Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kate Flora (Monday), and Kait Carson (Tuesday), with a group post on Thursday, and a post from special guest Dana Green on Friday.
In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:
Matt Cost will be at Noir at the Bar at the Village Cafe in Camden on Friday, October 30th, from 5:30 to 7:30, along with Maine Crime Writers Dick Cass (the lynchpin of this event), Gabriela Stiteler, Maureen Milliken, Brenda Buchanan, and Kate Flora, as well as others. Wow. This is an event that you don’t want to miss. Come for the readings, the food, the drink, and the good times.
Matt Cost is also excited to announce his latest debut, the first in a new series, 1955: A Jazz Jones & January Queen Raleigh Mystery. Check it out HERE.
“Ultimately, 1955 is a visceral and thought-provoking historical thriller that doesn’t shy away from the brutality of its setting.” ~~Book Review Cafe.
“Immersive and richly detailed, the novel drips with atmosphere, grit, and hard truths about race in mid-century America. With a pulse-pounding ending, 1955 will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.” —Christi Keating Sumich, author of Lafitte Lives and The Swamp Ghost
from Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: A “oops” to report on the reissue front. I publish my backlist through Draft2Digital and had scheduled the e-book of #4 in my Diana Spaulding 1888 Mysteries for December, a month after #3 comes out in 
e-book and trade paper. I was waiting to finalize the trade paperback of #4, Lethal Legend, until I could do another careful proofread of the text. So, I did that, made corrections to the e-book text already sent to D2D, and proceeded to go through the regular process for launching the print-on-demand version. I checked. I double checked. I clicked “approve.” The only thing I didn’t remember to look at was the release date. The print copy setup took everything I’d already chosen for the e-book . . . except for the release date. I totally forgot that unless I change it, that date automatically comes up as either the current date (e-book) or a date a week or so after approval (POD). So, dear readers, although it won’t be out in e-book format until December 8, the trade paperback of Lethal Legand can be ordered from all the usual bookstores NOW. Fortunately, book three, No Mortal Reason, will be available on November 10, so those collecting print editions of all four won’t have long to wait, but boy do I feel foolish!
Maureen Milliken will be at the Thompson Free Library Authors and Artisans Night Market, 4-7 p.m. today (Saturday, Oct. 24), at 186 East Main St., Dover-Foxcroft. The event includes local authors, vendors of crafts, baked goods, pottery, soap, fiber art, visual art and more. There is also hot food and hot drinks. Authors will be inside the library selling and signing books, vendors are outdoors and in the basement is the library’s 10 cent book sale. Come on up to beautiful Dover-Foxcroft, enjoy the last great days of fall in Maine, find some cool stuff and books, and help support a fantastic library.
An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.
And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora
I had a great time exploring the world of 1990 for my debut Raven: technologies that were nascent now ubiquitous, fears of the Cold War now gone but replaced by newer threats. My upcoming series however is set in contemporary America, following technology journalist Olivia Wright as she explores unregulated technologies, political manipulation, and all the ways technology can be turned against its users.
Wrapping up Emily St. John Mandel’s 
Vaughn Hardacker here. Several weeks ago, I received an email from ade@speedymetric.com, the CEO of speedymetric.com, asking if I would consider interviewing for a blog on the third novel in my Michael Houston & Anne Bouchard series: How Character Background Shapes Pressure in Quid Pro Quo: Vaughn C. Hardacker on Writing Tension.
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Dick Cass (Monday), Vaughn Hardacker (Tuesday), Rob Kelley (Thursday), and Matt Cost (Friday), with an interview with special guest Henry Wise on Wednesday.
If you’ve ever been to Augusta, you may have seen the huge cemetery at the top of the hill near the airport. It’s actually several cemeteries, at least four or five I think, with some mini-cemeteries thrown in. We grew up down the hill and it was part of our childhood playground. Graves date back a couple of centuries, and there are even a few plots of soldiers who died at the Civil War hospital that was where the airport is now. This photo is from the Forest Grove Cemetery, in between Winthrop Street and Green Street.
I go up to the cemeteries a couple of times a week now, even though I live in an adjacent town, because it’s a good place to walk the dog on the way to the grocery store. Dogs are allowed, and there are even a couple of waste baskets in what’s officially the Mount Hope Cemetery, north of Winthrop Street.
This relatively unexciting photo is the grave of James G. Blaine, who represented Maine in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was speaker of the house for six years before serving a term as a U.S. senator. The governor’s mansion next to the State House is his former home. The annoying thing about this photo is that one reason he’s planted here at the top of the hill (along with his wife, Harriet Stanwood Blaine) is that it’s supposed to have a view of the State House dome, but it only does in the winter now because of all the trees. Yeah, I guess the trees are nice, too. Little known fact: The three-acre Blaine Memorial, right above Forest Grove Cemetery, was designed by Carl Rust Parker, a landscape architect from the Frederick Law Olmstead firm, and the same guy who tried to design Capitol Park, 
I’ve driven by the Ezra Smith Wildlife Conservation Area in Mount Vernon many times, so one day recently decided to get out and check it out and give Willow some exercise. Ezra was the father of someone that some of you may have known — George Smith, who was head of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine for many years and a newspaper columnist who wrote about the outdoors as well as travel for many more years. The 163-acre conservation area hasn’t been around that long. Most of it was donated to the Kennebec Land Trust by George and his wife, Linda, eight years ago, a little while before George, who had ALS, died. Since it’s small, with just two loop trails, I thought it’d be a nice quick walk for Willow. It actually was kind of a scary one, with very thick woods at some points. A couple of times, she stopped and stared intently into the woods and wouldn’t go fowward without extreme urging from me, which is highly unusual behavior. Still, we came out all right. But there’s definitely something in those woods.
in Bath. Usually I bring the standards: first Burgess, first Thea, most recent books including my three thrillers and the romantic suspense. This time, as I was choosing what to bring along—always a challenge for someone who has published 28 books—I thought it would be fun to bring some different ones. Sorting through the boxes in my garage, I was reminded of some of the diversions I’ve taken along the way.
Next up was another collection of crime stories. One of the requirements for being a LBB editor was that each of us had to write a story approved by the other editors to be included in the collection. I gathered up those stories, plus stories I’d published in other collections, and created my own collection, Careful What You Wish For: Stories of Revenge, Retribution, and the World Made Right. Working with LBB taught me a lot about the choices that go into assembling a collection—long, short, dark, light, and what’s a stunning story to go first and a powerful one to finish. I also had a great time designing the cover. I found a photo that worked with the stories and my wonderful cover designer, Dave Fymbo, tweaked it for the cover.
shopping. It’s A Sampling of Sleuths, which is a compilation of ten stories featuring their series characters by “proven mystery authors each one with strong backlists.” Designed as a great way to introduce new writers to mystery lovers, it’s the perfect gift for a mystery lover if you don’t know what they’ve read or what they like. It was fun to write a short story with Burgess, and I got to make Fideau the “crime scene dog” he adopted a few books ago as the real hero of the piece.
like stories that are a bit different.
Or you can buy twenty-plus-year-old mint, autographed first editions directly from the author.
