Killer Frost Pre-Sales

Cover of Killer Frost by Judy Hogan

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KILLER FROST PRE-SALES
 It’s possible now to buy, in advance, a copy of my first mystery novel, Killer Frost, actually in print from Mainly Murder Press in Connecticut, Sept. 1, 2012. The advance sales will make it possible for me to order copies at 40% discount, and then I can pay for my bookmarks and some other early expenses. I’m aiming to have 120 pre-sales! Then I can order 200 books.

I’m launching the book September 22, on the fall equinox, Saturday, 3-7 P.M. at my Hoganvillaea Farm, in Moncure, NC. If you’re nearby, you’re invited. I will provide some basics, but it’s pot luck, so bring a contribution, food, and or drinks. Even champagne, If you’re feeling especially celebratory. This is how to launch a book on a budget.

The paperback will cost: $15.95; the Nook and Kindle versions, $2.99 (order on line)

To order your copy from me now, to be picked up at launch or mailed:

Send $20 (covers postage and sales tax)
or $17 (to pick up) to Judy Hogan
PO Box 253
Moncure, NC 27559-0253

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So: you see the cover above.

Here’s the plot:

When Penny Weaver agrees to teach freshmen composition at historically black St. Francis College, her teaching and relationship skills, not to mention her detective instincts, are more challenged than they’ve ever been. She falls in love with her boss, Oscar, who is very passionate about saving their students from ending up in prison because of how ill-prepared for college they are. When the Provost is killed, Oscar is the primary suspect, because of his anger at the Provost for not firing the History professor who traded sex for an A with Penny’s student Merilee. Penny’s detective friend and her husband, Kenneth, are investigating and ask her help, but because Oscar is confiding in her and she’s convinced he’s innocent, she doesn’t want to help them. She tries to throw suspicion on the abusive History Professor and the Vice President for Financial Affairs, formerly in prison for embezzlement.

After a spirited convocation speech on truth-telling, Penny’s students lead a protest about Merilee’s abuse, bad food, filthy dorms, but the President undercuts them by threatening to take away student scholarships. Penny struggles with her conflict: she loves her husband, but she can’t deny she loves Oscar.

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Here are the comments from pre-publication reviews:

A charming puzzler of a traditional mystery, this classic academic mystery debut is a pageturner populated with layered, interesting characters. My hat is off to Judy Hogan on a stellar debut. I look forward to the further adventures of Professor Penny Weaver at St. Francis college!
–Julia Spencer-Fleming, New York Times Bestselling Author of One Was A Soldier.

Killer Frost deserved to be short-listed for the Malice Domestic prize. It is a fine first effort. I think we’ll be hearing more from Judy Hogan and her protagonist, Penny Weaver.
–Louise Penny, New York Times Bestselling Author of the Three Pines mysteries and winner of four Agathas.

Judy Hogan’s debut novel set in the world of academia gives us a hint of what we might expect from this author in the future. Her insight into what’s happening to today’s youth, her concerns and her empathy are directly reflected in her characters–be they good guys or bad.
–Kaye Barley, Blog Master at
　***

meanderingsandmuses.com

Cookies for Christmas, a Holiday, or a Rainy Day

Grandson, seven years old.

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Christmas or Holiday Cookies, or A Rainy Day Activity
 The cookie recipes come from Joy of Cooking, but the icing came from Mother. I changed the gingerbread one to make it healthier. It’s great for small children, as they can model it. I have done these recipes, first with my children, since Amy was five, and then with my grandchildren, since they were two or three years old. If they can model clay, they can do this. I remember Amy’s twins, age two and a half, sitting in front of the oven while the cookies baked. Children are very entranced by sprinkles. So when the cookies are cool, frost them and then use decorative sprinkles, colored sugars, etc. If you use the egg white brushed on before baking, use the colored sugars. Both recipes I usually double and store in refrigerator for awhile first.

***

Gingerbread Men
Preheat oven to 350 (when you’re about ten minutes from baking)
Blend until creamy:
1/4 cup butter or shortening
½ cup brown or white sugar (or some of both to make up ½ cup)
Beat in:
½ cup of dark molasses (I have used both cane and black strap–unsulphured)
Sift:
1-1/2 cups all purpose flour (or new Super Sprout organic flour from Lindley Mills–whole wheat, sprouted and milled to a fine flour. You may be able to get it through a coop; in Chatham, you can buy it from the mill in Snow Camp area.)
1/4 cup of soy flour
Resift with:
1 teaspoon soda
1/4 teaspoon cloves
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
½ teaspoon salt
Mix with:
1-1/4 cup whole rye or wholewheat (organic).
Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture in about 3 parts, alternately with 1/4 cup of water, if you roll the dough, or 1/3 cup water if you model the dough.
Bake on greased cookie sheets. Watch carefully–depending on thickness, 8-15 minutes.

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Sugar Cookies
In Joy of Cooking, they are called Sand Tarts, but they’re much better than regular sugar cookies.

Sift:
1-1/4 cups of sugar
Beat until soft:
3/4 cups of butter (1-1/2 sticks)
Add sugar gradually. Blend these ingredients until very soft and creamy.
Beat in:
1 egg
1 egg yolk (save the white for brushing some cookies and then adding colored sugar)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
Sift before measuring:
3 cups all-purpose flour (you might try the Super Sprout, but I haven’t yet)
Resift with 1/4 teaspoon of salt.
Stir the flour gradually into the butter mixture until the ingredients are well blended. Chill the dough for several hours.
Preheat oven to 400.
Roll the dough until very thin. Bake on greased tins about 5-8 minutes, depending on thickness.

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Lemon Butter Frosting (Icing)
Cream 1 stick butter until soft
Add alternately:
1 pound of powdered, confectioners’ sugar, from sifter
2-3 Tablespoons of lemon juice (sometimes one lemon–fresh is best, but you can add a little of the bottled lemon juice if most of it is fresh)
1 tablespoon of grated lemon rind.
You add a little sugar, then a little juice, and get it to a creamy, spreadable but not too soft consistency.

For variation, you can use orange juice and grated orange rind, or 1 teaspoon of vanilla and milk for liquid, e.g., for chocolate cake.

Let the cookies cool completely; then frost and decorate. If you want to make Valentine’s or Easter cookies, etc., the children can draw valentines, bunnies, etc., and then use a knife to cut around the shapes on the dough. They’re fun to make, and they taste good, too.

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Granddaughter, age 9.

Marcia Herman's Sipping My Garden

Cover image of Marcia Herman's Sipping My Garden.

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My book, Sipping My Garden, was a labor of love—for the herbs, for delicious drinks, for lovely illustrations, and for gardening and gardeners. This is how it all began—my sweet affair with sipping my garden… The preface tells the story of how I met my friend in Provence and what I learned from her about her plant gathering, drying, and making of herbal teas. For many years as a child she had watched her grandmother gather and dry herbs and blend them into delicious mélanges and now I was to learn to share this across the ocean in America. Except for the occasional cup of peppermint tea, I realized for herbal teas we all bought those boxes with names like Zinger, Bed-time, and Peach Peppermint instead of sipping our own gardens.

So, I began researching the herbs and perfecting an easy, foolproof, and quick way to make herbal teas from plants that many gardeners already have growing. There are chapters on the method of making the teas (tisanes strictly speaking since these are herbal decoctions), plant lists, recipes, resources, and what to do if you don’t have a garden. The book is beautifully illustrated by a local artist, Emma Scurnick, and one from the west coast, Nan Feagin.

A sample recipe:  Peppermint-Lemon Grass Tea

¼ cup dried peppermint leaves
A heaping tablespoonful of dried Lemon grass
Pinch of green tea
Two stevia leaves if a little sweetening is wanted

This, as well as any other recipe with dried leaves, may also be made with fresh herbs using larger amounts.

Place in teapot or stainless steel cooking pot and pour 6 cups of near boiling water over the herbs. Let steep 30 minutes to several hours. Strain and pour into a pitcher and enjoy hot or cold all day.

Thank you, Marcia E Herman
Chatham County, NC

www.seedpodpress.com. It retails for $16.95. It makes a great gift book. Maybe for Valentine's Day!  In Chatham County the book is also available at Chatham Marketplace, New Horizons Trading Company, Lyn Morrow Pottery, and Cooper Mays Pottery.

How to order:

Sipping My Garden may be ordered from

This is a pitcher of rosemary, sage, and green tea, one of the recipes in Marcia's book.

Bio:Marcia E. Herman is a lifelong gardener and lover of herbs who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. In addition to a full time career in pediatrics and public health, she has studied the science and lore of herbs for many years and assisted with the establishment of the Medicinal Garden in the Mercer Reeves Hubbard Herb Garden at the NC Botanical Gardens. Marcia lives in Pittsboro, NC, in hearing distance of the Haw River.

Comments on the back cover:

This delightful book will be sought by all converts to the locovore movement. I’m glad for the book’s suggestion to consult local references about what herbs will grow in any given area.　 And if growers and herb enthusiasts will follow the simplified plant identifications and precautions, then they will find the pleasures of teas harvested from their own gardens.　 It doesn’t get any more local than that! 　Al Cooke, Extension Agent, Horticulture, Chatham County Center, N.C. Cooperative Extension

 The plant kingdom provides us with so much--shade and color, changing seasons, endlessly varied forms in the shapes of leaves, and fragrance, not to mention the basis of our food supply.　 That plant diversity harbors another secret: plants are a virtual library of interesting compounds, many that evolved with the animal kingdom and so are able to interact with animal physiologies, including our own.　 Marcia E. Herman’s writing, in an easy-to-read way, shows how this chemical diversity furnishes us with a great array of teas and gently leads us into its emotional, medicinal, and aesthetic pleasures.　 This lovely book will open your passion for these delights.　 Dr. Peter S. White, Director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, Chapel Hill

 Marcia rightly looks to herbal teas for leisure and pleasure. I think of herb teas as the best of medicines. Leisure and pleasure are good medicine, and phytochemicals are good medicines. Here’s to your health, sipping your garden teas.　　James A. Duke, PhD, Author of The Green Pharmacy (Rodale 1997) and distinguished alumnus, University of North Carolina,　 Chapel Hill (1948-61) thegreenfarmacygarden.com

Marcia Herman, happy herb gardener and herb tea expert.

Review: Current Affairs by Lane Stone

Cover photo of Current Affairs:  A Tiara Investigations Mystery

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Review: Current Affairs: A Tiara Investigations Mystery. Lane Stone. Mainly Murder Press, 2011. Trade paperback: $15.95. ISBN: 978-0-9836823-2-5. 237 pp.

What strikes me most about the debut mystery, Current Affairs, is its humor. A few pages in, and I was laughing out loud. Remember those early Evanovich mysteries? Here is Leigh Reed, a new voice, a Southern Belle voice, who doesn’t take her Georgia Beauty Queen status or her relatively affluent lifestyle very seriously. Leigh and her two best friends, also former state beauty queens, Tara Brown and Victoria Blair, have formed Tiara Investigations. Their cases consist mainly of helping married women document their husbands’ infidelity. They have not yet told their husbands.

They interview prospective clients at their favorite restaurant, the Cracker Barrel, usually over the breakfast specials. Their fees are reasonable, and often it takes only an hour of their time, once the wife has alerted them, to follow the "cheating, lying, sneaking" lovers, take a few photos, and later give them to the wife.

They use three throw-away cameras, to make sure they get those photos, and are usually accompanied by their three standard Schnauzer dogs, which provide protection in case they get in over their heads, which they soon do, when the husband they are to follow, is shot dead in front of their eyes, and another husband they’d nailed as fooling around is the investigating officer. He, and many other characters in this book, are regularly overwhelmed by their unpredictably zany behavior, dogs or no dogs.

Another paradoxical and so human aspect of this new mystery series is that Leigh is protesting the Iraq War, and her husband, The General, whom she loves passionately, is busy fighting that war. This is a great book for breaking stereotypes, and for fun, but it has a serious side as the Tiara women, hunting for the killer of their client’s husband (she loved him), invade the high-tech world of military weapons research and development.

Here’s a book without a dull moment but with a bone-deep honesty that draws you in to identify with characters willing to be fully themselves, outrageous behavior being their natural mode.

Look for the next Tiara Investigations, hopefully coming soon.

***

Author website: lanestonebooks.com

Order from mainlymurderpress.com, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Ingram.

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Lane Stone lives in Sugar Hill, GA and Alexandria, VA. When not writing, she’s enjoying characteristic baby boomer pursuits: hiking in various countries and playing golf. Her volunteer work includes raising money for women political candidates.  She’s a proud member of both the Chesapeake and Atlanta chapters of Sisters in Crime.

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Lane Stone, author

Review: Frankie Bailey's Mystery Novels

The cover of Frankie Bailey's 2011 mystery, Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave.

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Beginning with her first novel, Death’s Favorite Child, I found parallels with my own books. [Hard cover: ISBN: 1-57072-145-9. Trade paper: 1-57072-146-7. Silver Dagger Mysteries. Overmountain Press. Copyright 2000]

Lizzie Stuart, Frankie’s amateur detective in this traditional mystery, is visiting Cornwall when she meets the first man she has been seriously attracted to, John Quinn. My Penny Weaver meets her lover, Kenneth Morgan, while she’s on vacation in Wales, in my first mystery.

Penny is white and Lizzie is African American, but both have the ability to see people as people first and look past skin color, culture, educational background, etc. In Death’s Favorite Child, the murder victim works at a small family-owned hotel near the beach. In Sands of Gower the dead woman on the beach is a guest at the bed and breakfast house where Penny is staying.

Frankie is gifted at exploring all the nuances of Lizzie’s feelings.

After reading the first four novels in the series I have a strong sense of Lizzie’s character. She has become one of my favorite amateur detectives. She’s quite human, debates within herself a lot, but wherever there’s a mystery or a puzzle, she’s drawn like a magnet. She has to find out, and she takes risks which drive Quinn nuts and anyone else worried about her safety or wanting to protect her. When she’s close to solving a puzzle, she absolutely can’t let it alone.

The second, third, and fourth novels [A Dead Man’s Honor, ISBN: 1-57072-171-8, 2001; Old Murders, ISBN: 1-57072-218-8, 2003; and You Should Have Died on Monday, ISBN: 1-57072-319-3, 2007, all in the Silver Dagger series] take place in Virginia, primarily at Piedmont State University, where Lizzie teaches Crime History in the School of Criminal Justice. Frankie herself teaches Criminal Justice at SUNY-Albany. She grew up in Danville, Virginia, and her fictional town of Gallagher is located on the Dan River.

In these later books present day murders are solved as well as murders that took place many years earlier, for instance, the murder of lynching, which is a more inclusive term than the hanging of a man by a mob, without his having the benefit of regular court trial. "The victim of a lynching might be hanged, burned, shot, and/or drowned. He--more rarely she–might also be tortured and mutilated. The majority of lynchings occurred in the South and border states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." [A Dead Man’s Honor, p. iv.]

There is a cerebral, almost serene, quality to these books. We take in all kinds of information not generally known, are taken inside horrifying events and have a front row seat as we learn what "really came down." We may know intellectually that human beings are capable of savage cruelty when they are afraid, greedy, jealous, protecting their position or image, keeping things from changing, but here we take it in easily, naturally, swiftly, as our own experience. Frankie’s passion is focused on taking us there so we witness these realities for ourselves.

In A Dead Man’s Honor we go back to 1921 in Gallagher, when a black man was shot, assumed to have killed the white doctor in town. This event has personal meaning for Lizzie because her grandmother had witnessed this lynching and left town on a freight train the same day.

Another African American professor in Criminal Justice is found dead. Is there a connection between the two murders? In Frankie’s books it’s likely. Old murders cast their shadow into the present. History is not dead.

Old Murders continues that theme, as Frankie researches a young black woman sentenced to die in the 1950s after killing her employer. Meantime a Maine developer is persuading the town council to let him build shops, condos, etc., along the river front, and a local developer is furious. A lawyer involved in the arguments between the developers also defended the young black woman at her trial in the 1950s.

In You Should have Died on Monday Lizzie decides to find her mother, who left town shortly after she was born. Lizzie was raised by her grandmother, who had died a few years earlier. Hester Rose had only bad things to say about her daughter Becca. Lizzie has hired a private detective, who finds people who knew her mother in Chicago, where Lizzie heads. The trail then leads to Wilmington, N.C., and to New Orleans. The old crime happened in 1968 and involved Black Panthers, the Chicago Mob, and Becca.

I found myself easily caught up in this fascinating, complex weaving between old murders and new murders, and I was pulled along, not only curious myself but worried about what Lizzie was getting her courageous, risk-taking self into this time. The plot web is always satisfying; the characters and places, alive.


What I especially enjoy and feel a kinship with is how Frankie handles race. There is no undercurrent of rage or resentment against white people or white Southerners because of the way they treated slaves, tenants, maids, or the whole black community then or now. Rather there is a presentation of many individuals, including Lizzie and Quinn, as human, as sometimes deeply flawed, sometimes showing courage and insight one gazes at in wonder.

I want to be there, I find, in every scene, hear every argument, puzzle over every new event and where it fits into the whole tapestry. I have put down each book satisfied, but eager to read the next one.

I myself hope to do something similar as a white woman who has often crossed the racial divide that persists in this country. I also wish to reveal the humanity that lies in us all, the courage and the stupidity, the sublimity, and the dark blood-lust.

Frankie "sees" in the way I want to in my books. You’ll be glad you read her books. They go way beyond mystery stories. They carve a place for themselves out of that elusive, rock-hard quarry we dig in to find the truth about our humanity and how to live well while we’re here on this earth.

***

Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave, A Silver Dagger Mystery from The Overmountain Press, Johnson City, TN, 2011. Trade paper: 978-1-935692-010. $13.95. 216 pages.

In this, her fifth mystery, Frankie Bailey puts her heroine into a weekend gathering of four ex-military friends, their wives and girlfriends, who are, for the most part, richer than she is and also hold high-powered jobs. We witness how Lizzie Stuart handles this complex situation in the context of the Virginia Eastern Shore, where the historical remnants of slavery and black tenant farming are still part of the landscape, with the more recent addition of Hispanic migrant workers, who are generally treated with suspicion and contempt.

Over and over Lizzie is made uncomfortable by the behavior of the others, and by Quinn, too, to whom she’s now engaged. He’s hiding things from her, and he’s also lying to her. I find I admire Lizzie’s combination of courage and discretion in a nearly impossible situation.

I once realized that what century you are living in can change with where you are geographically. To go into certain parts of the rural South is to return to the mid-nineteenth century, or even to the Middle Ages, when there were lords of the manor, knights back from foreign parts, and serfs, i.e., farm workers attached to the land who were essentially powerless economically and politically.

In this novel, the centuries mix and match. Lizzie, as a professional crime historian, becomes fascinated by two graves from the 1940s at the edge of a bean field, and visible from the highway: Rachel Robinson (1929-46) and Rachel’s Mother (1910-46).

When Lizzie looks in a folder Quinn had hidden from her, she finds a clipping about another death, in 1989, of a former soldier who had tried to kill her baby and then had killed herself. As usual, Lizzie has to find out about these deaths while she tries not to rock the boat at the beach house party. The boat not only rocks, a storm of strange and inexplicable events pursues her and Quinn from the beginning of the book.

I like the way Frankie opens up Lizzie’s mind to us, as she takes in the not so subtle assumptions among the house party about race, faces her mixed feelings and yet hangs on–both to Quinn and to her determination to find out what’s going on. Again, past and present intertwine, and the plot is slowly unraveled, until, with one jerk, the whole behind-the-scenes picture is revealed, and the puzzle pieces fall easily into place.

If you haven’t read Frankie’s novels yet, you are in for a treat.

***Frankie Y. Bailey is a criminal justice professor and mystery writer. Her non-fiction books include African American Mystery Writers (2008). Forty Acres and a Soggy Grave, the fifth book in her mystery series featuring crime historian, Lizzie Stuart, was released in July 2011. She has completed the first book in a near-future police procedural series. Frankie is a former Executive Vice President (the chairperson of the board of directors) of Mystery Writers of America. Currently, she serves as President of Sisters in Crime.

Website: http://www.frankieybailey.com/
***

Frankie Y. Bailey

Review: Michele Drier's Edited for Death

Cover of Michele Drier's Edited for Death, first mystery novel.

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Edited for Death. Michele Drier. Mainly Murder Press, 2011. Trade paper, $15.95. ISBN: 978-0-983682-1-8. 221 Pages.


Smart, classy, and genuinely entertaining. The clever puzzler, taut and tense, nails the high-stakes reality of a devoted journalist on the hunt for blockbuster story. Breaking news: this mystery is a winner!
----Hank Phillippi Ryan, award-winning author.

***Amy Hobbes, Managing Editor of a small northern California town’s newspaper, the Monroe Press, and her best reporter, Clarice Stams, follow leads as to why several deaths are connected to the hotel Senator Robert Calvert, also dead, owned. The local Sheriff, Jim Dodson, in Marshalltown, where the Senator was the dominant force, appears stumped. He shares enough information to keep Clarice busy writing articles and to get Amy’s curiosity aroused and her research instincts triggered.

In order to understand the present, the women must explore the past. With the help of an old journalist friend, who does art news for a San Francisco paper, Amy begins to see connections and is more hooked than ever when the Senator’s nephew also dies at the hotel.

Edited for Death has a lively, clipped, fresh style; the narrator, Amy, a strong voice. The metaphors are exactly right, the dialogue is zesty and entertaining, but the deeper Amy delves, the more serious the subject matter, because Robert Calvert served in the U.S. Army in World War II and was among the troops which liberated Auschwitz and uncovered the tragic remains of the Jews murdered there.

I like Drier’s honesty, both in her humor and in the tragedy behind the events that led to the present-day deaths. The book is light and solemn by turns, and every touch feels right. The characters are well-fleshed out and fully human. The mystery is carefully plotted to keep us both intrigued and guessing until the very end. My hat is off to Michele Drier and Mainly Murder Press for a zinger of a first novel. Now we need the next crime Amy Hobbes’s instincts tell her she must investigate.
***

Judy Hogan.  I admit that Mainly Murder is also to be my publisher, but I'm choosy about the books I believe in and review.

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Michele Drier was born in Santa Cruz to a pioneer family and is a fifth generation Californian. She’s lived and worked all over the state and has called both Southern and Northern California home. During her career in journalism — as a reporter and editor at large and small daily newspapers – she won awards for producing investigative series. She lives in the Central Valley with cats, skunks, opossums and wild turkeys.

***


Edited for Death is available from www.mainlymurderpress.com, from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Ingram.

Thank you, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Judy's desk with cosmos late last summer, computer to the left. 

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THANK YOU, MARTIN LUTHER KING
 I associate Martin Luther King with flowers. Also with living in Chase Park, an interracial apartment complex set up following the Civil Rights push in Chapel Hill, by the Interfaith Council. It was new when we moved in January 1975, seven years after King died. He was only thirty-nine when he died in 1968. And all he did for us!

My children and I were in the white minority in Chase Park. I learned more about what lay under the surface of the black experience in the South than I had before. Later, I asked my children what they had learned from the three years we lived there.

Not all their experiences were good. Sometimes the black kids picked on them, but they also formed friendships. I remember when I heard Tim, then in first grade, talking with his friend outside the front door in black dialect. I smiled. Tim was already bi-lingual. All my kids said they learned that there were good and bad people of every skin color. A good lesson.

Here’s a poem I wrote in the 80s, thinking back to 1968, Spring, Berkeley, California. It’s from Sun-Blazoned, Sunbury Press Books, Bronx, N.Y., 1983.

Sun-Blazoned VI.2.
I never knew cherry blossoms
until I lived in Berkeley.
I never felt them until the spring
that Martin Luther King died,
and Amy’s babysitter, whom she called her grandma,
died of cancer. I hadn’t known
she was ill, but Amy knew, and said
how she hurt, and aspirin didn’t help.
Her back hurt anyway, nothing helped.
Drifting petals on the warm air
were spring’s tears.
Just as Christmas is green
in a barren month,
so cherry petals tell of loss and hurt
in the most optimistic one, in April.
Now you tell me–every time the subject
comes up–that you are sure
the cherry blossoms will no sooner open
than a hard freeze will come along
and turn them to brown plastic.
Is it so hard for you to believe
that loveliness may escape harm?
That cherry flowers may have their time
of full and eager openness,
that day after day of easy breezes
and benign air may waken all their senses,
until they grieve naturally,
losing what they must lose
to fulfill their time
and their place in that time?