Today Mary Feliz is visiting Ascroft, eh? to tell us about Cliff Hanger, her latest novel in the Maggie McDonald mystery series.
Welcome, Mary. Let’s get started, shall we?
Tell us about your novel. Is it part of a series? If so, please tell us about the series too.
MF: Cliff Hanger is the fifth book in the Maggie McDonald Mystery series. Maggie, a professional organizer turned amateur detective, restores order to her tightknit and quirky community in these California-based, character-driven, cozy mystery novels. In book five, an ultra-light pilot is found fatally injured in the cliffs above Monterey Bay, and the investigation into his death becomes a cluttered mess. Professional organizer Maggie McDonald sorts the clues to catch a coastal killer before her family becomes a target.
Where did the idea for the mystery that is central to the story come from?
MF: I live in the setting central to the books, and ultralights cruise over our property daily, particularly in the summer months. They’re noisy, so we always look up, and one day I wondered what would happen if one crashed on the nearby cliffs. I felt terrible, of course, but the pilot navigated safely and the idea morphed into a book.
Is there a theme or subject that underlies the story? If so, what prompted you to write about it?
MF: All of my books are built around the importance and strength of community. When tragedy rips a hole in the social fabric, humans pull together to restore hope and the status quo. So do the characters in my books.
Each of the books also touches lightly on local social issues. In Cliff Hanger, that means looking at the conflicts between the environmental and agricultural communities on California’s Central Coast. We all need to eat and we all want clean air and water, but what happens when those goals are in opposition to one another?
How do you create your characters? Do you have favourite ones? If so, why are you partial to them?
MF: I love all my characters, even the bad guys. Like a parent, if I have a favorite, I’ll never tell. For my first book, I created my characters by building a collage for each one focusing on their likes and dislikes, beloved books, quotes, and cars. I included what kinds of shoes they’d never wear, and how they’d get dressed up for a fancy party. Their pets made it into the books, although I’d not originally planned on creating a dog story. I’ve never written a scene requiring formal wear, but I learned a lot about each character by trying to dress them up for one. Some were much more cooperative than others.
How do you bring to life the place you are writing about?
MF: I write about where I live. Sometimes, I’ll struggle with a location. In Cliff Hanger, that happened with the scene in the Beach Street Café. It was stiff – until I refreshed my memory of the vibrancy of the crowd by taking myself to brunch there, smelling their fabulous food, and eavesdropping up a storm.
What research do you do to provide background information to help you write the novel?
MF: I’m an information junkie and love research. In fact, I do way too much of it. That doesn’t mean I never make a mistake, but it does give me a rich tapestry from which to pull the threads I need to weave the story. Accurate research is important so that I can provide readers with depth and with confidence in the details. But story always wins out. I’m much more focused on what could be reality than what actually is reality.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell readers about the book?
MF: I had so much fun writing this one. The first few books take place in Silicon Valley where I lived when I wrote them. Cliff Hanger takes place about an hour away in the real-life town of Watsonville, where my husband and I moved in 2016. We live in a condominium complex that sits between Monterey Bay and an inland slough system (think marshy wetlands) with hundreds of migrating birds and a wealth of other wildlife. We’ve become bird fanatics and love that we see new ones nearly every time we step out the door.
I hope readers enjoy the location as much as I do, and that they consider visiting this rich natural environment. I’m very interested in what locations they love, too. We have so many unique wildland locations in our country.
Thanks for answering my questions, Mary, and good luck with Cliff Hanger, the latest book in the Maggie McDonald Mystery series.
Readers can learn more about Mary and her writing by visiting her website and her Facebook page. You can also follow her on Twitter.
The novel is available at the following online retailers:
About Mary Feliz: Mary writes the Maggie McDonald Mysteries featuring a Silicon Valley professional organizer and her sidekick golden retriever. She’s worked for Fortune 500 firms and mom and pop enterprises, competed in whale boat races and done synchronized swimming. She attends organizing conferences in her character’s stead, but Maggie’s skills leave her in the dust. Her first book, ADDRESS TO DIE FOR, received a Kirkus Star and was named a Best Book of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews.
CH: DOWN IN FLAMES is the sixth book in the Webb’s Glass Shop Mystery Series. Savannah Webb is the owner of a glass shop and she teaches a different type of glass art in each book. As a subject matter expert within the art community, she consults with the St. Petersburg Police Department when a crime is committed.
About Cheryl Hollon: Cheryl now writes full-time after she left an engineering career of designing and building military flight simulators in amazing countries such as England, Wales, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, and India. Fulfilling the dream of a lifetime, she combines her love of writing with a passion for creating glass art. In the small glass studio behind her house in St. Petersburg, Florida, Cheryl and her husband design, create, and produce fused glass, stained glass, and painted glass artworks.
HDG: I wanted to come up with an occupation for my sleuth that hadn’t been overdone in the cozy mystery genre, and somehow I stumbled onto the idea for an exotic pet-sitter. Her first “mission” is sitting a ball python. It was challenging to bring that to life in a way that wouldn’t repulse readers, but I think it worked—one endorser (cozy author Emily James) said that although she didn’t like snakes going into the book, the snake wound up being one of their favorite characters!
About Heather Day Gilbert: Heather is an ECPA Christy award finalist and Grace award winner, writes contemporary mysteries and Viking historicals. Her novels feature small towns, family relationships, and women who aren’t afraid to protect those they love. Like Belinda Blake, Heather plays video games, although so far she hasn’t done any exotic pet-sitting or hunted any murderers.
KB: After years of dreaming, writing, and re-writing, Death by Dissertation is my first novel and the beginning of the Cassandra Sato mystery series set in the U.S. in rural Nebraska. After graduating with a Ph.D. and working a few years at a college in Hawai’i—where she was born and raised—Cassandra moves to Morton College in the heart of the Midwest because she thinks it will help her get experience to someday become a university president.
About Kelly Brakenhoff: Kelly is an American Sign Language Interpreter whose motivation for learning ASL began in high school when she wanted to converse with her deaf friends. As an American Sign Language Interpreter with more than twenty years of experience, Kelly’s worked in college classrooms for fifteen different majors. From traipsing across muddy farm fields to stomach-churning medical procedures, and stage interpreting for famous figures, Kelly’s community interpreting interactions number in the thousands. Unfortunately, once she’s stepped away from the job, she usually forgets 90% of what happened. Which helps her keep confidential information safe, but also makes it really hard to grocery shop for more than 5 items without a written list.
EMC: DECO DAMES is the last novel in my five-part series featuring Jasmine (Jazz) Cross, a society reporter who’s caught between two clashing cultures: the high society and high-rollers she covers in the Galveston Gazette, and her brother’s illicit underground world of gangsters, speakeasies and bootleggers.
About Ellen Mansoor Collier: Ellen is a Houston-based freelance magazine writer and editor whose articles and essays have been published in a variety of national magazines. Several of her short stories have appeared in Woman’s World. During college summers, she worked as a reporter for a Houston community newspaper and as a cocktail waitress, both jobs providing background experience for her Jazz Age mysteries.
MM: Died in the Wool is the fourth book in the Whisky Business Mystery Series. The protagonist is a young woman named Abi Logan. A highly respected, globe-trotting photojournalist who suddenly finds herself thrust into the male dominated world of whisky making in rural Scotland when she inherits a distillery from her uncle. Being both inexperienced and a woman she’s harassed and threatened, but she refuses to back down especially after one of her employees is found murdered in a vat of the distillery’s finest. It’s a murder mystery of course, but it’s also a journey of personal discovery for a woman burnt out by her own over-stressed life. In the whisky world she finds a new life, and a new purpose.
About Melinda Mullet: Melinda was born in Dallas and attended school in Texas, Washington D.C., England, and Austria. She spent many years as a practicing attorney before pursuing a career as a writer. Author of the Whisky Business Mystery series, Mullet is a passionate supporter of childhood literacy. She works with numerous domestic and international charities striving to promote functional literacy for all children. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her family.
“With the summer tourist season on Bay Island in full swing, shop owner Cass Donovan barely has a minute to breathe, and things at Mystical Musings become even more hectic when a fight breaks out at one of her psychic readings. Shaken by the fracas and discouraged that her sixth sense seems to be on the blink, Cass is even more dispirited to learn that one of the men involved in the altercation was later found dead—and that a close friend of hers is the main suspect.
About Lena Gregory: Lena is the author of the Bay Island Psychic Mysteries, which take place on a small island between the north and south forks of Long Island, New York, the All-Day Breakfast Café Mysteries, which are set on the outskirts of Florida’s Ocala National Forest, and the Puzzle Solvers Mysteries, which take place in a small town on eastern Long Island. Lena grew up in a small town on the south shore of eastern Long Island, where she still lives with her husband, three kids, son-in-law, and five dogs. Her hobbies include spending time with family, reading, jigsaw puzzles, and walking. Her love for writing developed when her youngest son was born and didn’t sleep through the night. She works full time as a writer and a freelance editor and is a member of Sisters in Crime.
JT: The inspiration for my story is derived from a tragic incident that rocked my hometown during my senior year of high school. The incident was the mysterious death of a girl in my class whose body was found along a remote country road two days after she went missing. One of the suspects was another of my classmates, a boy who unfortunately was killed in a car crash six months later. Today, even after almost 54 years, the girl’s death remains unsolved, and many people in town still insist her killer was the boy.
Cat has a full plate at her Aspen Hills Warm Springs Resort, as a group of aspiring cozy mystery authors arrives for a writers retreat. So when baker Dee Dee Meyer stirs up trouble by filing a false complaint with the health inspector against the B&B—all because she insists Cat’s best friend Shauna stole her recipes—Cat marches into the shop to confront her.
About Lynn Cahoon: Lynn is the award-winning author of several New York Times and USA Today bestselling cozy mystery series. The Tourist Trap series is set in central coastal California with six holiday novellas releasing in 2018–2019. She also pens the Cat Latimer series available in mass market paperback. Her newest series, the Farm to Fork mystery series, debuted in 2018. She lives in a small town like the ones she loves to write about with her husband and two fur babies.
LN: The Oakwood Book Club Mystery Series follows the adventures of amateur sleuth Charley Carpenter, a young vintage clothing shop owner. She’s a lifelong resident of Oakwood, a wealthy insular suburb of Dayton, Ohio. Since things can get a bit dull, she and a group of friends formed a book club in which they read nothing but murder mysteries by female authors.
About Leslie Nagel: Leslie is a writer and teacher of writing at a local community college. Her debut novel, “The Book Club Murders”, is the first in the Oakwood Mystery Series. Leslie lives in the all too real city of Oakwood, Ohio, where murders are rare but great stories lie thick on the ground. After the written word, her passions include her husband, her son, and daughter, hiking, tennis and strong black coffee, not necessarily in that order.
dianneascroft.com 