Don't Even Ask Me This

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I'm sure my memories are tinged with the bitterness that comes from abject rejection. Okay, I'm sure that's not exactly true, but if someone offered me ten million dollars to go back to high school--and without the wisdom I hope I now have--I might need to think about it.

There were some wonderful parts, and people who are lovely friends now. And teachers who completely changed my life, and for whom I am grateful every day. But basically: thanks, but no thanks.

That's why our dear friend Leslie Wheeler has such a perfect setting for her new mystery! 

And ooh, leave a comment and you could win a copy
of her brand new Wildcat Academy. SO much fun to go back to high school...if you don't actually have to go.

Back to School in a Mystery

By Leslie Wheeler

My mystery novels and short stories are what you could call place-centric.

I start with a place I find intriguing and the plot and characters grow from that.

In the first book of my Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries, that place is a hill (Rattlesnake Hill), in the second, it’s a road (Shuntoll Road), in the third, it’s a bog (Wolf Bog). For my fourth book, I chose a school, but not a regular public school.

Wildcat Academy is set at a private boarding school. I went to a private school myself and so did my son, and we both had good experiences—though my son probably didn’t think so at time. In any case, the type of private schools I decided to write were called therapeutic boarding schools, or schools for troubled teens, or tough love schools. This was because they resorted to punishments and restrictions they claimed would help students in the long run. Instead, these tactics only made things worse for some students, leading to lawsuits and closures of the schools, amid charges of abuse.

My first encounter with such a school happened shortly after I’d moved to the Berkshires. My husband and I went to see a musical comedy performance at a school in a different town from where we lived. The main building was a mansion at the far end of a huge lawn with a gated fence.

We were ushered into a screened-in porch before the performance began. There, a man wearing multiple gold rings on his fingers, who turned out to be the head of the school, relaxed in a lounge chair like the shah of a foreign country, while students milled around him waiting for the show to start. Sensing there was something different about this school, my husband asked a couple of students we were talking with what kind of school it was.

After exchanging glances, one of the students said, “It’s a place for kids who don’t always go with the flow.” And that was all they would say, although obviously there was more to it. Only later did we learn just how unpleasant that “more” could be.

Meanwhile, I discovered there was a similar school in our Berkshire town, and many residents were not happy about it. I attended an angry town meeting in reaction to an incident where a group of students from this school broke into a neighboring house, when the owners were away. They got drunk on the booze they found, stole a car and smashed it on their way into town. Tempers ran so high at that meeting that some people were ready to run the school owners out of town. That didn’t happen, but a few years later, the school shut down.


Given my town’s experience with that school, it wasn’t surprising that the townspeople were adamantly against another tough love school moving in. One person even put together a pamphlet, detailing all the awful things that had happened at the school in its current location. That pamphlet added grist to my fictional mill as I began to write Wildcat Academy.

Still, as I’ve learned, most things in life aren’t totally bad. There are glimmers of light in the darkness. While the headmaster of my fictional school is not a nice guy, nor are the school bullies, I’ve given it two good people in the characters of a student and a teacher. I was an English major, so naturally she’s an English teacher. The teacher and the “good” student help my main character, Kathryn Stinson, solve the mysterious death of another student, who happens to be the son of Kathryn’s sister-in-law.

Readers, what was your high school experience like: good, bad, or a mix, and why? One of the commentators will receive a free copy of Wildcat Academy.

HANK: Oh, I absolutely cannot wait to hear this. (I have a theory.) Tell all, Reds and Readers!

An award-winning author of books about American history and biographies, Leslie Wheeler has written two mystery series. Titles in the Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries are Rattlesnake Hill, Shuntoll Road, Wolf Bog and now, Wildcat Academy. 

Titles in the Miranda Lewis series include Murder at Plimoth Plantation, Murder at Gettysburg, and Murder at Spouters Point. Her mystery short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best New England Crime Stories series, published by Crime Spell Books, where she is a co-editor/publisher. Leslie is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, serving as Speakers Bureau Coordinator for the New England Chapter of SinC. She divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Berkshires, where she writes in a house overlooking a pond.

Freezer Jenga

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I’m not going to show you any pictures here and in a minute you’ll understand why. Well, it is out of pure embarrassment, and my personal self-revelations, even to you all, darling ones, do not extend this far.

If you came over to visit, I would be so incredibly happy to see you! I would show you around my house and show you the things I love, and we could have a cup of tea or a glass of wine and it would be so lovely! You are all invited.

But I will never, under any circumstances, ever, show you the inside of my freezer. Freezers. 

We have a couple of freezers, long story, and I was very happy about that during the pandemic. Still am. (They are not separate, just in the fridge.) 

But I am absolutely completely incapable of throwing food away. I have to freeze it. Oh, well that’s not exactly right, if we have leftover broccoli I will just eat it, same with green beans, that kind of thing

But let’s say I make delicious sautéed flattened chicken breasts that I served with Parmesan cheese and rice and vegetables. And let’s say there are two of those left over. First they get tightly wrapped in saran, then I put them in the refrigerator because they would be great for lunch! Then we don’t have them for lunch. Then I have to do something with them. Into the freezer they go!


If we have leftover grilled lemon pepper salmon, yummy, that gets a day in the refrigerator until I decide that I’m not going to make salmon salad, and then into the freezer it goes! I could make lemon pasta, right? And that would be delicious on it. Someday.

But gradually, my freezer is filling up with little bits and bobs of things like that. Greek chicken, the leftover meat from turkey tacos, (wouldn’t that be good for nachos someday?) the leftover flank steak that would be great for stirfry. Someday.

But you see, I never use them. I always make new chicken or new tacos.

And also, my freezers are kind of like hideous Jenga. None of those things are symmetrical, so they sort of have to be stacked and layered. Very very tippy. And I have had several narrow escapes from frozen blocks of cheese landing on my toes.

Yes, I bought plastic dividers for the freezer; figuring cheese goes in, one chicken goes in, one bread-like things go in another one. That was so great. Very efficient. But I still can’t see everything.

Generally things are labeled, but not always, but if I have leftover beef bourguignon or pasta primavera, I’ll write that on the container. But sometimes I think oh, I’ll recognize that when I look at it. Which I… Sometimes do.

From time to time I’ll make a vow to just throw everything away. Or just close my eyes, put my hand in the freezer, and make for dinner whatever I pick.

However. I don’t do any of those things.

Reds and readers, do you have a freezer situation? Or a solution? Are you playing freezer Jenga?

It's Always About Me?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: It's true, isn’t it? If I assigned each of you to write a story about, oh, say, a day in a cave, each of our stories would be different. Why is that? The fab Gin Phillips has the answer. A very special personal answer.



It’s Always About Me

By Gin Phillips

I have a theory that no novelist can ever write a book that’s not about themselves. It’s not a theory with a lot of research behind it, granted. I’ve got a sample size of one—myself.

The thing is that I can’t imagine how you avoid writing about yourself, no matter what kind of world you’re building. The page is there in front of you, so beautifully blank, and whatever struggles or preoccupations are circling through your head are bound to unspool themselves as you type. Writing is therapy that you don’t pay for. A novel gives you thousands of words and an entire cast of characters to work all sorts of things out.

Your own struggles and obsessions aren’t necessarily recognizable to a reader, mind you. Not if you hide them well enough.

My first novel followed a family in a coal mining town in 1931 after a baby was found in the family well, but it was really about me coming to terms with how my grandmother and great-aunt and all the generations before me helped shape me. My book about ghosts at an archaeology dig was really about me falling in love with my husband, and my novel about a mother and son being trapped in a zoo during a public shooting was about my own experience with motherhood. (That last one might have been fairly obvious.)

So here I am at a new novel, Ruby Falls, and on the surface, it’s a historical mystery set after the real-life discovery of Ruby Falls in Chattanooga. The story follows Ada, a woman who finds a new world and a new start in the mazes of caverns under the falls. She descends into that underground world with a mind reader and a group of strangers bent on a publicity stunt, and she finds out one of them is a killer. It’s a story with secrets and murder and possibly romance.

It’s a cool setting for a novel. I spent plenty of time wriggling through caves in Tennessee—bats and salamanders and all—and fell a little bit in love with them myself.

But in another way this book isn’t about caving or mind readers or the Great Depression.

It’s about the fact that in the last five years I’ve lost my grandmother and great-aunt and stepmother, and I was up close and personal with their final years and their final days. That grief is underlying Ada.

More than that, though, I’ve thought plenty about how all three women—like so many women, generation after generation—were brought up to believe you get married, you have kids, and that’s your life. They had different paths in terms of how marriage and kids played out, but all of them struggled to fill their days once there was no one left at home to take care of. (My grandmother was seventy when my grandfather died, and she lived thirty-five more years!) 

Here’s the truth, of course: whether you have a family or not, at some stage the kids are gone. The husband might be gone, too. And there are all these years left, years when you are your best self—wiser, tougher, more competent than you were when you were younger. You know things. You know yourself, yet you’re supposed to—what? Sit on a porch and rock?

Those thoughts were the beginning of Ada, my main character in Ruby Falls. I wanted a woman in middle age to launch herself into a new narrative instead of reaching the end of one. I wanted her to find freedom and all sorts of possibility. She’s steeped in both loss and joy—mine, maybe—and, I’ll tell you, she left me feeling a lot better by the time I reached the last page.


How about you? Do you still think of those women who helped shaped you and have passed on? I’d love to hear about them. 

HANK: Oh, what a lovely and thought-provoking question! And yikes, caving—have any of you ever been? (And I want to ask Gin: tell us about the macaroni and cheese. )


Gin Phillips is the author of seven novels, and her work has been sold in 29 countries. Her debut novel, The Well and the Mine, won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Her novel Fierce Kingdom was named one of the best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly, NPR, Amazon, and Kirkus Reviews. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her family.

More About Ruby Falls

A tense, claustrophobic historical mystery set almost entirely underground, Ruby Falls has gotten starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. It’s about the discovery of a 150-foot waterfall in the middle of a mountain, the unthinkable crime that happens in its caves… and a woman who’s never felt more alive.

"Woven from historical events...and the workings of brilliantly brooding imagination, this story of murder, lust, and survival is as disturbing as it is mesmerizing. A hyper-immersive novel that fearlessly explores the darkest, most primal corners of the human heart.”—Publishers Weekly

“Excruciatingly suspenseful….electrifying.”—Booklist

"Exquisitely written and evocatively claustrophobic, layered and transportingly authentic—as chilling as it is tender, and as mysterious as the human soul."—Hank Phillippi Ryan

One body. Five suspects. Total darkness.

In 1928, a Chattanooga man disappears down a hole in the ground and discovers a 150-foot waterfall in the middle of a mountain that he names after his wife: Ruby Falls. Within months, visitors can buy tickets to see the falls for themselves. Ada Smith has been sneaking into the caves at night, entranced by the natural wonders around her and the freedom granted by this new underground world.

But it’s tough timing for a natural wonder. As the country flounders in the Great Depression, a shrewd public relations ploy seems like the only way to save Ruby Falls. A famous mind reader and mystic agrees to launch himself into the Ruby Falls caverns where he will attempt to locate a hidden hatpin using only his psychic abilities. He'll be joined by five others: his manager, his wife, a guide, a Chattanooga businessman, and a reporter from the Chicago Times. But they’re not alone in the caverns. Ada and another guide, Quinton, have been asked to follow the mind reader’s party at a distance, staying out of sight. They are a safety net, in case of a broken leg or busted flashlights.

One of them will be dead before the end of the day.

Faced with a corpse and the stark reality that one of the people in her midst is a killer, Ada needs to get everyone—the murderer and the innocents—back aboveground before their light runs out.

Ruby Falls is both a unique twist on the locked-room mystery and an exploration of loss and what it means to start over. It’s a heart-racing story of survival and a testament to the threads that bind strangers together.