Anastasia Pollack is visiting Ascroft, eh? to tell us about A Crafty Collage of Crime, the latest novel in the Anastasia Pollack Crafting mystery series.

Welcome, Anastasia. Let’s get started, shall we?

Tell us about the novel that you live inside. Is it part of a series? If so, please tell us about the series too.

A Crafty Collage of Crime is the twelfth book in Lois Winston’s Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series. I’m the Anastasia of the eponymous series. I’m a wife, mother, and magazine crafts editor who was living a normal middle-class suburban life in New Jersey until Lois came along.

Suddenly, I learned my idyllic life was all a lie, spun by a duplicitous husband to keep me in the dark about his affair with Lady Luck. Turns out, she was more Lady Unlucky for Karl and even more unlucky for me. After he dropped dead in a Las Vegas casino (I thought he was at a sales meeting in Harrisburg, PA), I discovered he’d gambled away our savings and our kids’ college funds. He’d also cashed in his life insurance policy, maxed out our credit cards, hadn’t paid our taxes or mortgage, and stuck me with both his bookie (to whom he owed fifty thousand dollars) and his communist mother as a permanent houseguest.

To stave off the creditors and the bookie, Lois came up with creative ways for me to moonlight, and that’s pretty much been my life ever since—except that she decided the threat of living out of a cardboard box on the sidewalk wasn’t bad enough. I also needed to stumble across dead bodies. Constantly! She said she had no choice. She was writing a mystery series. Was that supposed to appease me? So now, along with being a crafts editor and all the side gigs I juggle, I’m also a reluctant amateur sleuth.

I ask you, what did I ever do to that woman?

Does the writer control what happens in the story, or do you get a say too?

Believe me, I try to control things, but I rarely succeed. Lois did throw me a crumb by creating Zachary Barnes, the guy who rented out what was formerly my office above the garage, and as the series has developed, so has our relationship. I’m not sure it makes up for all the murders, though. And Lois being Lois, she couldn’t leave Zack as merely a photojournalist. No, she had to suggest that he may be a member of one of the government alphabet agencies. He’s always hopping the Acela to DC or flying off to assignments in places like Madagascar and Guatemala. Of course, he denies he’s a spy, but isn’t that what every spy says?

How did you evolve as the main character?

Lois created me after her agent suggested she write a craft-themed cozy mystery series. Lois had previously written romance, romantic suspense, and chick lit. But her agent knew an editor looking for such a series, and Lois had a background as a designer in the consumer crafts industry.

I have no idea how she plucked me out of the fictional character firmament. I guess I was next up in the queue. If only she’d discovered me while she was still writing romance…

Do you have any other characters you like sharing the story with? If so, why are you partial to them?

It takes village of characters to populate an ongoing cozy mystery series, and there are certainly many of them in mine. Besides Zack, there are my two sons and my BFF, food editor Cloris McWerther. She keeps my sweet tooth satisfied and the caffeine flowing in the office coffee pot. She’s also saved my life on more than one occasion by being in the right place at the right time.

In addition, there are my other coworkers, my much-married mother, assorted friends, and various local law enforcement I know interact with on an almost daily basis, thanks to Lois.

Then there’s my mother-in-law, a character of a completely different kind—unfortunately.

What’s the place like where you find yourself in this story?

Lois and I are both Jersey girls, but two years ago, Lois and her husband moved to a suburb outside of Nashville to be closer to one of their sons and his family. Ever since, readers have been asking when I’d make the move. Not going to happen. Ever. I told Lois if she tries to uproot us, I’ll go on strike and not only take all the other characters with me, but I’ll also kidnap her muse.

We struck a compromise. In A Crafty Collage of Crime, Zack and I head to Tennessee wine country. But Lois being Lois, you know she was going to drop the first dead body shortly after we arrived. That wasn’t enough, though. She had another surprise for me up her sleeve.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell readers about you and the book?

Because Lois has a quirky sense of humor, so do I. This is a humorous cozy mystery series. Come for the murder and mayhem. Stay for the laughs.

Thank you for answering my questions, Anastasia, and good luck to you and your author, Lois Winston, with A Crafty Collage of Crime, the latest book in the Anastasia Pollack Crafting mystery series.

Readers can learn more about Anastasia and her author, Lois Winston by visiting the author’s website and blog, and her Goodreads, Bookbub and Pinterest pages. You can also follow her on Twitter.

The novel is available at the following online retailers:

Amazon    Kobo   Barnes & Noble   Apple Books 

About Lois Winston: USA Today and Amazon bestselling author Lois Winston began her award-winning writing career with Talk Gertie to Me, a humorous fish-out-of-water novel about a small-town girl going off to the big city and the mother who had other ideas. That was followed by the romantic suspense Love, Lies and a Double Shot of Deception.

Then Lois’s writing segued into the world of amateur sleuths with her humorous Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series, which Kirkus Reviews dubbed “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” The series now includes twelve novels and three novellas.

To date Lois has published twenty-one novels, five novellas, several short stories, one children’s chapter book, and one nonfiction book on writing.