Memories of Doughnuts Past

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Christmas in my childhood revolved around food as much as presents, and one of my strongest memories is my two sisters and I helping my mother make doughnuts in our farmhouse kitchen. We’d spend most of an afternoon on the task. My mother’s doughnuts weren’t the airy, super-sweet ones with frosting or glazes that most bakeries offer today. She made a dense, delicious cake doughnut, and Using the recipe in a 1930s  Rumford Complete Cook Book, she mixed three cups of flour, a dash of salt, three teaspoons of baking powder, 2/3 of a cup of sugar, two eggs gathered … Continue reading →

Quake Anniversary: December 16, 1811

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The first quake rousted from bed most people within 50 miles of New Madrid and ended the French community’s Sunday dance. While residents of the diverse Mississippi river port fled from their shaking or collapsing houses, people as far away as Quebec, Washington, D.C., and Savannah felt the earthquake’s reach. December 16, 1811, marked the beginning of a series of three powerful quakes, more than a dozen major aftershocks, and, by the Ides of March 1812, almost 1,900 tremors. With the epicenter near southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas, the quakes terrified residents in these and bordering states. In New Madrid, brick … Continue reading →

Giveaway of Show Me the Gold

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Even if you’ve already read Show Me the Gold in hardback, you may want to sign up for a chance to win an autographed copy of the new paperback edition on Goodreads.com. A book makes a good Christmas gift. To enter the giveaway, go to https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22945313-show-me-the-gold-3.  Gold is the third book in the series, the story that starts with Phoenix and Annalynn staking out a country graveyard to catch vandals. By the end of the first chapter, the women take part in a shootout with bank robbers holed up in an abandoned farmhouse. You can read the first chapter on … Continue reading →

Preview of Book 5: The Sinister Snowman

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This week I proofed the galleys of Show Me the Sinister Snowman, the fifth in my series. That prompted me to add a page for the book under Show Me Mysteries and post the first chapter. This book starts right after Annalynn Carr Keyser completes her extended appointment as acting sheriff of Vandiver County, Missouri. She and former covert operative Phoenix Smith expect to build up their new Coping After Crime foundation, which Phoenix created to give Annalynn a job while she prepares to run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Phoenix intends to leave the boring applications for assistance … Continue reading →

Show Me the Gold Now in Paperback

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To help you with your holiday shopping, Harlequin Worldwide Mystery has released the paperback edition of Show Me the Gold for sale on its direct-to-consumer website, http://www.harlequin.com/storeitem.html?iid=68332. The third book in the series, Gold literally starts with a bang and presents new personal problems for Phoenix. Reviewer P. J. Coldren wrote, “There are several sub-plots to hold the reader’s attention; this is one of the hallmarks of a seasoned mystery writer. Nobody’s life has only one thing going on in it at any given time. People in mystery novels need to have more in their life than a mystery to … Continue reading →

Judy Hogan Makes Community a Character

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A mystery series must have a strong protagonist. For Judy Hogan’s Penny Weaver series, that’s a middle-aged poet/teacher and activist who marries a Welsh police officer and moves back and forth between a Welsh village and rural North Carolina. In the latest book, Nuclear Apples?, Penny remains the point-of-view character, but the real protagonist is the diverse community of activists fighting dangerous practices in a local nuclear power plant. Almost anyone who has taught has seen a class take on a collective personality without submerging the individuals. The author shows this same collective personality in her activists, who include a … Continue reading →

What Makes a Mystery Memorable

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What are your favorite mystery series and why? I posed that question on Facebook and a Sisters in Crime list to confirm my own observations and help me prepare a session on writing a mystery series. Eighteen mystery lovers responded, most women and most naming two or three favorite writers or series. Few of them said why. One who did was author Eleanor Cawood Jones. She wrote, “I look for in-depth characters and amazing settings. Carolyn Hart’s Henrie O, Blaize Clements’ catsitter mysteries, Mary Daheim’s Alpine, Susan Wittig Albert’s China Bayles series. The lead characters in each of those have … Continue reading →

Monitoring the New Madrid Seismic Zone

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The New Madrid Seismic Zone remains one of the most active in the United States, averaging approximately 200 quakes measured at 1.5 or more each year. Scientists say the chance of an earthquake measuring 7 or more in the next 50 years is 7-10%. The chance of an earthquake measuring 6 or greater in that time is three to four times higher. If you’re nervous about that next big one, or just curious, you can monitor what’s happening in the NMSZ each day at http://www.new-madrid.mo.us/index.aspx?NID=105. This New Madrid site gives you monthly summaries of the time, measurement, location, and hypocentral … Continue reading →

Reelfoot Lake: The Quakes’ Beautiful Creation

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The powerful New Madrid earthquakes produced much ugliness 200 years ago. River bluffs collapsed. Wave-shaped furrows covered acres of prairie. Sand boils shot rotted vegetation into the air. But the quakes also created beauty. They turned a large swampy area in the northwest corner of Tennessee into what today is the eye-pleasing and spirit-soothing15,000-acre Reelfoot Lake. It formed when the ground sank, creating a bowl that retained flood water when the Mississippi ran backward.   This week I detoured on my drive home from Killer Nashville to visit the Reelfoot Lake State Park near Tiptonville. The shallow lake, a major … Continue reading →

Book 5 Finds New Home

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The fifth book in my Show Me series has found a new home after being orphaned. Cave Hollow Press, an eclectic small publisher, will release Show Me the Sinister Snowman next spring. In this book, former CIA operative Phoenix Smith must play deputy again when Achilles, her K-9 dropout, sniffs out a murder weapon at the scene of a congressman’s “accidental” death. Who tried to hide a homicide? She suspects either a corrupt political insider or an enraged abusive husband and puts herself at risk to prevent more murders. Phoenix goes with her friend Annalynn, an aspiring U.S. House candidate, … Continue reading →

Reviewers Recommend Novel for All Ages

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Who are the readers for Thunder Beneath My Feet? Reviewers have recommended it for tweens through adults. Just what I wanted to hear. When I planned a story set during the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812, I chose to tell it through the eyes of a teenage girl who must grow up overnight and make judgment calls few adults face. I pictured readers as young as fourth graders and expected most to be sixth to eighth graders. I hoped anyone who likes history would enjoy watching the major characters, who range in age from ten to mid twenties, deal with … Continue reading →

Killing Chickens

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I wrote The Feedsack Dress to portray life as the era of the unmechanized, pre-electricity family farm ended. Readers view late 1949 through the eyes of a 13-year-old farm girl called Gail. Like the nation, she is making a major transition, in her case from the small one-room school to the much larger junior high in town and from the homemade feedsack dress to ready-made clothing. Saturday the Sullivan County (MO) Historical Society invited me to help celebrate a special exhibit of clothing made from patterned cotton sacks. I read a scene in which Gail and her mother perform a … Continue reading →