

Tempa Pagel

www.tempapagel.com

They Danced by the Light of the Moon

Five Star/Gale, Cengage, 2014

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New Hampshire Mystery Author Tempa Pagel: Guest Post on Tues. Feb. 18

On Wednesday February 19, Tempa Pagel's second New Hampshire mystery, THEY DANCED BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON, will be released -- so Tempa is guest posting here on Tuesday. Hope you'll stop in then (or just add your e-mail in the little box on the side, and you'll get the posts automatically, without any list of e-mails being kept!). If you missed our earlier blog "hurrah" for this book, here's the review.

Spooky real-life setting in Tempa Pagel's new book!

New Hampshire Mystery "Today" with Historic Ties: Tempa Pagel's 2nd "Andy Gammon" Mystery

I missed the first Andy Gammon mystery from Tempa Pagel -- so I'm going to have to find a copy of Here's the Church, Here's the Steeple, for the fun of seeing how this deft plotter weaves together New England history with current mystery in her first round.

But I'm delighted that the second Andy Gammon, THEY DANCED BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON, came my way! It's due to release in mid February from Five Star, a publisher rising rapidly in the mysteries field, and if either the New Hampshire setting or 1901 revelations mean this book needs to be in your collection, you may want to pre-order a copy ... Five Star print runs are usually modest and the first printings often sell out. I bet this will be one of those.

Andy Gammon is young woman with two lively children and a tolerant husband. She also has a mom who aids and abets her in getting involved in murder investigations. Good thing -- because the death at the newly renovated Grand Hotel of the Atlantic (a lightly disguised version of the Wentworth-by-the-Sea Hotel in Newcastle, NH) isn't even in Andy's home town. So how can she expect law enforcement to let her into the official process of finding the killer of the odd young woman she met during the hotel's opening meal and tour? She can't. She's got to do it all the way so many amateur sleuths have pursued criminals all along: by interviewing witnesses (uh-oh) and possible future vistims (!), and sniffing around where she's not supposed to be.

In Andy's case, that includes the very spooky grounds of an abandoned mental hospital, a grand and fortified but definitely crumbling architectural gem in Danvers, Massachusetts (sister city to neighboring Salem, Mass., although that doesn't come up in this book). Does she dare to trespass, against all warnings -- and to do it with a group of ghost hunters and a woman once in long-term treatment in the mental hospital? If she does, will her husband forgive her? And will she be safe??

The actual Danvers State Hospital.

This is a classic "traditional" mystery with a dash of the presence of Andy's predecessor in adventure, Marguerite Miller -- who disappeared from the hotel in 1901 and left behind a significant journal that we readers get to peek into, long before Andy finds a copy. But she's on the trail of any crime that may have involved Marguerite, as well as the young woman who claimed -- before her death at the hotel -- to be related to Marguerite Miller. (My one quibble with the book was an occasional slip on exactly how the two were supposedly related ... which may have been ironed out in the published version ... I read the advance "uncorrected proof.") Readers who appreciate a well-plotted "cozy" or traditional mystery will also enjoy Andy's mom and husband, and they way they complicate and sometimes assist her detection.

(I also got an extra smile out of discovering the trail of one of my grammy's relatives in this -- Thomas Story Kirkbride, whose great-grandfather Mahlon was the 4-greats grandfather of my grandmother Marguerite Harriet Kirkbride Taylor. Check out how this early psychologist's ideas of treatment and of architecture affect both Marguerite Miller's death and Andy's scariest moments.)

Author Tempa Pagel lives in the Massachusetts seaside town of Newburyport, with a family parallel to Andy Gammon's. I'm looking forward to reading more of her books! And ... great news ... she'll be HERE on the Kingdom Books blog as we get closer to her book's release date. Don't forget to order your copy! And check her website for events, to meet her and get a signed copy in person: http://www.tempapagel.com.