The New England Crime Bake will take place this weekend, and I can’t wait.

The ‘Bake is the annual gathering of crime writers and readers from across the region held each November outside of Boston. This year’s Guest of Honor is Lori Rader-Day, whose newest crime novel, Wreck Your Heart, will be out in January.  Lori’s protagonist is an up-and-coming country western singer named Doll Devine who has provided plenty of inspiration to conference planners. In addition to a full weekend of classes, panels, roundtables and interviews, Crime Bake 2025 will feature some down home socializing that—rumor has it— may involve line dancing at the Saturday night banquet.

Our own Barbara Ross, author of the wonderful Maine Clambake Mystery Series, will honored this year with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Barbara Ross

Barb has long been a leading light in the New England crime writing community. In addition to writing wonderful novels and novellas, she’s sat on many a board and organizing committee, and is always the first to volunteer to help organize a conference, critique other writers’ manuscripts and participate in group readings.

It will be a joy to celebrate Barb this weekend.

Another highlight will be the launch of SNAKEBERRY: Best New England Crime Stories 2025, the latest edition of the anthology edited by the terrific team of Leslie Wheeler, Susan Oleksiw, Ang Pompano and Christine Bagley. They are gifted and thoughtful editors, and I look forward to the release of their curated collection of short stories every year. The work of five Maine residents included in SNAKEBERRY — Bruce Coffin, Laurel Hanson, Moe Moeller, Gabi Stiteler and me.

Bruce’s story, called WRITER’S BLOCK, is about an eccentric writer nursing old resentments.

Laurel’s OUT OF THE REACH is about a man who believes himself to be clever being outwitted by people he’d long underestimated.

Moe’s story, THE LAST STONE FROM THE HOUSE OF USHER, re-imagines Poe’s classic set in rural Maine.

Gabi’s MONEY WELL SPENT is about an unexpected connection between a pair of young women who aren’t sisters but who have been “mothered” by the same woman, who is determined to keep them safe from, well, life.

My story, CAPE JEWELL, tells the tale of Erica Chapman, a 25-year-old woman whose romantic compass is broken, continually leading her into criminally-adjacent situations. Lucky for Erica, her aunt and three cousins, owners of a thriving lobster business Downeast, are supportive and resourceful when she gets into a fix.

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Here are the first few paragraphs of CAPE JEWELL:

 I holed up at my Aunt Marge’s place because I couldn’t imagine how the assassin would find me there. But less than thirty-six hours after I hotfooted it out of Portland, a gun-metal gray Tesla bumped across the gravel parking area next to the Cape Jewell public wharf. At 5:45 a.m. in late September, its license plate might as well have read CONSPICUOUS.

I stopped prepping bait and ducked into the wheelhouse of Marge’s boat. The sun was just breaking the horizon, making it too early for anyone but locals to be at the pier. From my invisible perch, I watched a man with a lithe build and a receding hairline step into the pre-dawn dusk, stretch his back, and stroll over to the shed where my cousin Vick, Marge’s oldest daughter, carried out her duties as harbormaster. I’d warned her that someone might come nosing around with my name on his lips. She thanked me for the heads-up and told me not to worry.

Not sixty seconds later Tesla man exited the tiny building, feigning nonchalance. He lounged against the hood of his Musk-mobile and tried to pretend he wasn’t studying everything and everybody in sight, including my aunt, who was standing on the dock next to her forty-eight-foot lobster boat. Marge gave no outward sign that she noticed the stranger, but I’m well familiar with her restrained body language. She was on high alert all right.

As gulls shrieked overhead, she hopped over the gunwale of My Four Daughters like she was sixteen rather than sixty-two and stepped into the wheelhouse where I was crouched on a low bench. She didn’t say a word but put a reassuring hand on my shoulder while she checked the gauges and flipped on the radar. Marge went back out on deck as the engine idled, checked the level of bait in two blue plastic barrels, and cast off the line. Then she eased away from the dock and weaved past a clutch of boats still at their moorings.

She throttled down once we were clear of the harbor.

“Safe now,” she said in her gravelly voice. “Guess you were right to fret about someone being on your tail.”

SNAKEBERRY is available from Crime Spell Books (www.crimespellbooks.com) or you can order it through your local independent bookstore. (It’s also available at the big online bookselling sites that shall not be named here.)

If you enjoy short crime fiction, there are some terrific stories in the collection. And as my friend Dick Cass always says, books make wonderful holiday gifts.

And a reminder: Someone who leaves a comment on one of our posts this month will win a bundle of cozy mysteries. Comfortable reading during the long, cold, icy winter ahead.

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Brenda Buchanan sets her novels and stories in and around Portland. Her three-book Joe Gale series features a contemporary newspaper reporter with old-school style who covers the courts and crime beat at the fictional Portland Daily Chronicle. Brenda’s short story, Means, Motive, and Opportunity, appeared in the anthology Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stories 2021 and received an honorable mention in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. Her story Assumptions Can Get You Killed appeared in Wolfsbane: Best New England Crime Stories 2023.