Edith Maxwell & Mulch Ado... about cats and family secrets #bookgiveaway

HALLIEEPHRON:  We’re alwyas happy to be hosting Edith Maxwell, this time with her new (#5) Local Foods Mystery, Mulch Ado About Murder. Edith writes smart, twisty whodunnits, and this one's got her pondering family and their secrets, my personal favorite vein to mine.

Welcome, Edith!

EDITHMAXWELL: I’m delighted to be back on my favorite blog again. Thanks for inviting me back, Hallie, and congratulations on your new release!

I’m happy to give away a signed hardcover of my own new mystery to one commenter here today.

My fifth Local Foods Mystery, Mulch Ado About Murder, came out recently. In the series, organic farmer Cam Flaherty occasionally thinks about her distant – physically as well as emotionally – academic parents. It isn’t until this book that they come to visit. Her dad, William, is an awkward, funny, entirely unhandy man who finally shows how much he cares about his only child. Her mom? Deb becomes a suspect in the murder in the first scene. Cam learns all kinds of things about her mom’s past during the course of the book, and they eventually grow closer.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about family. Right now I’m sitting with a very ill kitty, keeping vigil to see if he’ll make it through or not. Birdy is the junior member of our family of cats, despite being fourteen, and we never thought he’d go before his older “siblings.” He was one of two felines I brought to the family of Hugh and me when we combined households over a decade ago. Birdy is also the cat in my (that is Maddie Day’s) Country Store Mysteries and has been on every cover.

Our former senior cat, my lovely and neurotic Athena, died in 2012, only a month before my mother also passed away. Hugh already had Preston, now famous as the farm cat in the Local Foods mysteries (and an artist’s version of which graces the cover of Mulch Ado About Murder), and Cristabel, who has ended up the kitchen cat in my Quaker Midwife Mysteries.

Birth families are the ones we usually think of when we mention the word family. In my case my parents were married for twenty-five years and had us four kids all less than two years apart before they were thirty. A few years after the divorce we acquired a stepfather and stepmother, and liked both of them very much. My sisters and I remain close, although we all live far apart, and my quirky brother is in the mix, too. What is it they say about family – the ones who have to take you in? We’re all so different from each other, but that shared past means a lot, and I know they have my back.

A good friend recently heard from his 44-year-old birth son for the first time, so that’s another kind of family. The son was happily adopted as a newborn, but reached out via ancestry.com to my friend, who now looks forward to meeting him.

Yet a different shape of family is the one we form with our partner, whether spouse or not, and their family. Half a year after I met Hugh, he took me to New Jersey for the first time to meet his parents, both retired schoolteachers. My father, who died too young in 1985, had also taught high school. When I walked into Bette and Roy’s apartment, she was working on the NYT Sunday crossword. He was ranting about the latest Republican shenanigans. A dictionary was open on the coffee table, and I thought, “I fit in this family!”

Then there is the family I created when I had children. My two adult sons, Allan and JD, are truly joys – self-supporting, funny, smart, handsome, both happy with women they love, and both staying in close contact with me. All I lack are some grandkids, and I have every confidence they’ll be along one of these years.

I often thank my Quaker family in my book acknowledgements. For almost three decades the members of my faith community have supported, nourished, and challenged me. Unconditional love from a group like that is an amazing gift.

So I believe we make families where we find them, and we find family where we need it. What about you, dear readers and back- blog regulars? What shapes do your families take? Have you learned any family secrets lately?

HALLIE: Edith, love your question and looking forward to reading today's comments. Remember, a book giveaway to one lucky commenter.

EDITH MAXWELL: 2017 double Agatha-nominated and national best-selling author Edith Maxwell writes the Local Foods Mysteries and the Quaker Midwife Mysteries; as Maddie Day she writes the Country Store Mysteries and the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. Her award-winning short crime fiction has appeared in many juried anthologies and journals, and she serves as President of Sisters in Crime New England.

A fourth-generation Californian and former tech writer, farmer, and doula, Maxwell now writes, cooks, gardens (and wastes time as a Facebook addict) north of Boston with her beau and three cats. She blogs at WickedCozyAuthors.com, Killer Characters, and with the Midnight Ink authors. Find her on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Instagram.

ABOUT MULCH ADO ABOUT MURDER: It’s been a hot, dry spring in Westbury, Massachusetts. As organic farmer Cam Flaherty waits for much-needed rain, storm clouds of mystery begin to gather. Once again, it’s time to put away her sun hat and put on her sleuthing cap when a fellow farmer is found dead in a vat of hydroponic slurry—clutching a set of rosary beads. Showers may be scarce this spring, but there’s no shortage of suspects, including the dead woman’s embittered ex-husband, the Other Man whose affair ruined their marriage, and Cam’s own visiting mother. Lucky for Cam, her nerdy academic father turns out to have a knack for sleuthing. Will he and Cam be able to clear her mom’s name before the killer strikes again?