Like to gamble? Read one of my twenty humorous southern mysteries! Written in the tradition of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, or Patricia Wentworth, they are strong in plot as well as character, with all the clues you need to solve them. In each of my mystery series, though, I am wagering you can't solve the mystery before my female amateur sleuth. Want to bet you can? Let me know if you succeed.
Raised in the South and spending most of my life there, I love mild winters, sweet tea, Coca-Cola, warm beaches, and strong women. I also love children and helping make this a better world for them. That's why my mysteries, novels, and even non-fiction combine these ingredients. Set in the contemporary south, my fiction depicts women growing stronger as they deal with issues such as caregiving, widowhood, divorce, alcoholism, drugs, and abuse. In Hold Up the Sky, as four women with dark secrets can produce together in a steaming Georgia kitchen, they discover that true strength comes not from independence but from interdependence. In Carley's Song, as young Carley Marshall comes of age in a North Carolina preacher's home, she learns there are many kinds of love, not all of them kind.
But southerners love humor, too, so pirate skeletons tumble out of a family closet in Sins of the Fathers. A former boyfriend shows up to complicate MacLaren Yarbrough's marriage in When Will the Dead Lady Sing? In Murder in the Charleston Manner, a woman is murdered in her own side yard because Charlestonians are too polite to look out their northside windows. In Who Invited the Dead Man?, a body is discovered behind a screen at newly-appointed Judge MacLaren Yarbrough's party just after she has ordered the police chief, "Don't look back there. I put up that screen to hide things I don't want seen."
Women Who Do Too Much and Children Who Do Too Little (non-fiction) both are practical , sometimes humorous guides to reducing stress for women and teaching practical household skills to children.
And Our Cherished Things is a book in which to record your own cherished possessions and the stories that make them special. One woman described it: "Where I'm telling the kids what not to put in my estate sale, and why."
