Sarah Stewart Taylor's Strangest Job Ever

**Late breaking news! Jay Roberts is the winner of Jeri Westerson's The Isolated Seance! Lucy D is the winner of Alicia Bessett's Murder on Mustang Beach! The winner of Barbara Ross's Hidden Beneath is Deborah Ortega!

Now back to our regularly scheduled program...

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am such a huge fan of Sarah Stewart Taylor's books, and as I was fortunate enough to read an advanced copy of her latest Maggie D'arcy novel, A STOLEN CHILD, I can personally vouch for it being a terrific read and I'm thrilled to have her as our guest today.

What a great topic, too. This came up recently at a writers' conference and hearing about everyone's weird jobs was fascinating.

Here's Sarah to share some of hers!

In my new Maggie D’arcy mystery, A Stolen Child, Maggie has just started a new job as a patrol officer in Dublin, Ireland when she and her partner are first on the scene of the murder of a young model and reality TV star. As Maggie realizes that the woman’s toddler daughter is missing and starts to unravel the threads of the investigation, she feels an extra level of pressure to do well in her new job, and to prove herself so that she can make it onto a homicide team. Focusing on Maggie’s mindset while I was writing got me thinking about jobs, the ones we hate, the ones we love, the great ones and the weird ones.

If you don’t count getting paid a nickel each to pluck slugs and snails off of the plants in my grandparent’s garden, I got my first job when I was ten years old and was hired by a Mary Kay saleswoman in my suburban neighborhood. I would walk over to her house after school and she would pay me to put shiny gold stickers on the pink boxes of Mary Kay products stacked against the wall in her guestroom. She had a very pink and pristinely clean house and I loved sitting on the bed in her floral-scented guestroom, peeling off the labels and placing them carefully on the boxes. She didn’t yet have a pink Cadillac, but she was working toward that goal, something she talked about all the time, and I remember feeling proud that I was somehow part of it.

Between the ages of eleven and fifteen, I was a babysitter. I babysat often, for all different kinds of kids and families, and managed to save quite a lot of money by watching movies in other people’s houses and eating their snacks after the kids went to bed. I loved seeing different houses and getting a window into all those different family dynamics.

And then, I got a job in a bookstore. That was my high school job, and in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The bookstore was a beloved, independent fixture in my Long Island town and enjoyed enthusiastic support from the community. I stocked the shelves, recommended books, and learned a lot about literature and about the world. I met a lot of real-life authors too and I think that my bookstore job made writing books seem possible. And since it came with a discount, it also served as the gateway to my lifelong book-buying addiction . . .

During high school and college, I had a whole variety of jobs. I worked as a receptionist and constituent services assistant in my congressman’s district office and as a sandwich delivery person in my college town. I waited tables at an extremely fancy French restaurant, where I had to speak in a soft voice, and clear the tables in one graceful, confident take, balancing all of the heavy china plates on one arm so that the guests wouldn’t have to look at dirty dishes for a moment longer than necessary.

After college, I moved to Ireland and worked in pubs, and then eventually as a nanny. I went to graduate school there, and when I returned to the States, it felt like it was time to get a “real job.” 

I worked in publishing for a while — an invaluable experience for someone who wanted to write books. I am grateful every day for the experience of seeing how the sausage gets made — but what I really wanted to do was to write and while I was getting my journalism career going, I got a part-time job teaching writing and literature at a men’s prison. It was another one of my favorite jobs, illuminating in so many different ways. It provided me with a look at our imperfect and inequitable justice system and at the terrible things humans do to one another, as well as at the transcendent humanity that can be found in even dismal places. 

I loved being a daily news reporter and spent the next few years writing new stories during the workday, and fictional ones at night and early in the morning. When my husband and I moved to Washington, DC for a few years, I felt like I was close to finishing my first novel and got a job as a dog walker to allow myself more time to write and revise.

Every day, between eleven and two, I would walk all over the city with my furry charges, picking up dog poop, greeting the regulars at the dog park, breaking up scuffles, and giving out treats. My husband had a prestigious job with the Clinton administration and I secretly loved going to his fancy work events and to cocktail parties and seeing people’s faces when they asked what I did and I told them I was a dog walker. The job offered me time to plot and think about my writing while I wandered all over the city and it gave me lots of ideas for future novels. Every day, I got to go into my clients’ houses when they weren’t home. I saw their photographs and personal belongings. I could tell when a spouse had moved out, or when someone was sick. Those glimpses of strangers’ houses gave me endless fodder for novel writing. 

For the last twenty years, since my first book was published, I have described my profession as “writer” or “novelist” wherever it needed to be described, but like most fiction writers I have had to do other things to make money as well: teaching, journalism, P.R. writing, farming, and the most wonderful and demanding — and unpaid and undervalued — work of parenting.

What is the strangest work you’ve ever done? What’s the best job you ever had? 

 

Sarah Stewart Taylor is the author of the Sweeney St. George series and the Maggie D'arcy series. The first Maggie D'arcy mystery, The Mountains Wild, was on numerous Best of the Year lists and was a Library Journal Pick of the Month. The fourth Maggie D'arcy mystery, A Stolen Child, is out now.

Sarah grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College, Dublin, where she studied Irish Literature. She has worked as a journalist and writing teacher and now lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries. Sarah spends as much time in Ireland as she can. 

DEBS: Dog walkers are like real estate agents and house cleaners, they get to see everything--so perfect for the perpetually nosy writer!

I highly recommend following Sarah on Instagram to see fun updates on her farming life. The lambs!

REDs and readers, share your strangest job!

Two Irish-Themed Stories from Maddie Day and Barbara Ross

Jenn McKinlay: Having just returned from Ireland myself, I can not tell you how happy I am to welcome -- Fàilte -- two of the  Jungle Reds fave mystery writers with their Irish-centric mysteries! Yay!

Hello to all. Maddie Day (then known as Edith Maxwell) and Barb (aka Barbara Ross) have traveled a lot of the same roads on this publishing journey. Our first books were published by small presses. Our first series with Kensington debuted in the same year. We’ve been blogging together over at Wicked Authors for nine years. We already knew each other from Sisters in Crime New England and the New England Crime Bake. And both of us have been mentored and supported by several Reds. 

 

And this month we have books with the same theme coming out on the same day. We’re giving away two each!

 

In Four Leaf Cleaver, by Maddie Day, a cooking competition on Saint Patrick’s Day at Robbie Jordan’s Pans ‘n’ Pancakes goes seriously awry.

 

 

In Irish Coffee Murder, a collection of novellas by Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis, and Barbara Ross, the holiday is Saint Patrick’s and the signature drink of the day is murder.

 

 

To celebrate, Maddie (L) and Barb (R) sat down at the (virtual) kitchen table to talk writing, research, mysteries, and series.

Maddie: Barb, your novella solves a cold case, a crime from the past. Have you written other cold cases in your Maine Clambake series? Is it easier or harder than having your protagonist evade a criminal lurking in the present?

 

Barb: In mystery novels, it’s not unusual to have a crime in the distant past informing a crime in the present. What’s different about this novella is there is no crime in the present. (Is that a spoiler?) Therefore I had to really work at maintaining suspense and keeping the reader interested in a very cold case. The novella length is part of what made that feasible.

 

Barb: Maddie, why did you choose to write about St. Patrick's Day?

 

Maddie: I usually come up with my own book idea, unless I’m asked to write a Christmas novella, for example. For this book, my (and Barb’s editor) at Kensington suggested I could do a cooking competition. Or, he said, “What about a St. Patrick’s Day theme?” I found the combination irresistible, so I did both! Batter Off Dead, the previous book in the series, takes place in July, but after that was “Scarfed Down,” a Christmas novella. A mid-March story slotted into book time perfectly.

 

Maddie: This is your fifth novella, and you've said before you like writing that length. Would you consider writing only novellas in the future? Why, why not?

 

Barb: I do love writing these 25,000 to 30,000 word stories. I’m writing one now to be published in the spring of 2024. (Red Julia Spencer-Fleming was part of a brainstorming session for this one.) I’m very lucky my publisher, Kensington, has offered me the opportunity to be a part of these collections of stories. However, I wouldn’t write only novellas for two reasons. 1) I would miss the opportunity to tell longer stories, And 2) getting novellas published outside the confines of these anthologies is very difficult.

 

Barb: This is the 11th book in the Country Store Mysteries. What do you find more challenging and what is easier when writing this far into a series?

 

Maddie: I’m writing book 12 now and have a contract through  book 13, which is kind of astonishing. What’s easier is that I know the world. I’m pals with my chef’s staff, hugely fond of her Aunt Adele, and adore Robbie Jordan’s husband Abe almost as much as she does. I know how hilly Brown County is and what fictional South Lick looks like. I love when it comes time on my rotation to write a new Country Store book so I can plunge back into that world and hang out with my imaginary friends.

 

As with any long-running series (looking at more than half the Jungle Reds right now), the challenges come in keeping the stories fresh. Making sure protag Robbie Jordan keeps changing and growing in her personal life and in her sleuthing. Finding plausible new people to murder and that Very Good Reason for Robbie to have to investigate. 

 

Maddie: Do you have Irish heritage? Or doesn't it matter for writing about an American holiday with little resemblance to actual Ireland? 

 

Barb: “Perked Up” takes place entirely in Maine, though Julia and friends do go on a roadtrip to the middle of the state while investigating the mystery. I knew next to nothing about the Irish in Maine and found a marvelous book, They Change Their Sky: The Irish in Maine, a collection of scholarly  essays edited by Michael C. Connolly. When we think of Irish emigration to the United States we tend to think of famine-driven immigration to big cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. But that is only a part of the story. Did you know the oldest surviving Catholic church building in the US is in Newcastle, Maine? (Next town on the coast from where the Clambake mysteries take place.) Still in use, Saint Patrick’s was built  in 1807 by Irish immigrants who became wealthy shipbuilders.

 

As for me, last summer in Dublin, I had a really fun visit with a genealogist at EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum. I have Irish ancestry, somewhat distantly, on both sides. My father’s great-grandmother, Eleanor Armstrong, was born in 1843 County, Armagh, now in Northern Ireland and my mother’s great-great-great grandfather was born in 1812 in Dublin.

 

Barb: How about your Irish heritage? What kind of research did you do to write this book?

 

Maddie: My maternal grandfather, Richard Flaherty, was a classic bullheaded Irish-American in San Francisco who didn’t speak to my mother from shortly before I was born until he died, as stubborn as ever and with a full head of dark hair, at ninety-four. He had twin brothers who didn’t speak to each other. On the other hand, one of those twin’s sons, my mom’s cousin Bill, is a sweet and devoted family man I’ve gotten to know a bit. I look forward to finally getting to Ireland sometime soon and digging more deeply into the Flahertys of my great-grandparents’ generation.

 

Unlike you, Barb, I didn’t dig too far into the Irish in Indiana, and my Maxwell family roots there are Scottish. For research, I adapted and tested lots of Irish-flavored recipes, and otherwise went full-on American interpretation of the holiday (except green beer). 

 

Maddie and Barb: Thank you to Jenn for hosting us! We hope you’ll all join us at the Wicked Authors blog every weekday, and find us at our web sites and on social media. We wish you happy Irish-styled reading.

 

Readers: What’s your favorite holiday to read about? Do you celebrate any obscure holidays nobody writes about? Do you have a St. Patrick’s Day tradition? We’ll each give away a copy of our new book to two commenters (that is two commenters, two books each).

 

In Four Leaf Cleaver, there’s no mistaking Saint Patrick’s Day at Pans ’N Pancakes, where  the shelves of vintage cookware in her southern Indiana store are draped with Kelly-green garlands and her restaurant is serving shepherd’s pie and Guinness Beer brownies. The big event, however, is a televised Irish cooking competition to be filmed on site. Unfortunately, someone’s luck has run out. Before the cameras start rolling, tough-as-nails producer Tara O’Hara Moore is found upstairs in her B&B room, a heavy cleaver left by her side. Now, not only does Robbie have a store full of festive decorations, she’s got a restaurant full of suspects . . .

 

In “Perked Up,” Barb’s novella in Irish Coffee Murder, It’s a snowy St. Patrick’s night in Busman’s Harbor, Maine. When the power goes out, what better way for Julia Snowden to spend the evening than sharing local ghost stories—and Irish coffees—with friends and family? By the time the lights come back, they might even have solved the coldest case in town . . .

 

Maddie Day pens the Country Store Mysteries, the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries, and the new Cece Barton Mysteries. As Agatha Award-winning author Edith Maxwell, she writes the Quaker Midwife Mysteries and award-nominated short crime fiction. Day/Maxwell lives with her beau and cat Martin north of Boston, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook. Find her at EdithMaxwell.com, Wicked Authors, Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen, and on social media: BookBub,Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

 

Barbara Ross is the author of the Maine Clambake Mysteries. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Barbara’s Maine Clambake novellas are included along with stories by Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis in holiday anthologies from Kensington Publishing. Barbara and her husband live in Portland, Maine. Readers can visit her website at www.maineclambakemysteries.com, on her blog at Wicked Authors and on BookBub, Goodreads, Facebook, and Instagram.

 

 

Sarah Stewart Taylor--Be Fearless

DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of the perks of being an author is getting to read advance copies of upcoming books. Another is following the careers of other authors who have become friends. Such is the case today, with the publication of Sarah Stewart Taylor's THE MOUNTAINS WILD. I loved Sarah's Sweeney St. George books, and missed her writing in the years she was doing other things. So I'm thrilled to bring you Sarah today, with a wonderful new novel, THE MOUNTAINS WILD.

Twenty-three years ago, Maggie D'arcy's family received a call from the Dublin police. Her cousin Erin has been missing for several days. Maggie herself spent weeks in Ireland, trying to track Erin's movements, working beside the police. But it was to no avail: no trace of her was ever found.

The experience inspired Maggie to become a cop. Now, back on Long Island, more than 20 years have passed. Maggie is a detective and a divorced mother of a teenager. When the Gardaí call to say that Erin's scarf has been found and another young woman has gone missing, Maggie returns to Ireland, awakening all the complicated feelings from the first trip. The despair and frustration of not knowing what happened to Erin. Her attraction to Erin's coworker, now a professor, who never fully explained their relationship. And her determination to solve the case, once and for all.

  
Here's what I said about it: 
"With its evocative Dublin setting, lyrical prose, tough but sympathetic heroine, and a killer twist in the plot, Sarah Stewart Taylor's The Mountains Wild should top everyone's must-read lists this year!" ― New York Times bestselling author Deborah Crombie

Julia liked it, too:

"Lyrical, moody, THE MOUNTAINS WILD unfolds like an Irish ballad, at turns stirring, tender and tragic. Sarah Stewart Taylor has written a book as much about the mysteries of the human heart as the questions surrounding the long-missing woman at the silent center of the tale. A triumphant return to the genre." ― New York Times bestselling author Julia Spencer Fleming

So this one comes highly recommended indeed! Here's Sarah to share her inspiration--

BE FEARLESS

I am not a slogan-y sort of person. I have never made an inspirational collage. I don’t have any “Success” posters hanging in my writing room. I am generally of the mind that a single motivational sentence or word could never contain enough nuance to be actually useful.  

And yet, a few years ago, when I embarked on a writing project that would become my new mystery novel, THE MOUNTAINS WILD, I found myself turning over and over again to two short sentences: Do Your Work. Be Fearless. Finally, I typed them up and pinned them above my desk. 

I needed a bit of fearlessness. The heart of the novel -- about a Long island homicide detective named Maggie D’arcy who returns to Ireland twenty three years after she first went there looking for her beloved cousin Erin -- had been lodged in my head since the night in 1993 that I drove with a group of friends up into the mountains outside Dublin, Ireland, and someone said to me, “This is where the American woman disappeared. She was from Long Island, like you.” 

Over the next six years, a string of disappearances in and around those mountains would baffle Irish investigators. Most of the disappearances -- including that of the young American woman from Long Island who, like me, had recently moved to Ireland  -- were never solved. During the years I lived in Ireland, I traveled all over the country, visiting many of the places near Dublin and Wicklow where the women had lived or gone missing. It wasn’t until I returned home to the States though that, thanks to the advent of online news, I learned about all of the cases. I started writing crime novels set in New England, and then I had three babies in five years and for a while, I didn’t write much of anything. I could chase a toddler across a busy road while eight months pregnant and with another toddler strapped to my body and go three weeks in a row without sleeping more than two hours at a stretch, but could I still construct a mystery plot? I wasn’t sure. I was afraid I’d never be able to do it again. When I started finding the time to tell stories again, I wrote kids’ adventure novels and the Irish cases receded in my mind, but never went away.

And then a few years ago, a plot began to crystalize. I started to think about the families of crime victims, in particular the families of crime victims who have disappeared, of whom no trace is ever found. I wondered what choices those family members might make, how it might affect their choice of careers, their relationships, the rest of their lives. I thought about the ripple effects of disappearances, of how everyone in the victim’s orbit is changed. 

Glendalough Valley

I was afraid to write the book though. A story inspired by those disappearances in Ireland somehow felt like it wasn’t mine to tell. Ireland was my favorite place in the world. The years I spent there, working and going to graduate school, were among the happiest of my life. I became myself there. I felt funny writing about something terrible happening there. I didn’t feel confident even trying until I sat down with an Irish friend in a pub in Dublin and told her my idea. You have to write it!” she exclaimed. 

 I started to do my work. I started traveling back to Ireland as much as I could to research locations, reconnecting with old and new friends and revisiting places that had been important to me. I interviewed experts and read accounts of the cases written by former investigators. I tried to figure out how to write the book. Irish crime writers I admire had written some terrific novels inspired by the disappearances and I knew I didn’t want to attempt to write the novel from the point of view of the Irish investigators or families. I decided to write it from the point of view of an American in Ireland. I wanted to capture the feeling of being a foreigner in a country you may think you understand, but really don’t. I wanted to capture the excitement and intense focus of getting to know a new place, the sense of everything being just slightly different: the words for things, the electrical outlets, the understanding of historical events and social dynamics. And I settled on the first person, present tense, because I wanted to narrow my character’s viewpoint to her own limited knowledge, to show her experiencing Ireland moment by moment, rather than thinking she -- or I -- had anything like a bird’s eye view. 

Glendalough Valley Boardwalk

My main character, Maggie D’arcy, appeared in my head one day. She would have grown up in an Irish American enclave on Long Island, she would have a complicated relationship with her missing cousin. She would go to look for her and be surprised by what she learned of Erin’s life. She would fall in love with Dublin, and with one of the men in Erin’s life there. She would realize how little she actually understood about Irish history and politics. Despite some promising leads, she would fail to find any trace of Erin, but she would become a homicide detective and years later, when new evidence was found and a new woman had gone missing, she would have to return to Ireland to face the man she’d loved for all those years and to try and solve the case once and for all. 

I’d done my work, but I was still terrified. I’d been out of the mystery community and that part of the publishing world for so long. Could I even do this? Would anyone want to read what I had to write? Doubt swamped me. 

And that’s when that phrase came to me. Do Your Work. Be Fearless. There was something about those words that centered me, that showed me the way. Put your head down. Do the work. Then put it out there, knowing that a book is always a risk, that not everyone is going to like it. Staying in Maggie’s head helped me. What was she experiencing? What was she missing? Where had she misunderstood? Maggie, it turned out, needed a dose of bravery too. 

THE MOUNTAINS WILD comes out today. My husband and my kids, now 15, 11 and 10, are helping me celebrate. I have been welcomed back so warmly -- as you can see from the quotes from both Julia and Debs on the cover of my book -- and I am so excited for the day that I get to see everyone in person once again. 

When have you had to talk yourself into being fearless? What resulted? And what slogans or phrases have been meaningful to you at various points in your life? 

Sarah Stewart Taylor is the author of the Sweeney St. George series and the Maggie D'arcy series. She grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College, Dublin, where she studied Irish Literature. She has worked as a journalist and writing teacher and now lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries.

DEBS: I love Sarah's questions! Stop in to chat and chime in!

The Question Writers Hate by Clare O'Donohue

JENN McKINLAY: A million years ago when dinosaurs roamed -- okay, more like seven years (in 2011) it just feels like a million -- I was fortunate enough to be paired up to sign books with this sharp cookie, Clare O'Donohue. I remember because my best friend Annette flew all the way in from Connecticut to go to the signing and afterwards she said, "I am buying all of that woman's books. She's amazing." I totally agreed and we did. So, here is Clare, breaking down the inner working's of the writer's mind for us while we celebrate the release of her new book Beyond the Pale, which is out TODAY!!!

I FINALLY HAVE AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION WRITERS HATE:

Clare O'Donohue

Every writer has been asked this. At every conference, on every panel, at every book signing. “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s probably the most asked question novelists hear.

The most hated question? “Where do you get your ideas?”

It’s not that writers are curmudgeons (okay, yeah, maybe) it’s just an impossible question to answer. Mostly ideas are not there, and then they are. Like the name of the person who sat next to you in sophomore English. One minute your brain can’t come up with a thing, then BOOM. There it is.

            At the risk of annoying all my fellow writers, the next time this question gets asked though, I’m going to raise my hand high, yelling, “Call on me!! Call on me!!” like the perfect student I never was. Because I know exactly where I got my idea for Beyond the Pale.

            Since I was a little one I’ve dreamed of traveling the world and having a passport filled to the brim with stamps from far-off places. But, you know, work, family, life, excuses. I have traveled a lot, seeing all but three states in the US (Alaska, N. Dakota and Idaho, just hang in there I’m coming). And when my idea was forming, I’d already been to what others might see as an impressive amount of foreign shores – twenty countries. But, ever greedy, I wanted to see more.

So, before you could say book research, I came up with a plan – create a mystery series with each novel set in a different country. Travel, writing – two birds, one tax-deductible stone.

The original plan was to have my main character be a single woman in her early 30s who inherited (Won? Found?) a large amount of money and decided to travel. At her first country she’d happen across a murder, meet quirky, possibly dangerous people, see the sites, and solve the crime. Book #2 would be similar, except different country. Genius!

I thought about my main character potentially meeting a love interest in book one. Would he follow her to country #2? Would there be a new beau in #2? If I wrote twenty books in the series would she end up with an admirer in every port? Plus, who would she talk to, who would she trust? Yeah scratch that. I’d already done the beginning of a relationship in my Someday Quilts series, and the end of a relationship in my Kate Conway series. I decided instead on featuring a couple, long married, and focus on the middle bit of a relationship, where you love, understand, and slightly annoy each other. That bit. Genius!

But would they just trip over bodies in every country? I’d already done that too – and nothing wrong with it, I’m here to say. Agatha Christie built a nice career out of body-tripping mysteries and I’m not fit to shine her shoes, so nothing against it. But maybe, I thought, I could mix it up. Give them a professional reason for all the bodies that will inevitably pile up across a long series. Spies. I felt particularly good about myself with that one. Genius wasn’t big enough. I’d write a Thin Man meets James Bond spy novel. That way there’d be a reason for all the travel and all the danger. It opened up a world of possibilities of bad guys, and crimes, and international intrigue.

But who would my husband and wife be? That took some time. I wanted smart people, capable of taking care of themselves but not so capable that they wouldn’t really be in danger. Accidental spies. College professors (he’s a World Literature professor with a reputation for sniffing out forgeries, she’s an International Politics professor who once trained to be in the CIA). They would know a lot about each country so the location would become a kind of character in the novel, they would bring special skills, and they would – of course – have each other to rely on even when they couldn’t rely on anyone else. And, I’d get to sneak in stuff I know from having an International Politics degree (Double genius because I’m finally using my college degree!)

My idea, in spits and spurts, was formed. A long-married pair of college professors sucked into helping Interpol but finding that instead of a straight-forward assist, they’ve gotten themselves caught between an international crime ring and a dangerously off-the-book subgroup of the famous international police organization.

I patted myself on the back coming up with all that. I did sort of feel genius-y. But then that’s what ideas are like. They’re promises mixed with ego and dash of optimism. That’s why writers are so loath to hear people talk about how special their ideas are. We want the real thing – the thousands of words on paper – thing. And now I have it. It may not be genius, but it feels good to see my idea become an actual book. And it doesn’t hurt that it took several stamps in my passport to do it.

Clare O’Donohue is the author of Beyond the Pale, the first in the World of Spies Mysteries. It’s set in Ireland. She visited Argentina, her thirty-third country, earlier this year, which will be the setting for book #2.

Okay, Reds, what about you? Answer the hated question -- where do you get your ideas?