Exciting March releases!

It's hard to believe that today is the last day of February!

If you're like me, and planning what to read next month, here are some books I'm looking forward to:

Witness for the Persecution (Jersey Girl #3) by E.J.Copperman.  Severn House. 1 March 2022.

Former New Jersey prosecutor Sandy Moss moved to a prestigious Los Angeles law firm to make a new start as a family lawyer. So it seems a little unfair that Seaton, Taylor have created a criminal law division specifically for her. Just because she's successfully defended two murder trials, it doesn't mean she likes them!

But when abrasive Hollywood movie director Robert Reeves is accused of murdering a stuntman on set, Sandy finds she can't say no when he demands her help. Robert might be an unpleasant, egotistical liar, but something tells Sandy that he's innocent - even if no one else can see it.

At least this time, she reassures herself, her charismatic, adorable, and oh-so annoying TV star boyfriend Patrick McNabb isn't involved in the case. He isn't . . . right?

The Suite Spot, by Trish Doller.  St. Martin's Griffin, 8 March 2022.

Rachel Beck has hit a brick wall. She’s a single mom, still living at home and trying to keep a dying relationship alive. Aside from her daughter, the one bright light in Rachel’s life is her job as the night reservations manager at a luxury hotel in Miami Beach—until the night she is fired for something she didn’t do.

On impulse, Rachel inquires about a management position at a brewery hotel on an island in Lake Erie called Kelleys Island. When she’s offered the job, Rachel packs up her daughter and makes the cross country move.

What she finds on Kelleys Island is Mason, a handsome, moody man who knows everything about brewing beer and nothing about running a hotel. Especially one that’s barely more than foundation and studs. It’s not the job Rachel was looking for, but Mason offers her a chance to help build a hotel—and rebuild her own life—from the ground up.

Cheddar Off Dead (Cheese Shop #1) by Korina Moss.  St. Martin's Press, 29 March 2022.

Cheesemonger Willa Bauer is proving that sweet dreams are made of cheese. She’s opened her very own French-inspired cheese shop, Curds & Whey, in the heart of the Sonoma Valley. The small town of Yarrow Glen is Willa's fresh start, and she's determined to make it a
success – starting with a visit from the local food critic.

What Willa didn’t know is that this guy never gives a good review, and when he shows up nothing goes according to plan. She doesn’t think the night can get any worse... until she finds the critic’s dead body, stabbed with one of her shop’s cheese knives. Now a prime suspect, Willa has always believed life’s problems can be solved with cheese, but she’s never tried to apply it to murder…

Under Lock & Skeleton Key (Secret Staircase #1) by Gigi Pandian.  Minotaur Books, 15 March 2022.

After a disastrous accident derails Tempest Raj’s career, and life, she heads back to her childhood home in California to comfort herself with her grandfather’s Indian home-cooked meals. Though she resists, every day brings her closer to the inevitable: working for her
father’s company. Secret Staircase Construction specializes in bringing the magic of childhood to all by transforming clients’ homes with sliding bookcases, intricate locks, backyard treehouses, and hidden reading nooks.

When Tempest visits her dad’s latest renovation project, her former stage double is discovered dead inside a wall that’s supposedly been sealed for more than a century. Fearing she was the intended victim, it’s up to Tempest to solve this seemingly impossible crime. But as she delves further into the mystery, Tempest can’t help but wonder if the Raj family curse that’s plagued her family for generations—something she used to swear didn’t exist—has finally come for her.

Who Controls Characters?

By special guest E.J. Copperman

For me, writing is about characters, pure and simple. You can have an amazing story idea with astonishing plot twists. You can come up with a surprise ending that will knock the socks off anyone reading your book with their socks on. But if your characters aren’t interesting people your story isn’t one-tenth what it should be.

The problem is, the little suckers have a way of taking on lives of their own.

Ask me what Alison Kerby (the Haunted Guesthouse series) would order at an Italian restaurant (fettucine Alfredo). How Samuel Hoenig (the Asperger’s Mystery series) would react to an attempted mugging (he would ask the mugger what his favorite Beatles song is). I can tell you because in my head these are people who have whole personalities.

So the idea of a character somehow coming to life and tormenting the writer had great resonance.

In Written Off, the first in the Mysterious Detective Mystery series, Rachel Goldman is a midlist author of novels in which Duffy Madison, a consultant to the Morris County (NJ) prosecutor’s office specializes in missing person cases. So when she finishes the fifth book in the Duffy series, the last person she expects to hear from for some time would be Duffy.

Except then he calls her on the phone and asks for help in the case he’s working.

A flesh-and-blood consultant to the Bergen County (NJ) prosecutor’s office is investigating the disappearance of a local woman who happens, as does Rachel, to write mystery novels. He wants Rachel’s help from the writer’s perspective to help analyze the facts of the case and help find the missing woman before it’s too late.

And he says his name is Duffy Madison.

In order to make the story work, I had to decide what kind of man Rachel would write, so I could write him. That meant I had to know what kind of person Rachel is and how good a writer. I decided for the sake of sanity she is roughly as talented as I am, which made things easier. If Rachel was better than me it would be rough to write Duffy.

You getting this?

The book and its proposed sequels (there will be another next year for sure) take on the idea of what responsibilities a writer has to the people for whom she—in this case—writes but also the people she writes. Duffy says he has no memories before the date Rachel started writing her Duffy Madison books and that it means she created him, standing before her.

That’s a bit much for a writer to take on. But then Rachel starts to worry about the other principle of writing: The author must constantly be looking for ways to make life difficult for her character. With Duffy standing right in front of her, can she do that?

It’s about what makes writers the way we are—crazy—and how far that can be taken. But it’s not terribly heavy and serious. Anyone who’s read any of my previous books knows I wouldn’t be very good at heavy and serious.

Written Off operates on two levels, hopefully: at the same time she’s trying to help the three-dimensional Duffy find the missing writer and keep herself out of range of the person who’s kidnapping crime fiction authors, Rachel is also grappling with the man who insists she created him. Is he crazy? Is she delusional? Who is this guy, really?

Read the book. Maybe you’ll find out.

Then again, maybe not. It’s a series, after all, and the characters have to stay interesting through subsequent books. The possibilities are endless. (I’d add “bwahahahahaha,” but that would be presumptuous.)




E.J. Copperman is the author of the Haunted Guesthouse mystery series and the co-author with Jeff Cohen of the Asperger’s Mystery series. On June 14, E.J. unveiled the Mysterious Detective Mystery series in which a crime fiction author is confronted by the flesh-and-blood incarnation of her fictional sleuth. Next year there will be yet another series, but we’ll tell you about it then.

Cozy Monday

Written Off (Mysterious Detective #1) by E.J. Copperman (Crooked Lane Books hardcover, 14 June 2016).

Rachel Goldman is a full-time mystery writer whose protagonist is a police consultant named Duffy Madison.  After publishing three books in the series, she's successful enough that she doesn't need a day job, and is the process of working on the fifth.

Just as she's saved the first draft of Alive and Buried to the hard drive, she receives a phone call on her landline. The caller identifies himself as Duffy Madison, a consultant with the Bergen County (NJ) Prosecutor's Office, and tells her he needs to meet with her as soon as possible on a matter of life and death.

Rachel is understandable skeptical; the caller has to be a crack-pot. The fact that he assures her that he isn't crazy just makes Rachel more certain that he is.

After ending the call, it slips Rachel's mind completely.  It's not until she's signing books at the launch for the fourth in the series (How to Vanish Without a Trace) that she remembers.
This is because the last person in the signing line identifies himself as Duffy Madison and asks for her help in solving the disappearance of a Bergen County woman.  

What really throws Rachel, though, is the man's claim that he is the character from her novels, and that she created him.  He explains that he started working with the Bergen County authorities four years earlier (about the time that the Rachel's first novel was published), and has no memory of anything before that.

Rachel is intrigued enough to investigate, and determines that his story is true.  She still feels somewhat uncertain about how she could possibly assist, until she receives a threatening email.  At that point, it becomes personal, and she agrees to help Duffy.

The story that had been interesting suddenly jumps to absolutely gripping, and I kept telling myself I'd read "just one more chapter" until I reached the end of the book.  

Where will Rachel and Duffy's story go next?  Is it really true that he's her character come to life?  

There's only one way to find out...



The publisher has generously offered a copy of Written Off  to one of my readers.  Please comment below before 12:01 a.m. on June 27, 2016.  Entries from the US only, please.  
Please don't forget to include an email address where I can contact you if you win!


FTC Full Disclosure:  Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with a review copy of this book.

Welcome Guest E.J. Copperman!

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Writers get this question all the time. It’s an honest question asked by readers and in some cases interviewers who want to know about the process. I understand the impetus behind the question.

I just don’t have an answer for it.

The fact is, if I had a formula, a foolproof means of finding a good idea for a novel, I could get one whenever I wanted and this job would be… well, I’d still have to write the book, so “easy” might be something of an overstatement. But it wouldn’t be as hard, by a discernible margin.

My latest book, Inspector Specter, is the sixth in the Haunted Guesthouse series. You’d think after five other books with the same characters it would be a struggle to find something for them to do. Not at all. This one came from the characters, which is the best place to start.

Alison Kerby owns a guesthouse on the Jersey Shore and it happens to have two ghosts haunting it. They get along okay, but that’s a long story all by itself. She also has a PI license, and in this book is asked by Lt. Anita McElone (rhymes with “macaroni”), with whom she has sort of a grudging professional relationship, to use her “ghosty connections” to solve the murder of McElone’s ex-partner, whom we met in another book in the series.

Because the story came from the characters, I could concentrate on how it affects their relationships. I knew the story would be workable because it was about the people readers have gotten to know, and new readers will find accessible even without reading the other books in the series (although would that be so bad?).

For those who want to be published writers, I can’t offer a simple way to get an idea. They tend to hit when you least expect them, so the best piece of advice is not to expect one and see how that goes. I have gotten book ideas in the shower (it’s best not to picture some of these), while trying to fall asleep, while walking the dog and while watching baseball on television. The baseball ones don’t tend to work very well, as my concentration is completely elsewhere. Some of the others haven’t been bad.

The trick, really, is to be able to tell a good idea—a sustainable one that will make it through a whole book and not just up to Chapter Six—from a bad idea (the opposite of that). And that is where some experience can actually be helpful.

Consider this: When you get a story idea, can you image what the middle of the book will be like? Beginnings are easy; they are the story idea all by themselves. Endings should take care of themselves because a premise demands a resolution. What about the middle? Can you think of a really impressive, important, fun scene that’s going to happen somewhere about halfway through your story? If so, you might have a workable idea on your hands.

Who are your characters? One common mistake with writers is that we get a terrific idea for a twisty plot, but we don’t know who’s going to populate the book. Remember that you character is the reason for the story—if it’s not specific to the personality you’re creating, your story could happen to anybody, and your reader won’t care as much about what happens. Think of the person you most want in that situation, and then maybe create a character who’s the opposite of that.

If you’re trying to start a series, think hard about sustainability. Sure, you have a great idea for this book, but if you want to bring the character back time and again, is it plausible that s/he could get into another situation worth writing about? Do you have more than one premise in your head? Do you know what you’ll do for Book #2? I once wrote a series about the owner of a one-screen movie theater that showed only comedies.

Who solved crimes. Try coming up with more than one story idea for that series sometime. It can be a challenge. (Although that series was a lot of fun to write.)

How interested are you in the story? How charged up? If you’re not desperate to get this book out before someone else hits on the same idea, if you don’t feel moved to get to the keyboard right now and start pounding it out, maybe this isn’t The Idea.

If you’re writing something because you think it’s going to be commercial, because that’s the trend in publishing right now, because hey, hot teenage vampires from Dubuque are what it’s all about now and you can make a movie deal, stop. You’ll write something even you don’t want to read, and besides, by the time your book is ready to be shown to editors, the trend will be talking scarecrows who fight crime and search for love in the big city.

Don’t write something because it’ll sell. Write something that will sell because you believe in it.

There are good ideas and bad ideas. I’ve gotten both. Hopefully, Inspector Specter turns out to be one of the good ones, but ultimately you get to decide that when you read the book. In your own writing, you do your best and hope the readers agree with your assessment.



The publisher has generously offered a copy of Inspector Specter to one of my readers. Please comment below, WITH A VALID EMAIL ADDRESS, before midnight onDecember 17, 2014. Entries from the US only, please.