Don’t you just love serendipity?

By special guest Jessica Estevao.


Several years ago my husband and I were looking for a summer place near the water. I had no idea that our search would lead to a new series and a love of historical mystery writing. After looking at places all over the state of Maine we found the perfect spot in Old Orchard Beach. We spent that first summer renovating the house and basking on the beach. By the end of the first month we were utterly charmed.

After all, what’s not to love about seven miles of sandy beach and the last remaining seaside amusement park in New England? But while the kids were building sand castles and perfecting their body surfing technique, I found myself visiting the Harmon HistoricalMuseum and buying antique post cards at Cottage Decor. Slowly, but surely, the history of Old Orchard worked its way into my affections and on my imagination.

I was intrigued to discover our property used to be part of a Methodist campground. While it now has different owners, the natural amphitheater they used for sermons and speakers is still in operation just up the street from our house.

I learned about the different incarnations the town had experienced. In the Victorian era it hosted wealthy families for the entire season at the grand hotels like The Hotel Velvet as well as day-tripping mill girls from neighboring Biddeford.

By the early 1900s Grand Beach was popular with early auto racers as well as pioneering pilots attempting the first trans-continental flights. A few years later the big band era and dance marathons drew the crowds. Soldiers returning from WWII brought their families in droves throughout the middle of the twentieth century.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that all that information would work its magic on the story-telling part of my brain. Before I knew it, I started imagining the buildings and vehicles and amusements from the past still lining the streets. Then, of course, the buildings filled with imaginary people with all their intrigues and peculiarities.

Before long, the influence of Old Orchard had concocted Ruby Proulx, the protagonist for my latest book, Whispers Beyond the Veil. The Gilded Age hotel where she lives and works, her friends and family all invented themselves as I walked along the sand or imagined a trolley car trundling down the street beside me as I strolled to the shops. Reasons for murder and mayhem swooped into my brain like marauding seagulls making a play for picnic lunches.

Just like that, an historical mystery had snuck up on me. I had never intended to turn my hand to historical writing but thanks to a little serendipity it had.

Jessica Estevao (who also writes as Jessie Crockett) writes the Change of Fortune Mysteries. The first in the series, Whispers Beyond the Veil, will release in September 2016. 

She loves the beach, mysterious happenings and all things good-naturedly paranormal. While she lives for most of the year in New Hampshire with her dark and mysterious husband and exuberant children, she spends summers on the coast of Maine where she keeps an eye out for sea monsters and mermaids.

Teen Tuesday

These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly (Delacorte Press hardcover, 27 October 2015).

As the only daughter of the wealthy American aristocrat Charles Montfort, 17-year-old Josephine is expected to graduate from finishing school and marry a rich, well-born young man.  But in late 19th Century New York, things are changing, and Jo would much rather become a journalist like her heroine Nellie Bly.

Even though she fights with the administration to publish some of her investigative pieces in the school newspaper, Jo's life is pretty rosy.

Until she receives the news that her father has died from a gunshot.  Her uncle manages to keep the detail that it was deliberately self-inflicted out of the newspapers, but Jo knows that her father was too experienced to clean a loaded gun.

On a stealthy visit to a newspaper that her father owns, she hears a young reporter claim that Charles' partners paid to keep quiet the fact that his death was really a murder.  Jo strikes up a friendship with Eddie, and his pal Oscar, a medical student who works at the morgue.

Jo defies propriety by teaming up with the two young men to find out what really happened to Charles, and in the process learns about things that Young Ladies should never even think of: poverty, prostitution, and child labor, for starters.

Class and gender differences of the period may be surprising to some teen readers, but Jennifer Donnelly is an experienced writer of historical fiction, and her research is accurate and thorough.

The novel is fast-paced and gripping.  I read it in a single afternoon, and would dearly love to read more of Jo Montfort's story.




FTC Full Disclosure:  Many thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for the e-galley.

Cozy Monday

A Gilded Grave (Newport Gilded Age Mystery #1) by Shelley Freydont (Berkley Prime Crime trade paperback, 4 August 2015).

The Season - the annual period when it is customary for members of a social elite of society to hold debutante balls, dinner parties and large charity events. It was also the appropriate time to be resident in the city rather than in the country, in order to attend such events.

In the United States in the late 19th Century, the Season moved from New York or Boston to Newport, Rhode Island in the summertime. Apart from the change of location, not much changes: the social competition is as ruthless as ever.

Newport is the first season for Deanna Randolph, so she doesn't have the experience that a City season would have given her. She's already a bit at a disadvantage, having effectively been jilted by her intended, Joseph Ballard, who decided to move to a warehouse on the wrong side of town.

The first ball she attends a the seaside home of the Woodruffs, and is very exciting and glamorous, but the evening's festivities are dampened when the body of one of the maids is found at the bottom of a nearby cliff.
Deanna is stunned when Joseph, whom she's known since she was a child, turns out to be the main suspect. Despite the fact that he's "spurned" her, she knows he could never do such a thing, and she intends to prove it.

The story begins a little slowly, but it soon picks up. The reader will soon become captivated by the intelligent, caring and slightly naïve young woman as she navigates the unfamiliar waters of business and society.

Once you get into the story you won't be able to put it down.

No word yet on when the second installment is due, but it won't be soon enough!


The publisher has generously offered a copy of A GILDED GRAVE to one of my readers.  Please comment below before midnight on August 10, 2015.  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.