I stared at the photograph. Mound of dirt in the background. A close up of my wrist and hand, holding something fresh from the ground and in need of a good cleaning. It was the only reminder I had of the artifact I’d found. I pushed back from my desk and moved around my office, passing the bookshelves to study the wood framed maps of Pompeii, Rome and Londinium. Interesting that I’ve traveled all over the world, participated in all sorts of archaeological digs… only to find the bizarrest of artifacts in the mountains of North Carolina. Stranger was the way my supervisor, the lead archaeologist ..read more

Wayne sits down for a question-and-answer session with dru’s book musings so that we can learn more about what makes him tick. Let’s see what he has to say. What is your full name? Wayne Edward Baronick How old are you? 38 What is your profession? Detective with the Monongahela County Police Department Do you have a significant other? I’m working on it. Do you have any children? Not that I’m aware of. Do you have any siblings? One sister, Abby. Are your parents nearby? Yes. They live in Marsdale, a small town in Monongahela County. Who is your best friend? Guy by the name of Marty Hogan. We’ve ..read more

One of the things I like best about working on films is there’s no such thing as a “typical day.” Every day is different because a film is like a shark — it’s got to keep moving forward to stay alive. My name’s Joey Jessop, and I’m a key costumer for movies. My specialty is big movies like the one I’m working on now, The Golden Age, about Hollywood in the 1930s — many would say the most glamorous time in the history of film. We’re shooting a big scene this evening, a nightclub sequence featuring beautiful showgirls and a full orchestra, along with 200 background players in evening gowns and tu ..read more

My father always said there were three rules to making wine during Prohibition: keep it simple, don’t label the bottles, and don’t drink the product. I follow two of them. He didn’t follow any. My name is Letty Hart and I take care of my family’s winery here in Los Angeles. By family, I mean me and my mother. After my father left, I stepped in with the lessons he taught me and taught myself the rest in order to continue the winemaking that helps our family survive. Now it’s all routine, at least with the vineyard and the wines. Nothing else is the same from what I knew before. It’s all changed ..read more

You’d think that my days living full time on a private residential cruise ship would be spent sipping cocktails poolside with a good book and my sister Jane, but there’s so much more to it than that. There are the extravagantly themed parties, exploring exotic ports of call, murders to solve, and, of course, arts and crafts. What was that? The murders? I suppose that does require a bit more explanation. In our case, we didn’t seek the murder solving life, it found us. And we’re pretty good at it if I do say so myself. I chalk it up to the fact we were both librarians in our pre-seafaring lives ..read more

Looking for something to read? Check out some of the new titles releasing during the week of May 5 – 11, 2024 with five debut series. I hope a few of these books take you to an exciting place. Have fun reading! MAY 6 The Light Beside The Sea by Connie di Marco (Cozy Mystery) San Francisco astrologer Julia Bonatti has been haunted for years by the hit and run death of her fiancé, Michael Sefton. The driver of the vehicle was never apprehended. The lone witness to the accident spoke to no one and now is dead. Even the cold case detective assigned to the case died before any resolution was found ..read more

Now it’s time to learn more about the authors we read. . .   Why do you write the genre that you write? I call the Hayden & Friends Mystery Series “Quozy Mysteries”—if you couldn’t guess, a mashup of Queer and Cozy. I didn’t set out to write a cozy series per se. However, I intentionally wrote a light-hearted and humorous amateur sleuth whodunit with gay main characters who were not the villains, the victims, or mean and nasty to each other. As it happened, the type of story and vibe I was going for overlapped with the genre sensibilities of cozies. What’s the quirkiest quirk one of y ..read more

The link popped up right after I finished helping a client decide on the embossing for her wedding invites. I waited until I finished her order before I checked the text from my mother. She’d already bombarded me with articles about any shooting, break-in, or assault within a 50-mile radius of Jersey City. I had ignored them all. This one came with a picture of a woman. She looked how I’d wanted to when I was growing up as a black girl in Maryland. Beautiful. Blue-eyed. Strawberry blonde. Her hair casually flung up in knots on both sides of her head. Space buns that I couldn’t get away with, e ..read more

OCEAN’S 8 meets Janet Evanovich, this fast-paced crime caper features one badass mother, with a certain set of skills who is forced to come out of retirement to protect her son, and teach a few men a few lessons! Ex-con artist Bee Cardello is going legit. Divorced from her mafia boss husband, she is determined to stay on the straight and narrow. So, when ex-hubby Charlie steals $37.5 million from a dangerous kingpin, who puts out a hit on Bee and her ten-year-old son Oliver, she finds herself pulled back into the life she’s worked so hard to escape. Dru’s Short Musing: Bee’s past comes back to ..read more

June 1900 “Are you still going to ride in the park when you’re a Duchess?” “The Duke’s too smart to try and stop me!” I assured my friend Hetty MacNaughten, as we hopped off our velocipedes after a summer-morning spin in Washington Square Park. We both have a great deal on our schedules at the moment, but there was no way either of us would let a dry June day go to waste. “Good thing.” Hetty took off her straw hat, and some of her red hair fell out of its knot. “I need to clean up before I go to the news office. I’m hoping to pitch a story on woman suffrage in the Western states, so I’d better ..read more