Paula Munier--Home at Night

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

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

The Best Houses, Real-Life and Literary

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

                                                                    

Beware the blackbirds…

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

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

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

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

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

She’s Gone to the Dogs - a guest blog by Margaret Mizushima

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: You all know I love dogs. And I love mysteries. I also love small towns and danger in the wild outdoors. So I was astounded I'd never run across Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek K-9 series until recently. It presses all of my buttons (plus, there's a simmering will-they-won't-they romance that develops in the background.) 

Those of you who were a little faster on the ball than I will be delighted to hear Margaret's latest, STANDING DEAD, is out now, and those of you who are saying, "Ooo, sounds good..." are in luck - STANDING DEAD is the eight book covering the adventures of Officer Maggie Cobb, handsome veterinarian  Cole Walker, and K-9 Robo, so there's a lot of great reading you can catch up on!

You might guess a writer who has been praised for her realistic, heart-felt portrayal of a working K-9 German Shepard and her relationship with her handler must have a lot of experience with canine friends. And you'd be right! Margaret is here to tell us about some of the memorable dogs in her life, and how those good boys and girls helped shape her award-winning fiction.

 

 

 When I married a veterinarian, I knew he loved animals, but I didn’t foresee that he would become a dog collector over the years. If I’d been paying attention, though, I would have read the signs. During vet school and before we married, Charlie adopted two unwanted dogs and then found them loving homes. After we married, he brought one black Labrador retriever into our home while I contributed two black half-Siamese cats. Black fur everywhere!

 

 

After forty-one years of marriage, we’ve lived with and loved countless pets, and we’ve also collected countless memories and stories. The first that comes to mind features a tri-colored Australian shepherd named Bear. Like so many of our dogs, Bear came to us through our vet clinic. Shy and sensitive, he preferred to lie at our feet or be petted rather than to work cattle or sheep like other herding dogs. When we realized how afraid he was of livestock, we gave up on training him and let him stay in the yard instead of going up to the barn. He soon became very attached to our five-year-old daughter.

 

One day, Charlie set up electric fencing in the open space next to our house so that we could graze sheep on the grass and weeds there. After releasing a ram and four ewes, he decided to leave the stock trailer in the middle of the enclosure to provide shade. As he worked to set up the trailer for shelter, he didn’t notice that our daughter had ducked under the fence and was running out to join him. But she caught the ram’s eye, and soon that big fellow squared off to charge.

 

Charlie lifted his gaze in time to see the ram charge, but he was too far away to intervene. As Charlie began to run and yell, Bear streaked under the fence and faced off that ram. Although frightened and trembling, that courageous dog saved his girl. You can bet he got extra treats that day.

 

Another story comes to mind about our Rottweiler named Ilsa. This dog came to us through our clinic at a time when our oldest was a latchkey, elementary-schooler and our youngest a toddler. Originally, we thought Ilsa would be a great dog for protection. But then a youngster in our community became lost during a family outing in the mountains and wasn’t found until much too late. So my husband and I decided to train Ilsa in Search and Rescue just in case one of our girls strayed from our campsite when we took a trip to the mountains.

 

 

Ilsa took to SAR training like she was born to it. Rottweilers are herding dogs by nature and when socialized and trained correctly, they want to assist their humans. Ilsa used a combination of air scenting and ground tracking as she became more and more skilled in finding people. Thank goodness we never had to ask Ilsa to search for a lost child. But during her training she was great at finding our kids in the yard when we asked them to hide before we shouted, “Ready or not, here she comes!”

 Little did I know that over twenty years later, I would turn to fiction writing and create a German shepherd character named Robo who was proficient in tracking, narcotics detection, and patrol. The Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries feature Deputy Mattie Cobb, her K-9 partner Robo, and a veterinarian named Cole Walker. Together they solve crimes that impact their fictional mountain community of Timber Creek, Colorado. There are eight books in the series, including this month’s new release, Standing Dead. I invite you to join Mattie, Robo, and Cole on their latest adventure.

 

Dogs can be our companions, our support animals, our helpers, and our protectors. And for this, all they want in return is love, food, and shelter. Roger Caras once said, “Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.” I think dog-lovers would agree with Caras. Do you have a story about a special dog or pet in your life?

Deputy Mattie Cobb and her sister, Julia, travel to Mexico to visit their mother, but when they arrive, they discover that she and her husband have vanished without a trace. Back in Timber Creek, Mattie finds a chilling note on her front door telling her to look for “him” among the standing dead up in the high country.      The sheriff’s department springs into action and sends a team to the mountains, where Mattie’s K-9 partner, Robo, makes a grisly discovery—a body tied to a dead pine tree. Mattie is shocked when she realizes she knows the dead man. And then another note arrives, warning that Mattie’s mother is in desperate straits. In a last-ditch gambit, Mattie must go deep undercover into a killer’s lair to save her mother—or die trying.

 

 

 

Margaret Mizushima writes the award winning and internationally published Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries. She serves as past president of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America and was elected 2019 Writer of the Year by Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. She and her husband recently moved from Colorado, where they raised two daughters and a multitude of animals, to a home in the Pacific Northwest. Find her on Facebook, on Twitter as @margmizu, on Instagram and on her website www.margaretmizushima.com.