Stories are the Spice of Life by Leslie Budewitz

 JENN MCKINLAY: One of our favorite writers Leslie Budewitz is with us today and she has a delightful post about the joys of traveling through the written word and how it inspired her latest. LAVENDER LIES BLEEDING.

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LESLIE BUDEWITZ: One of the joys of reading is armchair travel, right? You get to visit a place you’ve never been, or return to a place you’ve loved, with the author. Maine, with Julia. Key West, with Lucy. England – and France, Italy, and even Australia, oh and New York City – with Rhys.

 

With me, it’s Montana, where I was born and raised and still live. And Seattle, where I went to college and lived and worked as a young lawyer. I fell in love with Pike Place Market at eighteen, not long after the voters saved it from “urban removal.” Fun and funky, it was, and thanks to those voters and the historic preservation district they created, it retains its charms.

 

If, like me, you think of cobblestones, flying fish, and tales of the long-dead, top-hatted market master dancing in the upper windows of the Economy Building charming.

 

With the 9^th book, Lavender Lies Bleeding, coming out next week, I’ve been remembering a few of my favorite discoveries about the city, from living there and from researching and writing about the place. (I always say that by research, I mean eat, but as my research assistants, my BFF and Mr. Right, can attest, it also means walking. A LOT.)

 

One of the first things you see when you walk into the Market at First and Pike is Rachel, the four-foot-high bronze pig and Market mascot. She’s a piggy bank, of course, as well as a photo opp, and all the money deposited in her goes to the Market foundation for community services—emergency loans to vendors, the senior center, and more.

 

On one visit, Mr. Right and I were snooping around – with my sketchbook as my excuse, I’ll go down any ramp, hallway, or staircase in the Market. We came around a corner and saw a store room, its door open. And inside?

 

Spare pigs.

 

Big ones and little ones. On all fours like Rachel, or seated. Bronze or silver toned.

 

Turns out the spare pigs are often displayed in the Market itself. But they also travel, to pop-up Farmers’ Markets around downtown and to other regional markets and events.

 

I love public art, and it’s everywhere in the Market. These tile figures outside the restrooms at the foot of the stairs just behind the main entrance evoke the Market’s early years—it was founded in 1907 and is the oldest continuously-operating farmers’ market in the country. So when I needed a spot for a confrontation in Lavender Lies Bleeding, that staircase and these figures popped to mind.

 

Along with the cattle ramp—and Market staff confirmed to me that it was once used to bring cattle and pigs, Rachel’s flesh-and-bacon ancestors, into the Market. I first discovered it while location scouting with my BFF, and finally had a chance to use it in Lavender.

 

In my student days, I loved exploring the city’s neighborhoods. I still do, and try to take Pepper to a different one in each book. She often returns to her childhood home, where her BFF, Kristen, now lives, on Capitol Hill. In The Solace of Bay Leaves, she visits the adjacent neighborhood called Montlake. One rainy summer day, my BFF and her teenage daughter spent an afternoon sipping coffee and wandering Montlake’s streets and parks, looking for exactly the right spot for Pepper’s old frenemy, Maddie, to get into trouble. We found it—and I just managed to avoid backing into a car while taking a picture.

 

The Fremont neighborhood, probably the city’s funkiest, proudly declares itself the Center of the Universe, and since no one can prove otherwise, the King County Council officially agreed. I explored it on the pages of To Err is Cumin—a bakery I remember fondly, an underground vintage mall where Pepper finds clues in old treasures, and the Sunday Market where vendors and growers hawk their wares and bicyclists ride wearing only body paint, helmets, and shoes. Which catches Pepper quite by surprise when she finds herself taking an unexpected swim in the Ship Canal that runs through Fremont and is rescued by a pair of men in green and blue and nothing else.

 

The Market’s Flower Ladies have always made me smile. Mostly Hmong, they grow incredible blooms that always draw attention, even from visitors who can’t take a bouquet home. The action in Lavender Lies Bleeding goes between the Market and Salmon Falls, a farm town outside the city that is home to several Flower Ladies and to Pepper’s vendor pal, Lavender Liz. I got to weave together what I’d seen in the Market over the years with my experience living in a rural community, to create a new place that lives only on the page. We can call it Story Land.

 

After all, as I’ve learned after all these years with Pepper and the Spice Shop crew, stories are the spice of life.

 

Readers, where have you been on the page lately, and what did you discover about the setting that surprised or delighted you? Tell us the book and author, too, if you can, so we can enjoy a little armchair travel with you.

Lavender Lies Bleeding (Seventh St. Books, July 15, in pb, ebook, and audio)

Pepper Reece, owner of the Spice Shop in Seattle's Pike Place Market, is shocked when vandals destroy the greenhouse at her friend Liz Giacometti’s lavender farm. But then Liz is killed, and Pepper digs in to solve the crimes. As her questions threaten to unearth secrets others desperately want to keep buried, danger creeps closer to her and those she loves. Can Pepper root out the killer, before someone nips her in the bud?

 

Leslie Budewitz writes the Spice Shop mysteries set in Seattle's Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers' Village mysteries, set in fictional Jewel Bay, Montana, based on the small town where she lives. As Alicia Beckman, she writes standalone suspense set in Montana and the NW. Her latest books are Lavender Lies Bleeding, the 9th Spice Shop mystery, and All God's Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection. A national best-seller and three-time Agatha Award winner, Leslie believes that stories are the spice of life. 

 

Read excerpts and more, and find buy links, at www.LeslieBudewitz.com

Leslie Budewitz--Dreaming of the Past

DEBORAH CROMBIE: A big welcome to one of our Jungle Red regulars and favorite people, the lovely and talented Leslie Budewitz! I'm not going to tell you anything about Leslie's book because it would be anticlimactic compared to the wonderful story she shares below. It gave me goosebumps.

Welcome, Leslie!

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: Thank you, Reds and Readers, for welcoming me back to the Jungle.

Just before sitting down to write this piece, I read Laura Jensen Walker’s piece on her new historical novel, Death of a Flying Nightingale, about the volunteer flight nurses in England during WWII. and how she discovered the stories of these forgotten women. So many fascinating stories.

Discovering the forgotten stories of the past is, of course, one reason many of us love reading historical fiction. And though I mostly write cozy mysteries and suspense, I’ve also written historical short stories, with a mystery slant, featuring some of those overlooked women.

I don’t remember how I first learned about Mary Fields (1832-1914), who was born into slavery and spent her last 30 years in Montana, including a decade working for the Ursuline sisters at St. Peter’s Mission to the Blackfeet Indians, but I was instantly fascinated. All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection brings together three previously published stories featuring Mary and a new novella.

When it came time to write the novella, to anchor the collection, I was lost. I didn’t have a clear story idea. I wanted to continue delving into the themes and motifs of the stories, which focus on how women created lives for themselves in the American West, and how the social strictures of the era influenced the choices they made. I had a vague idea that it would involve two women, a teacher and a mail order bride, whose lives overlapped and somehow connected to Mary.

I got busy researching the era. Updating what I knew about Mary and the Ursulines. Plunging into books and articles about the Black experience in the American West, particularly for women. Thinking about possible crimes, and what Mary’s role might be.

And then my subconscious took over, in the form of a dream.

In the dream, I saw a book cover. An image of a late 19^th century woman. A photo I’d taken years ago of a rime-covered rose, grown from a cutting I’d been given by a woman whose grandmother carried a cutting in a coffee can when she came to Montana by train to marry a man she had never met. The dream was in the collage style of a Montana artist, Amy Brakeman Livezey; I’d never met her, but I’d seen and admired her work in a local gallery.

A week later, I stopped in the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell, Montana, about 30 miles away, to see an exhibit of work by Livezey and another artist who tell stories of women of the past.

Imagine my shock when I walked in and saw the woman from my dream.

(I suspect I’d seen an image of the painting in an ad for the exhibit. I hadn’t focused on it, but my subconscious did.)

I wish I could tell you I immediately knew the rest of the plot for “A Bitter Wind,” but I didn’t. It took me a couple of weeks to realize that the dream was telling me to merge the two women I’d been thinking of into one. Amelia Morgan, who came West by train to marry a man she’d met once. A woman who wore a blue traveling suit and carried a carpet bag full of books—and a cutting of a rose, in a can. It took a while longer to figure out who she was marrying, start writing, and discover the crime and mystery.

 A few years ago, I read an article on Writer Unboxed, one of my favorite blogs for writers, about using collage to develop or clarify the elements of a story. I loved the idea. It totally daunted me.

But clearly, the dream was telling me to do it.

I found the image of the woman in blue on Livezey’s website. (And yes, I’ve told her this story and she loves it.) On a narrow road near Helena, Montana is an old homestead I’ve driven by many times, always thinking I should take a picture and never stopping. The house I envisioned in the story was vaguely like that one. My friend Tabby Ivy had painted it, and I found the image on her website. I found a suitable photo of a sparrow. I printed out the picture of Mary that ultimately went on the cover. Photocopied a map of the area. Dug out my childhood stamp collection, still in a box in the closet. After all, Amelia and George courted by mail, and Mary is believed to have been the first Black woman in the country to drive a U.S. Postal Star Route. I watched videos on making a collage.

And Readers, I did it.

Ultimately, what the dream did was give me images for my subconscious to work on, spurring my conscious mind to ask the questions that fleshed out the story. The dream and collage gave me permission to plow ahead despite not knowing where I was going, through a mountain of fear. They gave me trust in the creative process, even though it was unlike anything I’d ever done before.

It’s nothing like the courage of Mary, Amelia, or the Flying Nightingales, but it feels pretty good.

 

Readers, have your dreams given you ideas you’ve been able to use in waking life? Have they prompted you to do or make something unexpected?

 

All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, out September 17, 2024 in paperback and ebook (Beyond the Page Publishing)

 

From the cover: Born into slavery in Tennessee, the remarkable “Stagecoach Mary” Fields was a larger-than-life figure who cherished her independence, yet formed a deep bond with the Ursuline Sisters, traveling to their Montana mission in 1885 and spending the last thirty years of her life living there or in nearby Cascade. Mary is believed to have been the first Black woman in the country to drive a U.S. Postal Star Route, the source of her nickname.

In All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories, Agatha Award-winning author Leslie Budewitz brings together three short stories, each originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, imagining the life of Stagecoach Mary in her first year in Montana, and a novella exploring her later life, including: “All God’s Sparrows,” winner of the 2018 Agatha Award for Best Short Story; “Miss Starr’s Good-bye,” a nominee for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award; “Coming Clean,” a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s 2021 Spur Award for Best Short Story; and “A Bitter Wind,” a brand-new novella in which Mary helps a young woman newly arrived in the valley solve the mystery of her fiancé's death and his homesteading neighbors’ bitterness toward him.

Includes an abbreviated bibliography and historical notes from the author.

 

About Leslie:

Leslie Budewitz tells stories about women’s lives, seasoned with friendship, food, a love of history and the land, and a heaping measure of mystery. In addition to her historical short fiction, she writes the Spice Shop mysteries set in Seattle's Pike Place Market and the Food Lovers' Village mysteries, set in NW Montana. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody suspense. A past president of Sisters in Crime, she lives in NW Montana with her husband and a big gray tuxedo cat. Find out more about her, find buy links for her books, read excerpts, and join her newsletter community at her website.  

DEBS:  

 

Guilty pleasures – the lure of the advice column by Leslie Budewitz

LUCY BURDETTE: Today we welcome back good friend Leslie Budewitz to talk about her new spice shop mystery, To Err is Cumin. She’s also musing about advice columns, one of my favorite things to read in the paper, and the foundation for my advice column mystery series. (And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about reading them!) Welcome Leslie!

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: I adore advice columns. Reading them is like eavesdropping on neighbors you haven't met yet. The woman who tolerated her husband's pandemic beard, even though she hates it, but now can't convince him to shave. The cousin of the bride who wonders how many showers she should be expected to attend, gift in hand. The man whose girlfriend has the temerity to ask to be paid for working in his business. 

Seriously??? What do you do, write in, then wave the newspaper column in your sweet hunny’s face and say “See? I was right!”?

What I most enjoy is the glimpses of tensions, major and minor, in real people's lives. The window on interactions we haven’t witnessed. The chance to think about situations we haven’t faced, asking us to put ourselves in other people’s boat shoes or ballet flats and imagine how the world looks from that vantage. They help us better understand each other—and ourselves. 

Like good fiction, they build empathy.

Sometimes they make us laugh. A classic is the advice to a woman whose neighbor regularly popped in at dinner time: After dinner, put the dishes on the floor for the dog to lick, then put them in the cupboard while the neighbor watches. 

Some wisdom is simple, but profound. We can all identify with the letter writer (LW, in advice column parlance) who wanted to go back to college but worried that she’d be 55 in four years when she graduated. “How old will you be in four years if you don’t go back to school?”

As a writer, I’m drawn to exchanges that expose deep emotion and conflict. A recent letter from a mother whose teenage son had come out as gay sought advice on telling a homophobic grandparent. The responses from the columnist and readers who’d been there—as child, parent, or grandparent—gave me insight into the wide range of experiences, and helped me craft a minor character in my Spice Shop mysteries who is trans. As an author, I need to know what shaped each of my characters, whether that backstory appears on the page or not. The glimpses these LWs give us, through their willingness to be vulnerable, helps me see beneath the surface. 

Turns out that’s useful in real life, too.

Of course, some LWs have an agenda, just like some characters. They want confirmation that their behavior is appropriate, even when it isn't. So interesting—the ways we try to justify and explain our behavior. And yet, the desire for a pat on the head from someone else reveals that maybe we don't completely believe the story we're trying to tell ourselves. And it’s so much fun when the columnist turns the tables on a sanctimonious LW and points out the flaws in their thinking or behavior. 

When I was planning To Err is Cumin, I read a letter from a man who committed a crime years ago. He’d planned it; he’d even told his wife, who’d been against it. He went ahead. No one was hurt, he insisted. Now, when they disagree, she threatens to tell their grown children. He’s appalled. She’s lived comfortably for years as a result of his actions, without complaint. What should he do? 

What a fascinating dynamic! A self-deceiving crook and a spouse engaging in emotional blackmail. Alas, I had no idea what he’d done. I read every comment—still no clue. But how could I not use that scenario, bursting with tensions? 

Of course, the situation changed as I wrote, and the plot on the page bears little resemblance to the story LW told. 

But you’ll know. It will be our little secret. 

Later, as Pepper, my main character, and I were tracking a young woman named Talia around Seattle, I read a letter from a woman whose daughter had cut off all contact after an argument. Worse, the teenage granddaughter was refusing to communicate with the LW, her grandmother. I was struck by the columnist’s compassion. Keep reaching out, she wrote. Your granddaughter is a child, dependent on her mother’s love and physical support. It’s perfectly natural—even appropriate—for her to follow her mother’s lead. Be the adult. Work to end the estrangement, if you can, but don’t make the granddaughter pay for it.

So what do you know? When Talia tells Pepper how ashamed she is of her teenage self for refusing her grandmother’s gifts and letters, Pepper knows just what to say. And maybe Pepper’s advice will help the two stubborn women Talia loves resolve their differences. 

Reading advice columns gave me the idea for the struggle that sparked the story, and reading advice columns helped me wrap it up. Good things come from guilty pleasures.

Do you read advice columns? Got a favorite? What’s your preferred guilty pleasure? Leslie will be giving away a copy of TO ERR IS CUMIN on the Reds and Readers Facebook page. Stop over and say hello!

***

Leslie Budewitz writes the Spice Shop mysteries set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market and the Food Lovers’ Village mysteries, set in NW Montana. She also writes historical fiction—watch for All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection coming in September 2024. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody suspense. She cooks, reads, paints, hikes, and gardens in NW Montana. And yes, there are bears in her yard. 

To Err is Cumin 

Coming in audio July 16 and in trade paperback and ebook August 6.

One person’s treasure is another’s trash. . .

When Seattle Spice Shop owner Pepper Reece finds a large amount of cash stuffed in an old chair, she investigates—never suspecting a wingback will set her off on a trail of deception, embezzlement, and murder, and put her own life in danger.

“You Will Live a Long and Prosperous Life . . . ” by Leslie Budewitz

 Jenn McKinlay: Good morning, Readers! I am delighted to invite our dear friend Leslie Budewitz to talk about her latest Spice Shop Mystery, of which I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek! Enjoy - I know I did!

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Leslie: My Spice Shop mysteries are set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where Pepper Reece runs a spice shop and solves crime. I love showing readers around—via page and screen—a place I’ve loved since I was a teenager. And the Market’s long, twisty history is the perfect series backdrop.

But I also like taking readers to other areas of the city. A few years ago, Mr. Right and I visited Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum, chronicling the history of the Asian community in the Pacific Northwest, and toured the Kong Yick Hotel, a community center and residential hotel dating back to the 1880s. Naturally I started to wonder: What if a body was found in the basement of an old hotel? What other secrets might linger in a building where so many people had lived and worked—and died? So I created the Gold Rush Hotel on what was, when I last saw it, a vacant lot in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. 

The research was a book nerd’s dream. I pored over oral histories from early residents of the CID, as it’s called, along with maps and photos, and an intriguing account of the residential hotels, which were vital to the region's culture and economy. 

When I read a historian’s account of traveling with her father as a child in the early 1970s delivering fruits and vegetables, and his visits to the old Chinese hotels and restaurants, I felt one of those satisfying clicks writers live for. Community is key to immigrants, but especially to those who have faced extreme prejudice and legal exclusion. That, I realized, was why Francis Wu, my fictional hotelier, held on to the Gold Rush long after it closed. Why he was so determined that it stay in the family, despite his son’s indifference. 

And why he did not destroy the apothecary in the basement, despite what it had cost him. 

Part of the fun of writing the Spice Shop books is searching out the chapter epigraphs—spice lore, facts about Seattle and the Market, and other quirky tidbits. With Wok, I couldn’t resist the temptation to scatter in a few facts about fortune cookies, and even write a few fortunes of my own. 

Fortune cookies are an after-dinner ritual in Chinese restaurants across the U.S., but it turns out that their history is as tangled in fact and myth as any food in America. And theories of their origins abound, along with the claims to have been the first bakery to make them. 

One theory traces them to the Japanese tradition of tucking slips of paper with lines of poetry into “fortune crackers.” Just how that became the Chinese cookie spouting questionable bits of wisdom isn’t clear, but during the first half of the 20th century, their popularity grew. Some credit Japanese immigrants who ran many of the early Chinese restaurants in California. Others say it was a way of satisfying the Western love of something sweet at the end of a meal. 

Originally, the paper fortune was placed into a hot cookie and quickly folded with chopsticks before it cooled. An experienced baker could fold 13 cookies a minute. Machines came along in the 1960s—and now make as many as 8,000 fortune cookies an hour. 

The CID is still home to one last cookie and noodle factory, a century-old family-owned company whose original factory is now an art gallery, less than a block from where I built my Gold Rush Hotel—and I didn’t even know! 

Whatever the origins of the fortune cookie, they’re thoroughly American now, and no one can resist reading their fortune—and if all the cookie cutter wisdom does is make you laugh, that’s good luck, isn’t it?

***

Leslie Budewitz writes the Spice Shop mysteries, set in Seattle, and Food Lovers’ Village mysteries, set in NW Montana where she lives. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody suspense, including Bitterroot Lake and Blind Faith. The seventh Spice Shop mystery, Between a Wok and a Dead Place, will be out July 18. Find out more and links to buy the book at www.LeslieBudewitz.com. 

Here’s what Jenn said about Between a Wok and a Dead Place: 

“Leslie Budewitz delivers the goods again in her latest captivating cozy, Between a Wok and a Dead Place. A twisty-turny plot, seasoned just right with plentiful suspects and lots of culinary delights, this is one page turner of a mystery no reader should miss!”  

Between a Wok and a Dead Place

It's the Lunar New Year, and fortunes are about to change. 

 

Pepper Reece, owner of the Spice Shop in Seattle's Pike Place Market, loves a good festival, especially one serving up tasty treats. So what could be more fun than a food walk in the city's Chinatown–International District, celebrating the Year of the Rabbit?

 

But when her friend Roxanne stumbles across a man's body in the Gold Rush, a long-closed residential hotel, questions leap out. Who was he? What was he doing in the dust-encrusted herbal pharmacy in the hotel's basement? Why was the pharmacy closed up—and why are the owners so reluctant to talk? 

As Pepper begins to expose the long-concealed truth, the killer is on her tail, driven by hidden demons and desires. Can she uncover the secrets of the Gold Rush Hotel without being pushed from the wok into the fire?

Readers, do you have a favorite Chinatown memory or souvenir? A fortune you’ve saved? Writers, tell us about a “click” moment you’ve had. One lucky reader will have the good fortune of winning their choice of a Spice Shop mystery! 

Inspired the past Alicia Beckman on BLIND FAITH #Bookgiveaway

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Long buried secrets… For mystery writers they're the golden threads woven into our novels.

Today we’re delighted to host three-time Agatha award winner Leslie Budewitz, writing this time out as Alicia Beckman, with a just-published novel that began with her own golden threads.

Alicia Beckman/Leslie Budewitz: Fifteen books and I’m finally going home again, on the page.

Blind Faith, written as Alicia Beckman, is my fifteenth book and second standalone suspense novel. And in all those words on all those pages, only once before, in a short story, have I set anything in the town where I was born and raised, Billings, Montana, even though it’s a place I love and home to many stories.

An oddity of publishing is that by the time a book comes out, an author has usually written another book and is well into a third. I started Blind Faith in the summer of 2016, thought it was finished in early 2019, then revised it yet again in 2020. I worked on it between other projects and honestly can’t tell you how many other books and stories I’ve written since starting it. So I’ve been going back over my book journal to remind myself of the process. (Thank you to the late Sue Grafton for the brilliant tip to keep a journal for each book, to keep track not only of story ideas but your own doubts and questions.)

Boy, was I surprised by what I discovered, especially the process of overcoming doubt and finding the story. Though I’ve been practicing law for decades, I’d never written anything with a lawyer as a main character. (Corpse, yes, but that doesn’t count.) As this story emerged, I knew it was best told through multiple points of view and a dual time line, a contemporary cold case investigation interspersed with scenes from the past. Could I pull that off? Could I find the right factual twists to unearth the deep emotions that drive psychological suspense?

And I found lists of things I remembered from childhood, like this one:

Let me explain that last one. For many years, my parents bowled on Saturday nights at an alley not far from our house. It was a family-friendly place, with a kids’ play area and a lunch counter run by one of the bowlers. When he was in a good mood, he’d mix cherry Cokes and Green River sodas for the kids.

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who knew what a Green River was, so maybe it was a regional treat or Mr. Tollefson’s own invention, taking its name from the thick green syrup he mixed by hand with flavors, then added carbonation to create a lemon-lime soda.

The bowling alley also had a bar, called the Jubilee, and occasionally my parents would stop for a drink with other bowlers after the last pin fell. Kids were—still are—allowed in bars in Montana, and I enjoyed sitting in the curved leather banquette, the neon beer signs flickering in the windows, and listening to the adults talk. It was the late 1960s and talk covered the range of issues burning across the country.

One thing they did not talk about were labor unions, particularly the United Mine Workers, despite the union’s strong presence in the state and the national ruckus over allegations of corruption, rigged elections, and misuse of power and influence by union leaders, namely its president, Tony Boyle. Why? Because the head of the local, a kind, nondescript man who bowled in the same league as my parents, was Tony Boyle’s brother. A few years later, Tony Boyle was charged with embezzlement and later with conspiracy for the murders of a rival, his wife, and daughter, and was convicted. He died in prison.

Is that not fascinating, how one brother’s ambitions focus on the ten pin while the other plots a gruesome murder for hire?

When I started Blind Faith, I wanted to write about Tony Boyle, but he was too old to be connected to the key events, involving two teenage girls who meet in 1981 and again in 2016 as middle-aged women. But I could take what I perceived as his ruthlessness, his seeming talent for using people against each other, and the determination to escape the hardscrabble life of a mining family, and play that out on a local stage.

Then I read a lengthy newspaper feature about the Rainbow Bar in Billings, still owned by the same family that founded it as a beer hall shortly after Prohibition. The Jubilee was long gone, but after a dip into divedom and a thorough scrubbing, the Rainbow thrives. I hadn’t been in it in years, but could easily picture the block, a long row of two- and three-story redbrick buildings facing the railroad tracks on the edge of downtown.

I could see one of those women, lawyer Lindsay Keller, walking down the street, passing under the curved neon sign, and reaching for the old brass door handle.

While nothing on that list from the early days of Blind Faith except the school and the pop made its way into the book, those lists set my conscious and subconscious wheels turning. A lake. Brothers. A ruthless man. A fast car and a forbidden party. A murdered priest. A lawyer haunted by her choices. And a bar, where an old man mixes Green Rivers and whiskey-and-sodas with equal ease.

Readers, is there a notorious crime or criminal from your childhood that still haunts you? (Or maybe a sweet treat, lost in a childhood memory?)

Thanks to Crooked Lane Books, one lucky reader will win a copy of Blind Faith. (US addresses only.)

Alicia Beckman writes moody suspense, beginning with Bitterroot Lake (April 2021) and continuing with Blind Faith (October 2022). As Leslie Budewitz, she’s a three-time Agatha-Award winner (2011, Best Nonfiction; 2013, Best First Novel; 2018, Best Short Story) and best-selling author of the Spice Shop mysteries, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers’ Village mysteries, inspired by Bigfork, Montana, where she lives. Leslie is a practicing lawyer, a national board member of Mystery Writers of America, and a past president of Sisters in Crime.

5 Amazing things "Alicia Beckman" learned writing BITTERROOT LAKE #bookgiveaway

HALLIE EPHRON: Today I'm so pleased to welcome back Leslie Budewitz, an old friend of the Jungle Red Writers, but you might not "recognize" her because she's sporting a new name (Alicia Beckman) and diving into a new genre (suspense). She's making her suspense debut with BITTERROOT LAKE.

Writing as Leslie Budewitz, she’s a three-time Agatha-Award winner (2011, Best Nonfiction; 2013, Best First Novel; 2018, Best Short Story) and best-selling author of the Spice Shop mysteries and the Food Lovers’ Village mysteries.

She's here today to talk about tackling a new genre, and the five amazing things she learned along the way.

LESLIE BUDEWITZ/ALICIA BECKMAN:
1. Every writer needs a friend who is descended from packrats. As Bitterroot Lake begins, Sarah McCaskill Carter is a new widow who comes back to Montana from her home in Seattle to help her mother clean out the family’s historic lakefront lodge.

The main plot is contemporary, but when Sarah finds an old trunk filled with journals, albums, and letters from the 1920s, she’s confronted with the implications of a pair of tragedies she’d known little about. I’d seen enough old scrapbooks and albums to picture (sorry) the white ink on black pages, the black-and-white photos held with black paper corners. But I’m way down the line of descent in my extended family and half the continent away, so when I decided I had to get hands-on, I called my friend JD, keeper of a vast family collection.

Oh, my goodness. Her great-grandmother’s scrapbook, begun when she was first married and living in a logging camp. (Did I mention McCaskill Land and Lumber Company, started in the 19 teens?) Boxes and boxes of photographs and letters. And the baby books. The McCaskills lost a young daughter in 1926. When I found JD’s mother’s baby book and the baby book for the baby girl who died in 1924 at fourteen months, I felt slugged in the heart. I’d already turned in the manuscript—Covid kept us from getting together earlier—but in revisions, I was able to add the baby book, describe what the albums were made from, and sharpen the sense of discovery.

Those details helped me ground the story in reality and create a stronger emotional connection for the reader. That’s why we read fiction, right?

I’m grateful to have spent a few hours with JD’s collection, but I’ll confess, I’m equally grateful that I’m not the one who has to figure out what to do with it.

2. The freak-out in the middle is apparently part of my writing process. I’m writing away, sure I know what the story’s about—not just the plot, but what’s it’s really about, the emotional core—then at some point in the middle, it all becomes a hopeless squiggle.

I torture myself with too much thinking, make too many notes, take long walks, drink wine, talk to myself and poor, tolerant Mr. Right, and then, it hits me. I know what the story is really about. And the rest of the draft flows.

For The Solace of Bay Leaves, that meant tossing an entire plot line and acknowledging that Pepper’s friendship with Maddie wasn’t incidental but the heart of the story. For Bitterroot Lake, it meant recognizing the central role of Sarah’s family history.

It’s painful as heck, but apparently I have to write half the book before It All Becomes Clear. I’m hoping that starting the WIP with a stronger sense of the emotional conflict for both sleuth and killer shortens the process. I’ll let you know in a week or two.

3. Toilet tissue was invented in 1857. In the trunk, Sarah finds a dried rose on top of a little girl’s dress, tucked away in 1926. Wrapped in what? I asked my friend Google when tissue paper was invented. This was right when the pandemic started and Google was fixated on toilet tissue, not what I had in mind.

When I changed my search to wrapping paper, I learned that the two are related. In 1863, Ebenezer Butterick began using tissue paper for his newly-invented graded sewing patterns, and its use for gift-wrapping began a few years later.

4. Phyllis Ramey loved baseball. As she’s unraveling the mysteries from a century earlier, Sarah visits a cemetery in the fictional town of Deer Park. I pictured a weeping willow and a stone lamb on the grave of a child, but before writing the scene, I wanted a deeper sense of the place. So, on a clear blue day last May, desperate to leave home for a few hours, Mr. Right and I made a field trip to two historic cemeteries not far away.

Old cemeteries are fascinating, each grave a story. I will never know why long-ago descendants emblazoned MOTHER in gold on a massive boulder in the cemetery at the University of Notre Dame—or how she would have felt. And the story of the fourteen-foot high statue of a young girl standing beside a woman in a wheelchair at Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle seems lost to the ages. But I know, from a flat stone in the cemetery in Creston, Montana, decorated with a photo and the image of a baseball, that Phyllis Ramey loved the game.

I never met her, but that stone made me love her so much.

5. The first thing everyone wants to know—and so, perversely, the last thing I’ll tell you—is who is Alicia Beckman? My publisher asked me to use a pen name to distinguish Bitterroot Lake from my cozy mysteries. It’s moodier, for sure—the cover and copy tell you that—but it’s not like I’ve gone from being Jessica Fletcher to Hannibal Lecter.



My books all stem from the events of women’s lives, with crime, and this book is no exception. My mother’s name was Alice and my father often called her Alicia. The Beckmans were my maternal great-grandparents and I kept a picture of them on my desk as I wrote; they are my visual image of Sarah’s great-grandparents, though their lives were nothing alike. Odd as it sounds, I like thinking of them watching me, wondering what on earth this crazy great-granddaughter is up to.

Hey, I wonder that myself sometimes, especially during that squiggle in the middle.

Readers, learned something fun or intriguing from a recent read? I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks to Crooked Lane Books, one lucky reader will win a hardcover copy of Bitterroot Lake. And if you buy the book and would like a signed bookplate, drop me a line with your mailing address (leslie@lesliebudewitz.com)


ABOUT BITTERROOT LAKE: When four women separated by tragedy reunite at a lakeside Montana lodge, murder forces them to confront everything they thought they knew about the terrifying accident that tore them apart, in Agatha Award-winning author Alicia Beckman's suspense debut.

Twenty-five years ago, during a celebratory weekend at historic Whitetail Lodge, Sarah McCaskill had a vision. A dream. A nightmare. When a young man was killed, Sarah's guilt over having ignored the warning in her dreams devastated her. Her friendships with her closest friends, and her sister, fell apart as she worked to build a new life in a new city. But she never stopped loving Whitetail Lodge on the shores of Bitterroot Lake.

Now that she's a young widow, her mother urges her to return to the lodge for healing. But when she arrives, she's greeted by an old friend--and by news of a murder that's clearly tied to that tragic day she'll never forget.

And the dreams are back, too. What dangers are they warning of this time? As Sarah and her friends dig into the history of the lodge and the McCaskill family, they uncover a legacy of secrets and make a discovery that gives a chilling new meaning to the dreams. Now, they can no longer ignore the ominous portents from the past that point to a danger more present than any of them could know.

How Do You Say That? The Mysteries of Audiobooks by Leslie Budewitz

Jenn McKinlay: Do you hear what I hear? Yes, it's our very dear Jungle Red friend, Leslie Budewitz, talking about audiobooks! Take it away, Leslie! 

 Leslie Budewitz: I’m willing to bet every Jungle Red will agree with me: When an author gets her first audiobook contract, she breaks out in a grin. Why, exactly, I’m not sure, but it feels like a sign that you’ve arrived. 

 For me, it may be in part because books on tape—and they were on tape, back then—were such a big part of my reading life when I started writing. (We’ll just ignore the debate about whether listening is reading; it’s story, and that’s what matters.) I was living in a small town on an Indian reservation in western Montana and driving a lot—I worked for a small law firm 30 miles north, and helped teach a legal writing class at the University, 45 miles south in Missoula. My town didn’t have a public library, but the Missoula Public Library took the view that it served the region and gave anyone living in an adjacent county a card. As I drove, I listened to books by Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Elizabeth Peters, Ellis Peters, and Tony Hillerman. It was Hillerman whose books showed me I could set a mystery in my own rural community and that readers, and listeners, would be interested. 

 And it was those narrators—Barbara Rosenblat, George Guidall, Stephen Thorne and Patrick Tull—who gave the stories another dimension. Through them, I could be in two places at once: Driving my narrow highways lined by foothills and mountains, winding above the river or through a lush farm valley. And at the same time, walking the streets of Chicago, cruising along the Pacific Ocean near Santa Teresa, harvesting herbs in the gardens of a 12th century Benedictine monastery, or roaming the vast Hopi and Navajo lands. It was the voices who took me there. 

 Although my Food Lovers’ Village series began before my Spice Shop series, it was the Spice Shop books, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, that came to audio first. When I heard the voice sample the publisher sent me after they chose the narrator, my eyes widened. I knew that voice! You know it, too—Dara Rosenberg who does voiceovers for TV and ads, as well as narrating books. She even narrates Barbara Ross’s Maine Clam Bake series, a favorite of mine and a regular Jungle Red visitor. 

 At some point, we connected by phone and talked about talking—that is, pronunciations. My main character, Pepper Reece, is a Seattle native, and Northwesterners have their own way of saying certain things. It’s toorist and toor, not the Northeasterner’s toreist and tore. The king of clam chowder is EYE-ver, even though it’s spelled Ivar. Some characters have an accent, or a personal manner of speech. 

 The books are loaded with regional names, many from Native languages. It’s SHIL-shole Bay, not Shils-hole. Klickitat, Duwamish, and Snoqualmie. (KLIK-uh-tat. Doo-WAHM-ish. Snow-KWAL-mee.) The t and l of Tlingit are said as one syllable, rather than inserting a vowel between them. And it’s Spo-KAN, not Spo-KANE. 

 For The Solace of Bay Leaves, Pepper’s fifth adventure, knowing there would be an audio book directly influenced the writing. There’s a character named Jake Byrd, and no spoilers, but at times, the spelling of his last name matters. How could I make that clear for the narrator and for listeners? That led to passages like this: 

     “I went to a couple of meetings,” the customer said. “I didn’t trust that Burns or Burke, whatever his name was.” ... 

    “His name was Byrd,” the stylist said. “With a Y. And he called the project Byrd’s Nest. With a Y.” 

    “That’s right. He had all these fancy drawings, but they were ugly as sin.” 

And this: 

     “You know, mostly you know the other people in the business, right? You’re looking at the same jobs, hiring the same subs. But this guy was new on the scene. His name was Jake Byrd, with a Y, doing business as Byrd’s Nest, LLC. With a Y.” 

     “Cute,” I said. Finally, a first name for the man. 

     “I thought it was dumb.” Jessica bit into a lemon coriander crescent. “Oh, wow.” 

     Wait until the baker started using my spices. 

 Each chapter opens with a short epigraph, usually a bit of spice lore or Seattle history. I wanted to use a snippet from a book of walking tours saying that Lake Union, in the heart of Seattle, was known as XáXu7cHoo, or “small lake,” in Whulshootseed, the language of the Puget Salish tribe. But I couldn’t use it if I couldn’t tell Dara how to pronounce it. I emailed the guidebook author; he had no idea. An old friend of my husband’s is a professor of linguistics at Western Washington University; I emailed her. She didn’t even recognize the phonetics, and was sure it wasn’t a widely used system. She reached out to colleagues among the Northwest tribes, but it was Christmas; my copyedits were due January 2. I chose a different epigraph. Trust me, that made recording an audio file for my darling narrator much easier. 

Readers, let’s talk talking books! Are you a fan? Do you have a favorite narrator? Do you listen in the car, like Leslie, or as you go about your day? One lucky winner will get their choice of a paperback or set of audio CDs of The Solace of Bay Leaves. 

 From the cover of The Solace of Bay Leaves, the 5th Spice Shop Mystery by Leslie Budewitz: Pepper Reece never expected to find solace in bay leaves. But when her life fell apart at forty and she bought the venerable-but-rundown Spice Shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, her days took a tasty turn. Now she’s savoring the prospect of a flavorful fall and a busy holiday cooking season, until danger bubbles to the surface ... Between managing her shop, worrying about her staff, and navigating a delicious new relationship, Pepper’s firing on all burners. But when her childhood friend Maddie is shot and gravely wounded, the incident is quickly tied to an unsolved murder that left another close friend a widow. Convinced that the secret to both crimes lies in the history of a once-beloved building, Pepper uses her local-girl contacts and her talent for asking questions to unearth startling links between the past and present—links that suggest her childhood friend may not have been the Golden Girl she appeared to be. Pepper is forced to face her own regrets and unsavory emotions, if she wants to save Maddie’s life—and her own. 

 Leslie Budewitz blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in two cozy mystery series, the Spice Shop Mysteries set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in NW Montana. Watch for her suspense debut, Bitterroot Lake (written as Alicia Beckman) in April 2021. A three-time Agatha-Award winner (2011, Best Nonfiction; 2013, Best First Novel; 2018, Best Short Story), she is a past president of Sisters in Crime and a current board member of Mystery Writers of America. She lives and cooks in NW Montana. Find her online at www.LeslieBudewitz.com and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/LeslieBudewitzAuthor More about the Solace of Bay Leaves, including an excerpt and buy links here: http://www.lesliebudewitz.com/spice-shop-mystery-series/

The Books of the Decade By Leslie Budewitz

Jenn McKinlay: A few years ago at Left Coast Crime in Portland, OR, I was lucky enough to have lunch with fellow cozy mystery author Leslie Budewitz, and I discovered she's just as interesting to talk to as her books are to read. Here's Leslie to talk about what she's pondering lately - just before her latest mystery Chai Another Day comes out on June 11th!

Leslie Budewitz 

Leslie Budewitz: One of my favorite book blogs is Book Bound with Barbara, by Barbara Theroux, a former librarian and bookseller who founded and ran one of my favorite indie booksellers, Fact & Fiction, in Missoula. (Happily, it carries on without her.)

Last month, she started a series of posts linked to Lit Hub’s A Century of Reading feature, 

identifying 10 books that have identified each decade of the last hundred years, plus. (The link takes you to the 2010s; scroll down a few paragraphs for the links to earlier decades.) 

Reading that led me to this list of New York Times fiction bestsellers, by year. 

And it seemed rather wonderful that the most popular book during the first third of the year I was born happens to have been Doctor Zhivago, one of my favorite novels AND movies. (Ahem; no, I’m not that old; it was published in English a few years after its first publication in Italy.)

I know what you’re thinking: The movie is never as good as the book. Or at least, that’s what we say when we’ve read the book first. I’m not so sure we’d all agree if we’d seen the movie first, because movies create such strong visuals. But I can’t think of a book and movie combo where I’ve seen the movie first. (Scratching my head—there must be one.)

I read Zhivago in Russian Lit class in college in about 1980. The movie happened to be playing downtown in a huge – HUGE – theater called, if I remember right, Cinemax, in its most max theater. It could have seated 600 or more.

There were four of us. 

It’s a long movie, with an intermission, which is weird when there are only four people in the theater. The potty break doesn’t take long, and there were no lines for the popcorn or Junior Mints. 

It is, of course, terribly miscast. At least if you recall the first line: “Yuri Zhivago was not a handsome man.”

I jest—you know that, right? 

We love the movie and watch it every year or two, but only in winter, alternating with Laurence of Arabia (1962), Sharif’s first English-language film. I fondly recall my late mother curling up on the couch with me to watch it on a visit. And in January when the ice and snow build up around our house, either Mr. Right or I can be counted on to shout “Fa REE kee noh!” as if we were seeking refuge in an ice-bound country house, with the Red Army on our heels. 

But this is about books. And while I think Dr. Zhivago is a great movie, so well excised from the book, the book still holds my heart. The scope is huge, so much bigger even than the movie, if you can imagine. It captured decades of change, but in the grand way that the Russian novelists did so well. It was Boris Pasternak’s crowning glory, and it caused him serious trouble in Russia, especially when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. 

Turns out I’ve actually read most of the books on both these lists for the 1950s and 60s. Missed Portnoy’s Complaint, though I doubt I’ll remedy that. (I do remember the woman next door asking my then 20-something brother to return it to the library for her—she didn’t want her husband to know she’d read it.) The lists are, well, serious books. And you’ve got to be in the right mood, right? (Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t.) 

What about you, reader friends? Is there a popular book from your younger years that you still adore? Something on these lists that you missed but went back to read? How did that go? A book that when the title comes up in party talk, you try to keep your eyes from glazing over and decide you really must have another deviled egg? (Bad example—who doesn’t always want another deviled egg?)

Available June 11th

Leslie Budewitz blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in two cozy mystery series. Chai Another Day,  her fourth Spice Shop Mystery, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, will be published on June 11. Death al Dente, first in the Food Lovers' Village Mysteries, set in Jewel Bay, Montana, won the 2013 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. She also won the 2011 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction. “All God’s Sparrows,” her first historical fiction, won the 2018 Agatha Award for Best Short Story. A past president of Sisters in Crime and a current board member of Mystery Writers of America, she lives and cooks in NW Montana. 

Find her online at www.LeslieBudewitz.com and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/LeslieBudewitzAuthor More about Chai Another Day,  including an excerpt here: http://www.lesliebudewitz.com/spice-shop-mystery-series/

When Seattle Spice Shop owner Pepper Reece overhears an argument in an antique shop, she finds herself drawn into a murder that could implicate an old enemy, or ensnare a new friend.