December Snow

December Snow

Ned wanted nothing more than to spend Christmas with her Uncle Javin Granger, her last living relative. It had been forty years since she and her family left her hometown of Ednalee, Oklahoma; now, she was back, hiding from a threat in Atlanta and needing the peace and quiet of the old Victorian house her […]

The Warmth of a Friendly Home

Are there times when you long for the warmth of a friendly home, the sincerity of a smile, the familiarity of people and a certain place, the knowledge that you are welcome? Do you ever turn to a well-loved book to recapture that comfort? I do. I go to Mary Roberts Rinehart. How many times […]

When You Read

When you read a book, what are you expecting to find? If, within a few pages, you find misspellings, poor choice of words to describe a scene or person, one grammatical error after the other, do you keep reading?  If the author of the book lets you in on what other characters are thinking, jumping […]

An Open and Shut Case

An Open and Shut Case

To the authors who read my blog: As you write your new book, do you find that you have some chapters you prefer to other chapters? To the readers who read my blog: As you read a cozy mystery, are there chapters that stand out to you? And then, of course, there are favorite parts within each chapter. […]

Gold Mine of Information

Gold Mine of Information

Ned McNeil wanted to know about Marvie and she found the person who was a gold mine of information! Excerpt from Murder By Moonlight. It was one thing to say I wasn’t interested, but it was another to actually mean it. All that trouble at the deserted farm had happened a long time ago. Mrs. […]

The Unfriendly Woods

This is an excerpt from the latest Ned McNeil cozy, Murder By Moonlight. Usually, Ned enjoyed a walk through autumn woods, but today something went painfully wrong. I sang as I drove, windows rolled down. Ulysses didn’t object, so I took that as a sign of approval. My mind was on the events of the […]