Where's Waldo?

I'm finally back home tostay for a while, but it's been a busy month. In case I was missed, I spent last weekend down in Columbia, SC at the South Carolina Literary Festival, a gathering of readers and writers that left me juiced up for the summer. I don't know how to tag pictures so that names are revealed when you run the cursor over them, so in this first picture, starting with me on the back right and going clockwise: Cathy Pickens, Carla Damron, and our moderator for "Women of Mystery" Debby Johnson.

Earlier in the month, I moderated a panel of Best First Novel Nominees at Malice Domestic in Bethesda. Here we all are. L-R - Avery Aames, who won with The Long Quiche Goodbye; Laura Alden, Murder at the PTA; Amanda Flower, Maid of Murder; Sasscer Hill, Full Mortality; and Alan Orloff, Diamonds for the Dead.

Although this next picture was also taken at Malice, it could have been taken in Columbia this past weekend because they were there, too. Ann Woodman and Lynn Pixley are delightful sisters who adore mysteries. (I adore them!)

I had pictures of Diane Chamberlain's book launch from earlier in the month, but they don't seem to want to load. Nevertheless, these may give an idea of why I haven't been diligent in keeping this page updated every Sunday. Now that I'm home, I should do better.

Friends and Fellow Writers

One of the pleasures of a nearby New York Times-reporting bookstore is that the store brings in writer friends and colleagues I would not otherwise get to see very often.

Case in point was last Sunday.  Cathy Pickens (Can’t Never Tell) and Jane K. Cleland (Killer Keepsakes) came to Quail Ridge Books and Music with Rosemary Harris (The Big Dirt Nap).  Cathy and Jane I’ve known from their first books—Cathy’s won St. Martin’s Malice Award and Jane’s was nominated for a Best First Agatha—but this was my first (and surely not last!) meeting with Rosemary.  The three writers gave a delightful presentation that had customers lined up to buy their new books.  (I was hoping to post pictures, but they came out too fuzzy.)

I was back at the store on Thursday night for the launch of local buddy Alexandra Sokoloff’s The Unseen, another of her suspenseful horror stories.  This one uses a real event as her jumping off spot:  the opening after forty years of some seven hundred boxes of lab files from the parapsychology lab at Duke University that was headed by Dr. J.B. Rhine.

What her protagonist, a California psychologist, finds among those boxes is pure fiction.  What isn’t fiction is the character’s reaction to North Carolina’s trees.  Alex is from California herself and her take on our trees is something I’ve heard from other westerners, so I was amused to read:  There were many things about North Carolina that Laurel knew she would never get used to, but above all were the trees.  The trees were everywhere.  So dense they formed walls—walls lining the highways, walls obscuring the houses and the businesses, vast green walls preventing her from seeing any direction except in a straight line.  She sometimes felt as if she had been dropped into an enormous hedge labyrinth.  The trees made . . . navigation around town practically impossible.  In L.A. Laurel was used to triangulating off buildings.  A tree looks like a tree, especially when surrounded by hundreds and thousands of other trees.  She’d spent her first few weeks in a perpetual state of lost.

On Tuesday, yet another local lunching friend, Diane Chamberlain, will be at Quail Ridge with her new book, Secrets She Left Behind.  I’ll be in the audience applauding with all the rest.