Paula Munier--Home at Night

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am such a huge fan of this series that I've had this book release marked on my calendar! There's a new Mercy Carr novel from Paula Munier on your shelves today, and what's not to love with a gorgeous New England setting, dogs, romance, suspense, and a terrific mystery?  

And what a great cover! Here's Paula to share why this book has a special meaning for her.

The Best Houses, Real-Life and Literary

 

I love houses. I’ve lived in so many places in my life—too many to count, thanks to an Army brat childhood that took me from Georgia to Germany, Ohio to Oklahoma, North Carolina to New Orleans, among other places, and an adulthood spent chasing husbands and jobs from Nevada to New Jersey, Connecticut to California, Ohio to Florida, Louisiana to New England. I’ve hung my hat in French Officers Barracks, Swiss chalets, Las Vegas condos, shingled Cape Cod cottages, Santa Cruz beach houses, Boston triples, Ft. Lauderdale bungalows, college dorms, Married Student Housing (as bad as it sounds), basement apartments in Chicago, studios in New York City, brand-new ranch homes and 19^th century farmhouses in Illinois and Indiana corn fields and U.S. Army quarters everywhere.

As a child I dreamed of living in a house all my own. I loved the houses I read about in books: My favorite was the Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott grew up and where she set Little Women, which was my favorite book as a girl. (Of course, I wanted to be Jo. Didn’t we all want to be Jo?) I visited the house—now a museum—as a middle-aged woman and it did not disappoint.

And, of course, I adored Misselthwaite Manor, the large, forbidding English country house on the Yorkshire moors, where Mary Lennox is sent to live with her uncle when her parents die of cholera in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. (Duncombe Park in North Yorkshire stood in for the estate in the 2020 film adaptation, starring Colin Firth and Julie Walters.)

The best part, naturally, was the garden. How I longed to have a garden like that one day….

There was Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekulla, where she lives with her horse and her monkey and drinks all the soda she wants from the tree in her yard that grows a popular Swedish soft drink—because what kid wouldn’t love that? And 221B Baker Street where Sherlock Holmes played his violin and injected himself with his 7 percent solution and solved the crimes of the century. I devoured all of Sherlock Holmes after a British friend gave me a collection of the stories when we visited her in England—the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the U.K.  (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made up that address, but in time the streets were renumbered and now there’s a Sherlock Holmes Museum at that address in London. Such is the power of fiction.) Even the boxcar where the four orphans take up residence in Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, seemed like heaven to me.

It took me nearly a lifetime, but now I live in a 260-year-old Colonial on 19 acres of woods in what my Millennial child calls “Nowhere, New Hampshire.” It’s the perfect home for a writer, full of secrets and stories and maybe even a ghost or two.

Houses like mine are everywhere in northern New England. In HOME AT NIGHT, the fifth book in my Mercy Carr series, Mercy is house-hunting in Vermont, and the house that wins her heart is a Victorian limestone manor, a faded beauty built by a Civil War hero for his young wife in 1866. They say she died young under mysterious circumstances, and now haunts the house. That doesn’t bother Mercy, and even when she finds a dead body in the library, she’s determined to make the place her own—she’ll just have to solve the murder first. 

It was so much fun to write a story set at Halloween in a haunted house. I spent a lot of time researching houses, finding the just right one for the story—and changing my mind more than once. Being a writer allows me to live many lives in many houses….

What houses have you loved? Which houses have haunted you? What are your favorite houses in real-life and in literature? Let’s talk houses!

 

PAULA MUNIER is the USA TODAY bestselling author of the award-winning Mercy Carr mysteries. The fifth book in the series, HOME AT NIGHT (October 2023, Minotaur), was inspired by her volunteer work as a Natural Resources Steward. An agent by day, she’s also written three popular books on writing: Plot Perfect, The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and Writing with Quiet Hands, as well as Happier Every Day and the memoir Fixing Freddie. She lives in New England with her family, four dogs, and a cat who doesn’t think much of the dogs. For more, check out www.paulamunier.com.

                                                                    

Beware the blackbirds…

It’s Halloween in Vermont, winter is coming, and five humans, two dogs, and a cat are a crowd in Mercy Carr’s small cabin. She needs more room—and she knows just the place: Grackle Tree Farm, with thirty acres of woods and wetlands and a Victorian manor to die for. They say it’s haunted by the ghosts of grieving mothers, missing children, lost poets, and a murderer or two, but Mercy loves it anyway. Even when Elvis finds a dead body in the library.

There’s something about Grackle Tree Farm that people are willing to kill for—and Mercy needs to figure out what before they move in. A coded letter found on the victim points to a hidden treasure that may be worth a fortune—if it’s real. She and Captain Thrasher conduct a search of the old place—and end up at the wrong end of a Glock. A masked man shoots Thrasher, and she and Elvis must take him down before he murders them all. Under fire, she and Elvis manage to run the guy off, but not before they are wounded, leaving Thrasher fighting for his life in the hospital, Mercy on crutches, and Elvis on the mend.

Now it’s up to Mercy and Troy and the dogs to track down the masked murderer in a county overflowing with leaf peepers, Halloween revelers, and treasure hunters and bring him to justice before he strikes again and the treasure is lost forever, along with the good name of Grackle Tree Farm….

DEBS: Now, let's add Halloween and haunted house to my list of reasons to love this book... 

READERS, what houses have been special to you? What are your favorite literary houses?