Anastasia Pollack is visiting Ascroft, eh? to tell us about Embroidered Lies and Alibis, the latest novel in the Anastasia Pollack 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.

Author Lois Winston brought me to life in Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun, the first book in her long-running Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series, currently at fifteen novels and three novellas.

From the moment Lois wrote me into existence, she’s been messing with my life. She used to write romance, and I certainly wouldn’t have minded being the heroine of a romance novel. Lois’s agent had other ideas, though. She wanted Lois to write a humorous amateur sleuth series with a crafting theme.

On top of that, before the first page of the first chapter of the first book, Lois killed off my husband, then informed me he’d gambled away all our savings and left me with more debt than the GNP of Uzbekistan!

Amateur sleuths go around sticking their noses into murder and mayhem. So, I suppose I should have expected to stumble across a dead body at some point. It didn’t take long. The next thing I knew, I found myself staring at a corpse sitting in my office chair. It’s been one dead body after another since then. And now that we’re up to fifteen novels and three novellas, that’s a lot of dead bodies! (Although Lois did give me a reprieve in the novellas. No dead bodies. Only stalkers, identity thieves, and kidnappers. Can you guess who got kidnapped? Yours truly!

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

Lois likes to think she controls the narrative of my life, but I’ll go just so far before I put my foot down. I’ve discovered if I threaten to organize all the other characters into a general strike and take her muse hostage, she gives in.

For instance, when I complained about how I was burning the candle, not only at both ends, but also in the middle, to keep a roof over our heads and pay off all that debt, she began to realize she needed to toss me a few breadcrumbs. All work and no play makes Anastasia an extremely grumpy sleuth. And I certainly have a right to be grumpy. Did I mention she also saddled me with a nasty communist mother-in-law as a permanent houseguest? Rumor has it, Lucille Pollack was patterned after Lois’s own communist mother-in-law.

Anyway, Lois got the brilliant idea to add a little romance into my life. She created photojournalist Zachary Barnes, a man whose DNA swam around in the same primordial soup as George Clooney and Pierce Brosnan. Except Lois being Lois, she also made me believe that Zack might also be a member of some government alphabet agency. And can you blame me? The guy is always flying off to places like Madagascar, and he owns a gun. Zack claims I have an overactive imagination, but who goes to Madagascar other than cartoon characters? It’s not exactly a tourist hotspot. It’s on the State Department list of Enter-at-Your-Own-Risk Countries.

How did you evolve as the main character?

Lois was singled out to create the series because of all her agent’s clients, she was the one author who had the credentials to write such books. Her agent was already shopping around Talk Gertie to Me, a humorous chick lit novel, which became Lois’s first sale. Plus, Lois knew crafts. In her day job, she worked as a designer in the consumer crafts industry, specializing mostly in needlework and fabric crafts.

What Lois’s agent didn’t know was that Lois hadn’t read a cozy mystery since her preteen obsession with the Cherry Ames books. But Lois had read those more for the nursing than the mysteries. At the time, she thought she wanted to grow up to become a nurse.

When Lois set out to research crafting-themed cozies, she found that most of them centered around a sleuth who owned a crafts shop or worked in a specific craft. She decided to set her series apart by making me the crafts editor at American Woman, a monthly women’s magazine sold at supermarket checkouts. Each book would feature a different craft.

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

Well, of course I’m partial to my two sons and now Zack. With a few exceptions, most of my coworkers are great, especially Cloris McWerther. I consider her my BFF. As the food editor at the magazine, she not only keeps me well supplied with baked goods, but she’s also saved my life on several occasions.

Then there’s Detective Samuel Spader. Our relationship started out adversarial when Lois first introduced him in Revenge of the Crafty Corpse. Now he’s become family. And I once thought Tino Martinelli was a killer, but I was wrong. The guy would take a bullet for me.

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

Lois is a Jersey girl and created me as a Jersey girl, placing my home in an actual New Jersey suburb. She chose New Jersey because within a short drive, her characters can be in the mountains or down the shore, in the countryside or in Philadelphia or New York. This gives her lots of places for me to trip over dead bodies.

Along with setting the stories at her magazine and in her hometown, she’s also had me working a trade show, teaching arts and crafts at a rehab center, judging and teaching crafts at a conference for retirees, guesting on a morning television show, and even traveling to Tennessee for one of Zack’s photoshoots. One of the novellas takes place outside of Pittsburgh. Another in Barcelona, Spain.

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

Although the series debuted in 2011, and with the publication of Embroidered Lies and Alibis, we’re up to fifteen novels, in my world only two years have passed. Much has happened in that time, though. Yes, there have been countless bodies and murders to solve, but life has also been looking up recently. However, you won’t get any spoilers from me. Both Lois and I hope you’ll read the books to find out all about everything that has taken place in my world since she brought me to life.

Thank you for answering my questions, Anastasia, and good luck to you and your author, Lois Winston, with Embroidered Lies and Alibis, the latest book in the Anastasia Pollack mystery series.

Readers can learn more about Anastasia and her author, Lois Winston by visiting the author’s website and her Goodreads and Bookbub pages.

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 unexpectedly into the world of humorous amateur sleuth mysteries, thanks to a conversation her agent had with an editor looking for craft-themed mysteries. In her day job Lois was an award-winning craft and needlework designer, and although she’d never written a mystery—or had even thought about writing a mystery—her agent decided she was the perfect person to pen a series for this editor. Thus, was born the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries, which Kirkus Reviews dubbed “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” The series now includes fifteen novels and three novellas. Lois also writes the Empty Nest Mysteries, currently at two novels, and one  book so far in her Mom Squad Capers series.

To date, Lois has published twenty-four novels, five novellas, several short stories, one children’s chapter book, and one nonfiction book on writing, inspired by her twelve years working as an associate at a literary agency. To learn more about Lois and her  books, visit her at www.loiswinston.com. Sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Mini-Mystery. She also blogs regularly at The Stiletto Gang and Booklover’s Bench.