Rhys and Lucy Celebrate Pub Days!

RHYS BOWEN: Hooray, hooray, it's publication day! Champagne all around! Raising a glass to our readers!

It’s always a time for celebration when one of the Reds has a new book out. And today it’s a double celebration because we have two new books—I am excited to launch my new stand-alone THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT, into the world, and Lucy is equally excited for the pub day of her latest in the Hayley Snow Key West series, called  The Clue in the Crumbs. And so we decided to have a little chat about them.  (and this is a photo of the last book launch we did together. What fun that was!)

So congrats, Lucy! And hooray that Hayley is back with us. It’s interesting that we share a pub date, you with a light and fun cozy and me with probably the darkest book I’ve ever written. I think we’re showing the full scope of Jungle Reds! Is this lucky number 13 in the series? Did you ever think it would go on this long? Are you finding it more fun to write now that you know the characters and the setting so well? Or is it harder to come up with new and fresh ideas?  I know these are a lot of questions at once. 

LUCY BURDETTE: Huge congrats to you too, Rhys! It’s an honor to share a launch date with you. I couldn’t even guess what number published book this is for you! I love writing a long series, because the further I get into it, the better I know the characters. Honestly, it feels like the long-term psychotherapy I used to do in my other career as a clinical psychologist—uncovering layers and layers. I don’t ever get bored with my setting because Key West is such a many-layered town, with many visitors and a rich history. The longer I live there, the more I understand about the place, and the more I can show readers.

 But now here’s a question for you, since THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT is a stand-alone. You have so much experience with both long-running series and single titles. Isn’t it harder to think up a whole new set of characters and an entirely new setting? How do you feel about leaving Madeline and her son Oliver behind when you’ve invested so much in them (and put them through multiple wringers!)?

RHYS: I think it's book 55! And It’s definitely more work to write a stand-alone because I have to begin by researching a whole different world and getting to know a new set of characters. As you know with your series, when you begin a new book it’s like going back to a family reunion. You know the characters. You know how they will react to certain incidents. The challenge is to make each new story fresh and interesting. When I write a stand-alone I do enjoy getting to interact with a new set of characters, putting them through the wringer and then walking away. Although I have to tell you I get emails all the time asking when there is going to be a sequel to any of my stand-alones.

So, about your new book: I loved the Scone Sisters in the last book and I’m so glad you brought them back. Did you have that in mind when you introduced them last year? Did they come to you before you went to Scotland? When you were writing A SCONE OF CONTENTION did you know you wanted to use them again?

LUCY: Thanks for that Rhys, I love those characters too! I’m not too good at planning ahead.  I knew I wanted to include the town of Peebles, Scotland after we visited it in 2019 during the Solstice celebration. When Hayley Snow went to the home of Violet and Bettina after the shocking loss of Violet’s son, she had no idea what she would find there, and neither did I! But the sisters really popped as I wrote about them, and they got along like a house afire with Miss Gloria. Miss Gloria is a very popular character in this series, and I loved imagining highlighting the three older women in another book. Since they had won a contest with their cinnamon scone back in Scotland, a baking show seemed like the logical solution.

But since we’ve mentioned setting a couple of times, I have to ask you about the research that goes into a book like THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT. It’s a very complicated plot that swings through England and France and finally Australia, and covers some horrific events that happened over the course of World War II and beyond. How do you research a huge project like this one and decide what to cover and what to leave out? I can remember in one of the blogs you wrote for JRW that you wrote out stories in two separate timelines and actually spread the pages out in a hallway so you figure out how to weave them together. How did you manage the structure of this big sweeping story?

RHYS:  I didn’t have to spread the pages on the hall floor for this one as it’s all a sequential story going from 1930 to 1947. But I did have to do lots of research. I started when we rented a house on the Seine River near Fontainebleau and I saw the chateau and the forest and thought what a great setting it would make. Covid intervened and I had to wait until last year to go back and choose my houses in the Marais, take a river trip to see what the locks feel like and check out the museum of the resistance. In the meantime, I read the autobiographies of several real women who were spies/couriers in Nazi occupied France. I read the training manual for exactly what their training entailed (I would have quit the first day) and realized how incredibly brave they were. They knew the survival rate was twenty five percent and yet they signed on.

And part of the book takes place in Australia. I didn’t have to research that much as I lived there, was married there, my parents moved there and I used to spend a good portion of each year there until my mom passed away. I love the feel and openness of the Australian countryside so it was lovely to revisit it in the book.

So are you having a launch party, Lucy? Any events our friends should know about?

LUCY: : Yes! Big double book launch tomorrow night for A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS and THE INGREDIENTS OF HAPPINESS! This will be at RJ Julia Bookseller on Main St. in Madison CT. Call 203-245-3959 to reserve a seat. (Cake! Wine! Books!) How about you?

RHYS: I did a virtual event at the Poisoned Pen last night. There are signed books if you’d like one. And a live event coming up at Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA on August 19. I’ve also done/am doing numerous interviews/podcasts/chats etc. I post them on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/rhysbowenauthor

So thank you to all of you who are our loyal readers. We appreciate you so much! If you like this latest one do please post a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever else grabs you.  It really helps get the word out. 

Lucy Takes Spanish

LUCY BURDETTE: I’ve spent a lot of years of my life in school. Even so, it’s been a long time since I had to try to learn a completely new skill, complete with homework and drills and memorization. (Not counting book deadlines as homework, or classes on the finer points of writing…which hmmm, probably should count, right?) But when the Key West library offered Spanish lessons, John and I couldn’t resist signing up. Why, you might ask? We’ve always heard that learning something new is good for the rusty synapses, but that wasn’t our chief motivation. More and more people in the US speak Spanish, for one. I wanted to be able to communicate!

And for two, there have been times when some well-placed Spanish comprehension would have come in handy in our travels. Take for example the time we were in Barcelona without a word of Spanish between us other than hola. When we wanted to buy something, we were reduced to holding out handfuls of coins and hoping the shopkeepers were honest. Then there was the day we came through customs in a small town in Cuba. I emerged from the passport line with no problems, and then waited and waited for John to show up. As it turned out, he hadn’t understood what the customs agent was asking.

“Ha viajado en África durante los últimos dos años?” the man asked (or something like that.)

“Yes,” John answered cheerfully, not wishing to be seen as an uncooperative, Ugly American. If he’d understood their question: “Have you traveled in Africa in the past two years?” he would have answered No! rather than Si! And then he wouldn’t have been pulled aside and screened by a barrage of other authorities with questions about his possible exposure to ebola…

El profesor, Edgardo

la clase

That said, we are heading into our seventh week of class and finding it quite challenging. Even though we study a little bit every day and have a wonderful teacher (Edgardo, who hails from Puerto Rico, works at the Key West library, and also happens to be an amazing poet) and even though the old rusty brain cogs are creaking as fast as they can, French words are what come to my mind when he asks a question.

Here was one of my first assignments after Edgardo was done correcting it:

Yo soy de Nueva Jersey. Juan es mon (mi) eposo (esposo) gracioso y bello. Yo soy carto (baja) (corto and largo refere to length, not height). Juan es alto. Nosotros vivemos (vivimos) en Cayo Hueso. Yo soy psicologo y escritora. Yo escribe quince novelas de misterio. (We probably won't be able to discuss the past tense but the sentence should be "Yo he escrito quince novelas de misterio) Yoda es mi gato gris. Tonka es mi perro con pelo negro y castana (castaño). Nosotro tenemos dos muchachos (hijos?)  y una nieta. 

Oh holy yikes, Batman! What did I get myself into? The good news is, since I’m taking Spanish, Hayley Snow is too! You’ll see some of that surface in the 8^th food critic mystery, coming in 2018.

How about you Reds, are you good students of foreign languages? Have you tried something else new lately, out of your comfort zone?

Jungle Red Writers Present: Author-Originated Fanfic; or, Wouldn't It Be Fun To...

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Yesterday, we had a lively discussion about fanfic courtesy of Paul Doiron and J.K. Rowling's new Harry Potter tidbit posted to Pottermore. If we think of fanfiction as a kind of style or genre, I think it's fair to say that Rowling wrote her own fanfic. She's not the first author to do so, either. At the end of Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold expanded on the story with several drabbles, a type of short fiction of exactly one hundred words that originated in the fanfiction community. Diana Gabaldon spun off a secondary character from her Outlander books and made him the hero of his own series, a device frequently used by fanfiction authors.
Which made me think: Reds, if you could take your characters out and play with them like fanficcers do (Oh, the freedom of having no contracts and deadlines...) what would you write? Put your characters in the past (if contemporary) or the present (if historical?) Make them high schoolers or vampires/werewolves/witches? Give them marriages, children, and happy-ever-afters? PWP? (It stands for “Plot? What Plot?” because the stories are focused on, um, action of a certain kind. If you get my drift.) Focus a story on a secondary character? Crossover into another author's world?
I'm not treading into the murky undergrowth of slash fanfiction here, because I suspect none of us would write H/c (hurt/comfort), D/s (Dominant...well, you know), Alpha/Omega (don't ask) or mpreg (really, really don't ask.)

For me, I'd love to take my characters back in time to the French and Indian Wars, when New York state's Adirondack mountains were the western frontier and European empires battled each other on Lake George. I can just see Clare Fergusson as a plucky Scottish immigrant, and Russ Van Alstyne as the aristocratic Dutch patroon. Russ's deputy chief could become a Mohawk warrior. Young Officer Kevin Flynn would be a green-around-the-gills Redcoat.  Battles! Romance! Bagpipes!  It would be so much fun to write.

How about you, Reds? What would your fanfic be?

HALLIE EPHRON: I'd read that! Maybe I'd cast my old woman Mina Yetner in THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN as Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Boy would THAT change the story. And probably make the book a whole lot shorter, too.

Or move my pregnant Ivy Rose in Never Tell a Lie to the Dakota in NYC and write a sequel to Rosemary's Baby?


HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I've often thought of Jake and Jane as teenagers--what would they have been like, what did they do? And I may, actually, even write that, but don't tell.  Or an alternate world where Jane marries someone else. Also, actually, a possibility  Jane as a 9 year old. Also. Doing that.
What I  REALLY want to do is take all the JR characters and put them in the same book. Lady Georgie (somehow) comes to Boston.. She's a pal of Clare's, maybe. Something happens, maybe at a restaurant that Hayley is reviewing for her New England feature? And Jane is assigned to cover it, and find out whodunnit. Gemma (friend of Jake's ) shows up, and it turns out that Maggie Hope's granddaughter is actually the... well, I think it  could work.
DEBORAH CROMBIE:  Hank, I LOVE it!  You are brilliant.  Hmmm, how could we do this? There must be a way... Time travel forward for Rhys and Susan's characters? Or time travel backwards for everyone else's?

But while we're thinking about that, what I'd love to do is bring back characters from my earlier books to star in their own. Madeleine Wade, the massage therapist from Mourn Not Your Dead. Winnie and Jack Montfort from A Finer End, (what's going on in Glastonbury, I wonder?) Alun Ross, the slightly grumpy Scottish detective from Now May You Weep, whose wife ran off with a fertilizer salesman. And especially Ronnie Babcock, Duncan's old schoolmate in Cheshire, now a detective inspector.  
 
Melody and Doug could have their own books, too!  Oh, and I'd love to give Rosemary and Hugh Kincaid, Duncan's parents, their own mystery to solve. Now if I could just clone myself... And time travel...

RHYS BOWEN: Wouldn't a JR fanflc be fun!  And I was speaking at a library last night when one of the audience asked if I had considered spin-off books for minor characters that people love: Sid and Gus as detectives? Queenie on her own? (the mind boggles). 

My fans have also suggested that I write a story in which Georgie and Molly meet. That would be interesting and something I might actually do.  Or Molly's son is a detective in the 1930s and his case brings him to Georgie's London. I'd like Molly to prove to Sherlock Holmes that women make better detectives than men. I'd enjoy seeing Georgie get involved with Bertie Wooster.  Now all I need is a little time..... 


LUCY BURDETTE: I'm simply going to stand back and watch in awe as you women work! But I will say that I've brought Cassie Burdette into the forthcoming Key West mystery (DEATH WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS, coming in December.) It turns out that her father is Hayley Snow's mother's cousin--who knew? (This was suggested by a friend from the golf mystery days.) It also turns out that two strong women sometimes butt heads:)--I can only imagine what would happen if all the Jungle Red characters got together. Who would be in charge???

JULIA: Okay, I think I've got it. Jane Ryland and Jake Brogan sneak away from Boston to a resort in Key West. Also at the vacation destination: Clare Fergusson, performing a wedding for a friend at St. Paul's, and her husband, Russ Van Alstyne. The British groom's best friend from university, Duncan Kincaid, is there, along with his wife, Gemma James. At the reception, catered by Hayley Snow, they stumble over a body - an historian killed while investigating a 70-year-old mystery originating at Naval Air Station Key West.

The story then switches to the early days of WWII, when USAF Cpt. Liam Sullivan, SOE agent Maggie Hope, Lady Georgiana Rannoch, Lord Darcy O'Mara and the young American WAC Mina Yetner must stop a Nazi plot to attack the vital south Florida shipping lanes with their deadly U-Boats. 


Will the collection of aristocrats and commoners be able to
work together? Who is the Nazi sympathizer at the Naval Air Station? Why is someone willing to murder to protect their secrets after seven decade? Do nonagenarians Mina Yetner and Maggie Hope hold the key to the mystery?

What do you think, dear readers? What fanfiction would you like to see us write? And what other mystery authors should delve into d-i-y fanfic?

Thanksgiving in Paradise

Hi, this is Hayley Snow, the food critic from Lucy Burdette's Key West mysteries. One of my favorite writers, Deborah Crombie, asked me to talk about Thanksgiving in Paradise--that's Key West for those of you who don't know me. 
 

To be completely honest, sometimes I do miss the way we used to celebrate the holiday in New Jersey

--it was all about tradition. And we rarely broke from it. But I can remember one year when Mom felt sorry for a family who'd recently moved to the neighborhood from South Carolina. They knew no one and so they invited us. My father and grandmother and I grumbled like mad, but Mom held firm and we carted our side dishes and pies and relish trays up the street to their house. Oh horror of horrors, there were no mashed potatoes on the menu--only white rice!Well, Thanksgiving doesn't have to be traditional in Paradise. If you're unhappy about your meal or sad about your family, heck, you can ride your bike to the beach and have a picnic. Or pop down to Louie's Backyard for a cocktail on the deck overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. And if you don't feel like cooking at all while in Paradise, plenty of local restaurants will do the work for you. 
  

But we're definitely cooking at Miss Gloria's houseboat. Eric and Bill will be there, and Miss Gloria of course, and Danielle and Wally. Even Officer Torrence said he might stop by. And when we're done eating, I'll take some leftovers to the guys at Mallory Square. Because what good is a fabulous spread if you don't share it? 

Here's what's on our menu: Guacamole, pimento cheese, and bloody Marys to start, turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes and turnips, brussel sprouts sautéed with shallots and bacon, pumpkin pie, and cranberry sauce out of a can--because that's the only kind Miss Gloria will eat. Oh, and two kinds of chocolate...
 
When my guests first arrive, I like to ply them with the best ever bloody Mary. For hors d'oeuvres, I've decided on pimento cheese dip and guacamole. 

 And to go with the turkey:Pumpkins stuffed with cornbread, leeks, cheese, and bacon

Cornmeal-sausage stuffing 





For dessert, I love to bake, but it's awfully tempting to order pies from the Old Town Bakery. 




 

Then I'll save my baking for two chocolate treats, Scarlet O'Hara Cupcakes and a really easy chocolate cake that came directly from my grandmother's recipe box.

And finally, here's what I'll do with any leftover turkey.

So Happy Thanksgiving from all of us! What will be served on your table?

Key Lime pie a la David L. Sloan

LUCY BURDETTE: I know I've bombarded you with Key West things this week, but it's hard to resist when the place is so full of interesting people! 

As many of you already know, I have a particular fondness for Key lime pie, as it became the murder weapon in the first food critic mystery, AN APPETITE FOR MURDER. Naturally Hayley Snow is suspected when the victim turns out to be her ex-boyfriend's new squeeze. 

“Are the cops looking at any other suspects?” I asked.

“Not that they’ve mentioned. You are in the unfortunate position of having a decent motive and no alibi. And you’re a cook with more than a passing knowledge of key lime pie.” 

So what do we do now?” I asked. “I swear I never touched the girl. Or fed her any poison. I’ve never even made a key lime pie. To be honest, I’m totally freaked out by the idea of meringue.” 

So you can understand that when the Key West Citizen publicized a booksigning last week for THE ULTIMATE KEY LIME PIE COOKBOOK, we had to go meet David Sloan and buy a couple of signed books. I told him about our JRW blog and how we love food and recipes and he was happy to share a pie from the cookbook. He offers hundreds of options for combinations of crusts, fillings, sauces, and toppings, but I've chosen a traditional crust with a classic filling.

TRADITIONAL GRAHAM CRACKER CRUST

1 and 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
1/3 cup white sugar
6 tablespoons butter, melted

Combine the crumbs and sugar in a medium bowl. Stir in the butter until crumbs are coated. Press evenly into a nine-inch pie pan. Refrigerate at least 30 minutes before filling.

CLASSIC KEY LIME FILLING

1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk
4 egg yolks
1/2 cup Key lime juice

Preheat the oven to 350. combine eggs and milk and mix well. Slowly mix in the Key lime juice. Pour mixture into the prepared crust. Bake at 350 for 8 to 10 minutes. Cool, then chill until firm.

Serve topped with whipped cream or meringue and enjoy your little taste of Key West!


 

  

Behind the Book: Death in Four Courses

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Get out your limeade (or your margarita), put on your Jimmy Buffett, and get ready to party! Here at JUNGLE RED we're celebrating next Tuesday's release of our own Lucy Burdette's second Key West Food Critic Mystery, featuring plucky food writer Haley Snow. (Lucy, can I say plucky? I mean the adjective in it's very best sense--Haley doesn't think of herself as brave, but she does what needs to be done if her friends are in trouble.  She's my kind of heroine.)

Put together a great setting, wonderful food, and terrific writing, and you have a combination Publisher's Weekly calls "yummy." Now, here's Lucy to tell us more!

LUCY BURDETTE: Talk about providence. Not too long after I signed the contract to write the Key West food critic mystery series, I learned that the Key West Literary Seminar would be focusing on food writing in January 2011. The event was called THE HUNGRY MUSE, featuring foodie luminaries such as Frank Bruni, Madhur Jaffrey, Jonathan Gold, Diana Abu-Jaber, and many more. Not only would I be able to take notes from the best in the business, I could write the whole thing off!

I pictured my food critic character, Hayley Snow, as she anticipated covering this conference for her online magazine, Key Zest. She would be so thrilled to hear and meet her writing idols. But she would have mixed feelings too, as she tried to land interviews with bigwigs, write snappy but thoughtful articles, all while comparing her abilities and her fledgling career to theirs. And maybe Hayley had invited her well-meaning, foodie mother for the weekend, not realizing quite how vulnerable she’d feel working on this important assignment?

With the background in place, I looked for more ways to ratchet up the tension. Suppose the keynote speaker threatened to divulge some of the other writers’ potentially career-threatening secrets over the weekend? And suppose someone would kill to hide one of those secrets? And then what if a dear friend was implicated in this murder? Oh, I was rubbing my hands with fictional glee over the possibilities…

I write best when immersed in the setting I’m writing about. So I pictured Hayley attending the events I was attending—the opening lecture from a foodie luminary (in reality, Ruth Reichl; in Hayley’s world, Jonah Barrows), the cocktail party at the Audubon House, the panel discussions on topics such as “transubstantiation” and “cultural stew—spicing up language and life,” which became “Food Writing as a Funhouse Mirror—Marcel Proust Meets Bobby Flay.” 

And then there was food! For Hayley's benefit, I snagged a ticket to one of the extra events, The Flavors of Key West, a multi-course dinner and wine-tasting at Louie’s Backyard. And ate more food—dinner at Santiago’s Bodega and lunch at La Creperie (chocolate crepe pictured on left), where Hayley takes some guests and quizzes them about the murder…I’ll let her describe it:

"The waitress delivered our meals: Greek salads thick with feta cheese and Niçoise olives folded into buckwheat pancakes, a spinach and mushroom omelet, and the ham and cheese sandwich crowned with an egg over easy and an order of french fries on the side.

“Besides, if the conference sponsors aren’t happy,” Sigrid said, plunging her knife into the sandwich so the yoke flowed like yellow lava over the ham onto the crunchy stalks of potato, “Dustin’s out of a job.”

I loved developing the oddball secondary characters, like my fictional novelist Sigrid Gustafson, mentioned above, and imagining what they might have written and how they'd talk about their writing at the conference. Here's Sigrid expounding on the meaning of her novel:

“In Dark Sweden, the murderer reveals himself over a platter of raw oysters…At the moment the detective recognizes how he’d missed this opportunity to clinch his case, he also understands that his finicky palate will continue to interfere with his job unless he opens himself up, like a reluctant mollusk.”

Another character, Fritz Ewing, made his name writing poetry about protein. Here’s a snatch from his poem called “The Butcher.” 
          

At night, he brings his apron home, layered with the detritus of his day.

A splash of blood from the rib eye steaks carved for the rich man on the hill.

A touch of green from lobsters cracked and cleaned for the fussy housewife,

Who will eat pink flesh but not green, no matter how pleasing the taste.

Marrow from hacked bones,

Distributed to fancy restaurants and slavering dogs alike.

But it wasn’t only the food and the oddball characters that I loved writing about. I’m crazy about Key West, period. There’s something magical about the island. I feel so lucky to spend time there and to write books set on the island. My friend Mark Hedden summed the sense of what's so special about Key West up well:

“The thing about Key West is that it is ultimately a fragile place. Low and small and flat and just sitting there, unprotected, in the middle of all that ocean. One big hurricane, a foot or two of sea level rise, and we could be wiped off the map. Every day you live here, there’s a sense that you’re getting away with something.” 

And that’s the way I feel about writing DEATH IN FOUR COURSES—sure it was a lot of work; but the kind of work that leaves me feeling...like I’ve gotten away with something.

DEBS:  And now I'm hungry (and envious that you got to hear Ruth Reichl speak...) I'm going to get out my copy of DEATH IN FOUR COURSES and contemplate recipes. 

Readers, you can do the same. There are lots of ways to pre-order the book—you can pick your poison:

Barnes and Noble
Amazon
Indiebound
Or for a signed copy, RJ Julia Booksellers
 
And don't forget to leave a comment to be entered in our double-barreled drawing--for a copy of DEATH IN FOUR COURSES and for a copy of KEYS CUISINE, Flavors of the Florida Keys, by Linda Gassenheimer. (So you can cook like Hayley!)
 

The Key West Food Critic Mysteries

We were thrilled to find out that Roberta will be writing a new mystery series featuring a food critic and set in glamorous, sunny Key West. The first in the series (from NAL) is A TASTE FOR MURDER. Roberta will be writing under a new pen name, Lucy Burdette, but here at Jungle Red, we're still going to be calling her Roberta.

JAN: You've written mysteries with protagonists who were golf

pros, advice columnist/psychologist, and now food critic. How do you

go about learning the occupation of your main character and how does

that play into their personalities and/or sleuthing.

ROBERTA: The golf lover's series came at a time when I was deeply

obsessed with golf. I knew how to play, though certainly not at

the level of a professional, and was familiar with what happens to a

neurotic personality under the stress of competition! To get ready to

write about Cassie, I read a lot about pro women golfers, watched

tournaments, and even played with two pros in a tournament. So much

fun!

The advice column series featured a clinical psychologist and this

character was actually much closer to home for me. I gave her a

private practice very similar to the one I had and placed her in New

Haven, CT, which is very familiar to me. the advice column stuff I

simply made up...

Now this new series is something different--the first time a publisher

has suggested a character's occupation. I probably wouldn't have

thought of writing about a food critic, but I love to eat, cook, and

read and write about food, so why not give a try? I've been reading

memoirs by retired New York Times food critics (Born Round by Frank

Bruni and Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl) and other food writers

like Kim Severson (Spoon Fed.) And most luckily, the Key West Literary

Seminar in January is focused on food writing this year. So I'll get

to hear and learn from all kinds of well known food writers, including

the two critics I mentioned. I'm so excited!

JAN: I love Key West, but tell everyone else, why it makes such a

terrific setting.

ROBERTA: Key West is a gorgeous tropical island at the very tip of

the Florida keys, just 90 miles from Cuba. Tolerance of differences

seems to be higher here at the end of the earth, so KW attracts a

fascinating mix of people--artistic types, wealthy, homeless, gay,

straight, you name it. It has a kind of Caribbean island mentality,

while maintaining the advantages of being in the US. The police and

the town struggle to balance welcoming tourists and taking care of

actual residents. And the foodie scene is terrific!

JAN: Tell us about your new protagonist, Hayley Snow -- is she native to Key West, an import??And how does either one of those factor into her personality or her

sleuthing skills.

ROBERTA: She has just arrived on the island and fallen in love with

the place. As the book opens, the boyfriend she moved to be with has

dumped her. She can afford to stay only if she lands the food critic

position at the new Key Zest style magazine. Jan, I'm realizing as I

think about your question that I have so much left to find out about

this new character...

JAN: I know that you are a enthusiastic cook -- does that factor into your development of Hayley. Will you be sharing your recipes??

ROBERTA: Hayley's a great cook--she learned that from her mother. Her critical streak comes from her father. I loved having my character Rebecca Butterman think about problems while she cooked, and feed people both physically and emotionally (including herself!). So I'm delighted to have the chance to write another character for whom food and eating are important and pleasurable. I have no idea whether the

publisher will want recipes in the book, but I can definitely picture sharing some on a new blog. It's going to be a challenge to figure out how to promote this series under a brand new name--and a challenge to answer to "Lucy"!

JAN: Please feel free to ask Lucy more about Key West, cooking or her new series!!

-