Today, we’re getting together to give you a group update on what we’re writing or what we’ve recently written. All in one place so you can update your TBR list with books you’ve missed or get excited about the new books that are coming. Enjoy!

Kate Flora: Looking ahead from last year, I would have said that this year I have nothing coming out. Then everything changed. A request from the publisher of the fun noir collection, The Obama Inheritance, asked for a story about a twist on some current or former president for this year’s, The Faking of the White House, and they published my story, Long Live Long. Then, following the suggestion of a kind friend on Facebook, I submitted a “book from the drawer” and ended up publishing my first romantic suspense from SoulMate Publishing, Wedding Bell Ruse. As if that wasn’t enough, at another friend’s suggestion, I send in a story about an old lady who watches Maine lobstermen, and it appears in a collection called Heartbreaks and Half-truths. Truly an embarrassment of riches. If all goes well, the 10th Thea Kozak mystery, Death Comes Knocking, will be out in September, and the 7th Joe Burgess, The Deceits of the World, before the end of the year. Is it any wonder I’m enjoying a brief sabbatical?

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: I’ve been spending the past few months proofreading some personal projects to put up online as original ebooks, starting with my biography of my grandfather, The Life of a Plodder. It’s available now for the bargain price of $3.99. I’m still revising and proofreading my A Who’s Who of Tudor Women, all 1.140 pages of it, for the eventual move from online webpages to ebook. I still have a long way to go before that’s ready. I’m also looking at creating ebooks of my long out-of-print novels for middle-grades readers. What I’m not doing at the moment is working on anything new for a traditional publisher. A Fatal Fiction came out from Kensington this summer and I’ve already turned in next year’s “Deadly Edits” mystery, Murder, She Edited. Sad to say, they don’t want any more Liss MacCrimmon mysteries, so that series is, at the least, on hiatus, but I do have a standalone historical mystery, The Finder of Lost Things, coming out from Level Best Books in October. All in all, I have just the right amount of work to keep me busy and out of trouble.

Dick Cass: The fifth book in the Elder Darrow series will be out in October, Sweetie Bogan’s Sorrw, from Encircle Publications. Elder Darrow helps Boston Homicide Detective Dan Burton solve the murder of a low-rent music impressario and a New Orleans gangster’s right hand man. Suspects include a(nother) reluctant bar owner, an aging jazz diva, and assorted thugs in the musical world with varying desires. Look for preorder information on August 1, at Barbara Kelly’s web site.

I also have a story in a COVID-related anthology Stop the World, Snapshots from a Pandemic, from Thalia Press in August, 2020. (COVID anthologies being a growth industry, it seems.) My story Day 13 is a reverse-English riff on Rear Window and I hope you’ll take a look.

Charlene D’Avanzo: The fourth book in the Maine Oceanographer Mara Tusconi series (Glass Eels, Shattered Sea) came out earlier this summer. Like everyone else, all my in-person events were canceled which was so very sad. I especially enjoy speaking to a library (or whatever) group about why I write environmental mysteries with climate change understories, answering questions, and hearing what folks have to say. At this point, I have no specific plans for book #5 although I never intended to write one dealing with trafficking of glass eels either. Story after story in local newspapers convinced me otherwise.

Research for the book was fascinating – my library includes a half dozen volumes about eel biology and ecology – and I was able to draw on my own experience as a grad student working off a research ship in the Sargasso Sea. Readers may especially enjoy SCUBA scenes in the crystal-clear, gloriously warm Sargasso waters. Now I’ll see what happens with another in the series. The very recent shark attack off Harpswell (Maine) is certainly a good starting place …

A completely different type of book calls to me from my basement where my father’s WWII trunk is filled with letters to my mother. Dad was a physician stationed in the Solomon Islands for several years – a very dangerous place to be at the time. In addition to the letters, I have lots of photos from his time there. I have no idea what to do with this all, but as a writer now I think I should do “something”. We will see.