Happy Thanksgiving to our Jungle Red Family!

Just stopping in today to let you know how grateful we are to all our Red readers--for your friendship, and this community, and your support of us and our books. Happy Thanksgiving with love and gratitude from Hallie, Hank, Rhys, Lucy, Debs, Julia, and Jenn!

A Fictional Key West Thanksgiving and Cover Reveal: A DEADLY FEAST

LUCY BURDETTE: Today, the day before Thanksgiving, when many of us are up to our ears in menu planning or pie crust rolling or sitting in traffic on the way to grandma's house or (lord help us) the grocery store, I wondered what I could post that might be entertaining without being demanding. And it occurred to me that you might enjoy a few snippets from A DEADLY FEAST, the 9th Key West mystery, coming next May--because it's set at Thanksgiving. On Monday we chatted about our menus and guest lists, today you'll hear about Hayley's!

Here's the final artwork--isn't it pretty? And I love that Jenn's quote is on the cover...In this story, Hayley is helping to investigate the death of one of the customers from a food tour. Chef Martha Hubbard worries that someone sabotaged her key lime pie. 

Here's a little snippet describing the meal she's making to teach a class on Thanksgiving sides:

Bill opened the door to the cooler and gestured at the shelves, overflowing with turkeys, sacks of Brussels sprouts, slabs of bacon, onions in net bags, and more.
“She’s teaching a class on Thanksgiving side dishes,” he said. “My favorite is the brown-butter rosemary yeast rolls.”
My stomach let out a loud rumble and they both laughed.
“You’re welcome to join this class, on the house. She’s including a tutorial on gravy from scratch,” said Eden. “And her side dishes are like nothing you’ve ever seen on dinner tables. She likes to put a Thai spin on old classics, like sweet potatoes with charred poblanos or Brussels sprouts with Thai chilies and caramelized shallots. I can’t wait for the habanero candy!”
I’d begun to salivate at the sound of those recipes, almost drooling like one of Pavlov’s dogs. 

Hayley visits Martha's kitchen again the next day (or is it two days later?) to follow up on some new information:

She dumped a blue ceramic bowl of dough onto her floured counter. Then she began to knead it, stopping at every turn to sprinkle fresh rosemary leaves on top and knead those into the mixture.
“What are you making?” I asked.
“Rosemary garlic brown-butter rolls,” she said. “I let them take the second rise in the fridge. Then I bake them before dinner and slather them with more garlic butter right before bringing them to the table. Guests go mad for them.”
“Sounds fabulous,” I said. “What else is on your menu?”
“Smoked turkey with a honey vinegar glaze and red-eye gravy, confetti succotash, mashed potatoes with cream cheese, sour cream, and scallions, the usual,” she said, finally cracking a smile.
“I’m practically drooling,” I said. “You take Thanksgiving to a new level.”

And this is what Hayley's family is serving, after grace is said by Miss Gloria, with an emphasis on her gratitude for friends and family:

I helped them ferry all the dishes out to the sideboard in the dining room—the turkey, gravy, Sam’s cornbread stuffing, pumpkin biscuits, pasta with sage and roasted squash, green beans almandine, and an enormous salad topped with walnuts, dried cherries, mango, and goat cheese. Then my mother invited everyone to grab a plate and fill it.

A DEADLY FEAST blurb: Before Key Zest food critic Hayley Snow's family descends on the island for Thanksgiving, she has one last assignment--a review of a seafood tasting tour conducted by her friend Analise Smith. But when one of the tourists collapses on the last stop, Analise begs her to investigate before the police destroy her business and shut down the local Key West eateries on her tour. Pressure mounts when Analise calls a second time to request that Hayley meet with Chef Martha Hubbard, who prepared key lime pies for the tasting tour and is terrified that someone poisoned her pies to ruin her reputation. Chefs all around town are preparing their versions of a Thanksgiving feast, but with a murderer on the loose, will Hayley and her friends have anything left to be thankful for?

Available for pre-order from Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you buy your books.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

How I made my life nice and easier by SW Hubbard

LUCY BURDETTE: I don't have a thing to add to today's blog from Susan Hubbard--I just know you're going to love it!

SW HUBBARD: I feel the woman’s gaze boring into me as I browse the housewares aisle at Target. I glance her way. She quickly averts her eyes. 

A moment later, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I know what comes next.

“I love your hair,” the staring woman says. “I just had to tell you.”

I’ve been getting that a lot lately. Ever since I made the radical decision to stop dyeing my hair.

I started going gray at the age of twenty-five, while I was still a single girl in Manhattan.

Horrified, I used henna to make the gray strands look like tiny red highlights. 

By the time I was thirty, the henna wasn’t doing the trick anymore. I turned to permanent dye: Nice and Easy 118A, Natural Medium Brown, which matched the color I’d been born with. By then I was married, and my husband, complaining that I smelled like a toxic waste dump after the application, begged me not to color my hair.

“Your mother dyes her hair,” I answered. “I’m damned if I’m going to have more gray than she does.”

The next twenty years found me periodically locked in the bathroom, shivering for half an hour in a ratty old bathrobe with a pile of brown 118A glop on my head. To pass the time, I’d read although it was hard to turn pages wearing plastic gloves. Sometimes I’d get absorbed in a novel, and my hair would come out Ronald Reagan black. Sometimes I’d cut the time short to referee squabbling kids, and patches of gray would show through. Inevitably, I’d splash dye on the tile grout, the paint, or my library book.

Despite his reputation for thrift, my husband implored me to go to a salon. Thus began ten years of spending two hours every six weeks at Trendz in the capable hands of my colorist and my stylist. I’d leave evenly colored but $140 + tips poorer. Within two weeks, a white skunk stripe would appear along my part-line. Covering that up before the next dye job required two more products: brown spray-in color and root touch-up solution.

One day I floated an idea to my stylist. “I’m thinking of letting my hair go natural.”

He was horrified. Said I’d look old. Assured me I’d hate it. (Of course, my decision would halve his income.) But over the next weeks I kept studying my silver roots. They were kind of pretty.
 And I was tired, so tired, of the struggle to stay brown. 

More than the money, I really resented the time I had to sacrifice to this Sisyphean battle. So I returned to the salon with my mind made up. “How long do you think it will take? My hair grows so fast.” (I wasn’t willing to cut my hair short.)

“A year.”

“No way! Well, let’s strip the brown dye out of my hair.” 

“That takes six hours and costs $800.”

Stunned, I went home and bought two hats to cover the increasingly visible skunk stripe. And, positive my stylist didn’t know what he was talking about, I applied my mystery author research skills to find a product to rush the process along. Google had plenty of advice about fading the brown dye: a paste of citric acid and Head and Shoulders shampoo was the least toxic; a product called Color Oops, which produced a chemical mushroom cloud that brought me to my knees, was the most. 

The brown never disappeared, but gradually the hard lines of the skunk stripe softened, and I achieved an ombre look: silver on top tipped with brown ends. A young man at REI told me my hair was foxy. I know what I wanted to believe, but I’m pretty sure he meant I resembled a small forest animal.

Finally, after a full year, my stylist snipped away the last of the brown. I was totally silver. We both stared at me in the mirror.

“I gotta say, I like it,” he admitted. 

So did I.

Yesterday I was in CVS when I felt “the look.” This admirer strode right up to me. “I love your hair. What do you use to get it like that?”

I pivot from the hair products aisle empty-handed.

“Absolutely nothing.”

***

Do you color your hair? Would you ever stop? If you’ve stopped, do you toy with going back?


S.W. Hubbard writes the kinds of mysteries she loves to read: twisty, believable, full of complex characters, and highlighted with sly humor. She is the author of the 5-book Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series and the 5-book Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series. Tailspinner, the latest Frank Bennett Adirondack mystery, is available for preorder now.  With all the time she’s saving by not coloring her hair, she hopes to release a new estate sale mystery, Treasure Built of Sand, in early 2019. She lives in Morristown, NJ, where she teaches creative writing to enthusiastic teens and adults, and expository writing to reluctant college freshmen. She LOVES book groups and would be happy to visit yours in person (in NJ) or via Skype. 

Read the first chapters of her novels

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