Today Sophie Kimball from Dressed Up 4 Murder, is visiting Ascroft, eh? to tell us about this latest novel in the Sophie Kimball mystery series.
Welcome, Sophie. 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.
I’m Sophie Kimball, a forty-something bookkeeper/accountant, but everyone calls me Phee. I never intended to become an amateur sleuth but what can you expect when you work for an investigative agency in Glendale, Arizona? Most of the time I find myself in my mother’s retirement community of Sun City West, Arizona, tracking down clues for unsolved murders. In DRESSED UP 4 MURDER, my mother’s dog, Streetman, a neurotic little Chiweenie, finds a dead body under the tarp that covered her neighbor’s grill. Needless to say, barbequing is now on hold until the murderer can be caught.
This is the sixth novel in the Sophie Kimball Mysteries, Kensington Publishing, and like the others, is meant to keep readers laughing and guessing whodunit. It has a cadre of wacky characters, namely my mother’s book club and her neighbor Herb’s pinochle crew. Not to mention my aunt Ina, who’s as free-spirited as they get.
Does the writer control what happens in the story or do you get a say too?
Usually it’s the team of writers who get the say – Ann I. Goldfarb and James E. Clapp, writing as J.C. Eaton. However, there are times when things happen that neither author expected and I have to give myself credit for being the one who twisted their arms.
How did you evolve as the main character?
I began as a reluctant sleuth but as the series progressed, I took more risks and became more emboldened. Although I acquiesced to my mother and my aunt in the beginning of series, I became a force to be reckoned with as I solved more and more murders.
Do you have any other characters you like sharing the story with? If so, why are you partial to them?
I love sharing the story with my mother and the book club ladies. Their antics are over the top and their reflections about life and people in a senior community are priceless.
What’s the place like where you find yourself in this story?
It’s a senior community twenty miles northwest of Phoenix, Arizona. Lots of sun, a zillion activities, numerous restaurants, and quirky clubs. In fact, each book in the series showcases a different club. In MOLDED 4 MURDER, the clay and ceramic clubs were featured as the victim was found smothered to death with a clay jar over his head. Yikes.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell readers about you and the book?
If readers enjoy colorful antics and a good dose of hyperbole, this will be a fun read. It’s not to be taken seriously but is meant to make readers laugh out loud and forget about their own troubles while solving a murder mystery.
Thanks for answering my questions, Sophie, and good luck to you and your authors with Dressed Up 4 Murder, the latest book in the Sophie Kimball Mystery series.
Readers can learn more about Sophie and her authors by visiting her author’s websites:
www.jceatonmysteries.com, www.jceatonauthor.com, www.timetravelmysteries.com
and their Facebook page.
The novel is available at the following online retailers:
Amazon – B&N – Kobo – Google Books – IndieBound
Meet J. C. Eaton:
Ann I. Goldfarb: New York native Ann I. Goldfarb spent most of her life in education, first as a classroom teacher and later as a middle school principal and professional staff developer. Writing as J. C. Eaton, along with her husband, James Clapp, they have 
authored the Sophie Kimball Mysteries (Kensington), The Wine Trail Mysteries (Kensington Lyrical Underground), and the Marcie Rayner Mysteries (Camel). In addition, Ann has nine published YA time travel mysteries under her own name.
James E. Clapp: When James E. Clapp retired as the tasting room manager for a large upstate New York winery, he never imagined he’d be co-authoring cozy mysteries with his wife, Ann I. Goldfarb. Non-fiction in the form of informational brochures and workshop materials treating the winery industry were his forte along with an extensive background and experience in construction that started with his service in the U.S. Navy and included vocational school classroom teaching.
SE: The series is called The Barking Mad Mystery series because my rescue puppy Bailey insisted on having a starring role, even if he goes undercover and changes his name. The series is about a US Atlanta cop that comes to live in a small English village and becomes a community based police sergeant. He’s expecting lost dogs and bake sales but he’s immediately embroiled in murder and mayhem.
About Scarlett English: She is a crazy cat lady who likes solving mysteries. Or actually, make that a dog lady. Much to her chagrin, the police have never sought to consult her, which is why there seems to be so much unsolved crime. Especially—surprisingly enough—in the small English village where she lives. So, armed with curiosity, a penchant for taking in strays, a love of homemade wine and a good gossip, she puts her detecting talents to good use murdering her imaginary friends and neighbors and solving the cases one story at a time.
At the start of MURDER MAKES SCENTS, Stella points out that her mother, Millie, seeks adventure by travelling world, whereas Nantucket is always enough to keep her on her toes. How right she is!
About Christin Brecher: Christin was born and raised in NYC, where her family and many childhood friends still reside. As such, she feels she is as much of a small-town girl as any. The idea to write the Nantucket Candle Maker series sprang from her life-long connection to the small island off the coast of Massachusetts. Spending summers there as a child, Christin read from her family’s library of mystery novels, after which she began to imagine stories inspired by the island’s whaling heyday, its notoriously foggy nights, and during long bike rides to the beach. After many years in marketing for the publishing industry, followed by years raising her children, Murder’s No Votive Confidence is Christin’s debut novel.
I took over a part of the writer’s brain. I’ve been festering there for a while, but I knew it was time for me to have my say. As for the Kebab Kitchen series, I’ve evolved a lot over the course of the books.
About Tina Kashian: Tina is a bestselling author, an attorney, and a mechanical engineer whose love of reading for pleasure helped her get through years of academia. Tina spent her childhood summers at the Jersey shore building sandcastles, boogie boarding, and riding the boardwalk Ferris wheel. She also grew up in the restaurant business, as her Armenian parents owned a restaurant for thirty years. Tina’s books have been Barnes & Noble top picks, and the first book in her Kebab Kitchen Mediterranean mystery series, Hummus and Homicide, spent six weeks on the B&N bestseller list. Please visit her website at 
This is shocking. Ottawa is one of Canada’s best-kept secrets. It is large enough so that you can partake of any kind of culture from jazz concerts to musicals to university lectures to trivia nights at the pub, but unlike Toronto or Manhattan, it is small enough to be affordable; have much greenery preserved by the government in the middle of the city; as well as beautiful monuments; and a beautiful canal, which in winter, becomes the world’s largest and second-longest skating rink and was initially built on the backs of Irish labor.
About Sigrid Macdonald: Originally from New Jersey, Sigrid Macdonald lived for almost thirty years in Ottawa, Ontario, and currently resides in Weston, Florida. She has been a freelance writer for years. Her works have appeared in The Globe and Mail newspaper; the Women’s Freedom Network Newsletter; the American magazine Justice Denied; The Toastmaster; and the Anxiety Disorders Association of Ontario Newsletter. Her first book, Getting Hip: Recovery from a Total Hip Replacement, was published in 2004. Her second book, Be Your Own Editor, followed in 2010. Although Finding Lisa is written in first person, Macdonald only resembles her character in the sense that she once had a neurotic fixation on her hair, and she has always been called by the wrong name; instead of being called Sigrid, people have called her Susan, Sharon, Astrid, Ingrid and, her personal favorite, Siri.
I went looking for Jolie last year during the Thanksgiving holiday season, and to my surprise, my first interaction with her, she pegged me as a suspect to a murder. I had recently accidentally learned that my dad had family in Leavensport, Ohio. It was shocking, saying the least, to learn I’d had family less than sixty miles from me my entire life.
About Jodi Rath: Moving into her second decade working in education, Jodi Rath has decided to begin a life of crime in her The Cast Iron Skillet Mystery Series. Her passion for both mysteries and education led her to combine the two to create her business MYS ED, where she splits her time between working as an adjunct for Ohio teachers and creating mischief in her fictional writing. She currently resides in a small, cozy village in Ohio with her husband and her seven cats.
My grandfather is wonderful. He’s wise and witty and very sympathetic. Since I’m his only granddaughter among more than a dozen grandsons, I’m his favorite. He’s the head of our family and the family business, which I take no part in.
I love to write quirky characters and characters full of their own attitude. Hopefully, fans will be excited about Gladys’s new series.
About Katherine H. Brown: Katherine is from the tiny community of New York, Texas. Booklover (some might say book addict) and weaver of words, Katherine desired to be a writer from childhood, embarked on her first publishing adventure in 2017, and in 2019 said audios to her cozy office job to leap into a career as an author full-time. When not found between the pages of a book or tapping keys on her laptop, Katherine loves to watch baking shows with her stepdaughter or cuddle up with her husband Patrick. Katherine and family prepare to welcome a new baby girl into the family in March 2020.
I’ll never forget the first time I met her. I took the train from Manhattan up to Westport, Connecticut to do party prep for an event she was catering. A cab took me to Martha’s now-famous home on Turkey Hill Road. I stepped inside, looked into a gorgeous, antique-filled living room, and saw a woman using a crème brulee torch to assemble a gingerbread townhouse.
AD: Under the Radar is the 9th in the Zoe Chambers Mystery Series, which follows a paramedic/deputy coroner in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. Zoe is a caregiver at heart and fights to save the lives of her patients. If she fails at that, she fights to find them justice. In Under the Radar, she responds to a shooting and discovers her longtime friend, Horace Pavelka, has gunned down a man who’d bullied him mercilessly for decades. Ruled self-defense, no charges are filed. When another of his tormentors turns up dead in Horace’s kitchen, Police Chief Pete Adams questions the man’s innocence in both cases…especially after Horace and his girlfriend go into hiding.
About Annette Dashofy: She is the USA Today best-selling author of the Zoe Chambers mystery series about a paramedic and deputy coroner in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. A former EMT and lifelong resident of the area about which she writes, Annette lives with her husband and one very spoiled cat on what was once her grandfather’s dairy farm. UNDER THE RADAR (February 2020) is the ninth in her series.
dianneascroft.com 