Mystery Monday - My 2025 favorites

For Duck's Sake (Meg Lanslow #37) by Donna Andrews ((St. Martin's Press, 2025).

Just Another Dead Author (Berit Gardner #2) by Katrina Bivald (Poisoned Pen Press, 2025).

From Cradle to Grave (Her Royal Spyness #19) by Rhys Bowen (Penguin Group, 2025).

Beach Reads and Deadly Deeds by Alison Brennan (MIRA Books, 2025).

Death of a Forest Fairy (Hungarian Tea House #4) by Julia Buckley (Julia Buckley, 2025).

The Wexford Carole (Imogen Durant #2) by Janice MacDonald (Ravenstone Press, 2025).

The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective by Jo Nichols (St. Martin's Press, 2025).

The Busybody Book Club by Freya Sampson (Penguin Group, 2025).

2024 Favorites (so far)

Since we're now officially halfway through the year, I'm sharing my favorites of the books I've read so far. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

(Books are listed alphabetically by author.  Most of them are e-books from the library, Kindle Unlimited.)

The Body in the Bookstore (A Secret Bookcase Mystery #1) by Ellie Alexander. Storm Publishing, 19 June, 2024. (Kindle Unlimited)

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown.  Harper Collins, 13 February 2024.

Death Through a Dark Green Glass (A Writer's Apprentice Mystery) by Julia Buckley.  Merrill Books, 20 April 2024).

The Fellowship of Puzzle-makers by Samuel  Burr.  Doubleday Books, 9 April 2024.

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde #2) by Heather Fawcett.  Del Rey Books, 16 January 2024.

The Night in Question (An Agathas Mystery #2) by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson.  Ember, 21 May 2024.  

Stay Dead by April Henry.  Christy Ottaviano Books, 28 May 2024.

The Lost Book of Bonn by Brianna Labuskes.  William Morrow, 19 March 2024.

Recipe for a Charmed Life by Rachel Linden.  Berkley Books, 9 January 2024.  

The Last Hope (Maggie Hope #11) by Susan Elia MacNeal.  Bantam Publishing, 21 May 2024. 

Fatal First Edition (Library Lovers' Mystery #14) by Jenn McKinlay. Berkley Books, 13 February 2024.

Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller.  William Morrow, 18 June, 2024.

Holmes, Marple, and Poe by James Patterson.  Little, Brown Books, 8 January 2024.

Mind Games by Nora Roberts.  St. Martin's Press, 21 May 2024.

On Shakespeare's 460th Birthday...

...A Reflection on His Enduring Poetic Genius

by Julia Buckley

This month we appreciate those poetic voices that gave words staying power, words that burrowed inside us and found our hearts and souls. But rhyme and rhythm, those two companions that helped to give the words their gloss, remain a crucial part of poetry, and William Shakespeare must be acknowledged today as a poet, a genius of iambic pentameter who gave us the Elizabethan (or Shakespearean) sonnet and a multitude of poetic phrasings to live by.

The simple format of the Bard’s sonnet style was ABAB  CDCD EFEF  GG. Thus, you had alternating rhyming lines, grouped in quatrains, until the final two lines (thirteen and fourteen) when you created a rhyming couplet, and this became the “mic drop” of your whole poem.

Among the many ways one can celebrate poetry and Shakespeare this month is to write a sonnet, or many sonnets, and read them aloud, revelling in the rhythm, rhyme, and intelligent wording of the poem.

For example, if I were to be asked to write a sonnet about National Poetry Month, I might begin—

What poems bring to ev’ry human heart
Cannot be measured with a mortal tool
But must be calibrated as an art

That elevates the thinking of a fool.

For those interested in sonnets, there’s a lovely video on this Shakespearean site, along with links to all of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

You can explore his beautiful sonnets and poems in the sites above, but I want to mention one more aspect of his poetic gift: the way he brought his poetry into his drama. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were written in iambic pentameter (or partially so), but that lovely regular line rhythm isn’t always apparent because he wrote in Blank Verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). His diction, though, is unmistakably poetic, and I’ll support this contention with some of my favorite examples.

First, which love sonnet is superior to the words spoken by Romeo when he realizes that what he felt for Rosaline was infatuation, but what he feels for Juliet is love. As with the sonnets, Shakespeare seeks a sublime image to demonstrate the transformative power of Romeo’s love. What better than the metaphor of light? When Romeo lays eyes upon his young love, he concludes:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!

For I ne’er saw true beauty til this night.

--Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 5

It amazes me each time I read it that Shakespeare had so much insight into every aspect of the human condition, including the overwhelming sensations of love. Romeo felt such love and such awe at her beauty that light itself could not compare to her. Shakespeare lifted the notion of love to the sublime, the eternal, and thus made it profound.

Emily Dickinson once explained the essence of poetry in a letter, saying,

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”                         ( L342a, 1870)

I like to use Dickinson’s method of determining what is poetic because it is the words that elicit a physical reaction that have already made it into our consciousness. Her “top of the head” feeling comes to me often when I read William Shakespeare, or the Romantic poets, or Emily Dickinson!  So all of my excerpts here are lines that moved me to a state of awe.

The poetry in Shakespeare’s plays gives them their staying power (401 years since his death), and there are so many other beautiful poetic moments:

Prospero the magician, in The Tempest, after giving up his power, and determining in an existential speech that “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

Or Macbeth, forced to sacrifice his selfish dream, his kingdom, and probably his life, concluding, “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun.”

Or his wife, Lady Macbeth, plagued by horrible dreams and heavy guilt, murmuring “Hell is murky . . . “

Or Old King Lear, lamenting, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child.”

Such powerful, poetic language cannot help but live on. Note the use of metaphor, simile, allusion, alliteration, personification, and other poetic devices in the quotes above that elevate the words to poetic status even without the use of rhyme.

Entire books have been written about Shakespeare’s poetic genius, and I have only made a clumsy foray into his talent. I hope, though, that these examples will send you to his works to reclaim your own favorites by this great poet who remains a gift to literature and mankind.

 

Julia Buckley is a Chicago-area writer. 

She taught high school English at an all-girls school for more than thirty years, and she considered the teaching of Shakespeare’s works an honor and a true joy. 

She has published several mystery series, including the bestselling Writer’s Apprentice series. 

She lives in the suburbs with her husband, within driving distance of her two sons.
 

 

Horace Bick, The Grizzly Bear, and The Joy of Old Hardware Stores

A guest post by Julia Buckley.

Readers who enjoyed my first Writer’s Apprentice mystery, A Dark and Stormy Murder, don’t have to wait much longer for the sequel. Death in Dark Blue debuts tomrrow,  May 2. Since I don’t want to delve too deeply into the storyline and risk spoilers, I thought I’d talk a little more about Blue Lake, the fictional town where all the mystery happens.

Blue Lake is an amalgam of any number of Midwestern small towns I’ve visited, and even Bick’s Hardware has shades of other hardware stores I’ve seen over fifty years. One in particular stands out. It was a wonderful old store in Valparaiso, Indiana—my college town!—and I happened to wander into this place when I was twenty and searching, just before Christmas break, for family Christmas gifts. 


I had chosen my brother Christopher’s name in the family grab bag, and I wanted to buy him a saw and a flannel shirt (both on his list). So I walked the mile from campus to Valpo’s downtown strip, and I stumbled across an amazing place called Wark’s Hardware. The interior was dim, dusty, wonderfully fragrant of cut wood and mixed paint and varnish. Like Bick’s Hardware, Wark’s had shelves that went all the way to the ceiling, and in fact it had a dizzying effect, giving me a sense of vertigo until I adapted to the sheer volume of stuff on the walls.

It didn’t take me long to realize I loved the place, especially after asking Mr. Wark for some help and finding that although he hadn’t smiled much, he was quite friendly and attentive, and spoke in a scratchy voice that grew on me, too.

I bought a saw from him, and when my family came to pick me up a day later, I insisted that they visit Wark’s Hardware with me just to revel in its wonderful eccentricity.

Wark’s is no longer there, and it’s likely that Mr. Wark is no longer with us, either, but the store lives in my imagination. The great thing about writing is that we can borrow bits and pieces from every memory that we have. We then embellish those memories with our own little decorations. 

For example, there was no giant grizzly bear at Wark’s Hardware, but I did see a lot of things like that when I visited South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. I decided to borrow this bit of whimsy and place a giant stuffed Grizzly in the porch lobby of Bick’s Hardware, and that Mr. Horace Bick, showing a bit of humor, placed a sign in his clawed hands that said “Bick’s is Best.”

In addition to my love of hardware stores, I am mad for antique shops. My husband and sons do not share this love, and so I am often a lonely wanderer on family vacations, trying to suss out likely-looking places that might hold dusty treasures when all the boys are ever looking for is a good hamburger joint and perhaps a place that sells guitars. Some of my cool antique shop finds have also made it into Bick’s Hardware, but I’m thinking that in a future book I might just let Lena wander into an antique shop and get lost in the wonderful objects that take her to other times and places.

Thanks for reading! Book two is available for pre-order now. Here’s the Amazon link. https://tinyurl.com/ksl6oxc

Oh, and assuming I write about one, what’s a good name for an antique shop? 😊

Julia Buckley is a Chicago mystery author. She writes two mystery series for Berkley Prime Crime. A Dark and Stormy Murder was recently named "a noteworty traditional mystery" by Writer's Digest, and her novels The Big Chili and Cheddar Off Dead will both be available in Japanense translations. She has twelve books available on Kindle.

She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Chicago Writer's Association. In addition, she has worked with the same writer's group since 2000.

Julia has taught high school English for twenty-eight years; she lives near Chicago with her husband, two sons, four cats, and a mischievous Lab puppy named Digby.

Cozy Monday

Death in Dark Blue (Writer's Apprentice #2) by Julia Buckley (Berkley Prime Crime mass market paperback, 2 May 2017).


Lena London has been Camilla Graham's assistant long enough that their first collaborative book, The Salzburg Train,  has been published.  They're both pretty excited, and Lena wants to share her excitement with her new beau, Sam West.  But when she goes next door to to give him a copy, she (almost literally) stumbles upon the body of a woman.

Lena recognizes the woman: Taylor Brand was the best friend of Sam's late wife Victoria, who was determined to prove that Sam had murdered Victoria, even though Sam had been exonerated when proof surfaced that Victoria was still alive. Lena is, of course, stunned.  She's also certain that Sam wouldn't be foolish enough to commit a murder on his own property, and local police chief Doug Heller agrees with her.

Still, the media presence, which had just begun to dissipate, increases, and Lena and Sam are once again in the national spotlight.

Lena and Sam are desperate to determine the identity of Taylor's killer.  They'd like to find Victoria, too, but that has been taken over by federal agencies, who seem to have given the case very low priority. 

There are some fictional characters whose jobs I'd love to have.  Lena London is one of them.  Camilla Graham is a romantic suspense author reminiscent of Mary Stewart, the grande dame of romantic suspense. 

Julia Buckley has been so thorough in the conception of her characters that there is a list of all of Camilla Graham's novels (from 1972 through 2016!) at the front of the book.  And, each chapter begins with an epigraph from Camilla and Lena's work in progress, Death on Danube.  

Although not absolutely necessary, it's probably a good idea to read the first book in the series, A Dark and Stormy Murder, to fully understand what's going on in this book, but it won't be a hardship!



The publisher has generously offered a copy of Death in Dark Blue to one of my readers.  Please comment below before 12:01 a.m. on Monday, May 8th.  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.

When I Discovered Mary Stewart

By special guest Julia Buckley.

Julia Buckley is a Chicago mystery author whose career started in 2006 with the publication of THE DARK BACKWARD. Since then her work has appeared on Kindle in the Madeline Mann series and the novel THE GHOSTS OF LOVELY WOMEN.  She is currently writing two series for Berkley Prime Crime, the first of which launched with THE BIG CHILI. 

She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Romance Writers of America, along with the Chicago Writer's Association. In addition, she has worked with the same writer's group since 2000. 

Julia has taught high school English for twenty-seven years; she lives near Chicago with her husband, two sons, three cats, and a mischievous Lab puppy named Digby. 

(Bio from Juia's website)

I remember when I first fell in love with Mary Stewart. It was somewhere between the late seventies and the early eighties; my mother, a volunteer librarian at my school and eventually at our local library, was always bringing home interesting books. We were huge library supporters: my dad was on the board, and we invited the local librarian, a bachelor, to our house for dinner and games of Password.

My mother had long been a Mary Stewart fan, and I can’t recall if she pressed one into my hand, assuring me that I’d like it, or if I picked one up on my own. Stewart’s covers and titles were compelling, with a Gothic flair and a sense of menace.

In any case, I read the first book. In those days we children who were still in school tended to come home in the afternoon and lie on the furniture like giant sloths, reading the books we had been forced to leave behind. I remember hearing a lot of “Why don’t you go get some fresh air?” while I lay there, devouring chapter after chapter.

The first way that Stewart lured her reader was with an Epigraph at the beginning of each chapter, always literary, referring the reader to a passage from Shakespeare, or Milton, or Bronte. This carefully-selected quotation always had relevance to the story she was telling. After this came the one-two punch of a fascinating setting and a gripping plot, introduced by an irresistible first line.

In her first suspense novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, Stewart begins by setting the tone:

The whole affair began so very quietly. When I wrote, that summer, and asked my
friend Louise if she would come with me on a car trip to Provence, I had no idea that I
might be issuing an invitation to danger.*

Every Mary Stewart fan knows the quiet satisfaction of this sort of beginning. One can be assured of an exciting ride with a highly literate driver.

In my own book, A Dark and Stormy Murder, Camilla Graham is a Mary Stewart-type suspense novelist, and Lena London is as star-struck as I would be, had I ever been given the chance to meet Lady Stewart in person. I suppose the book is a kind of wish fulfillment. In an homage to Stewart’s books, I begin each chapter with an epigraph, but I am quoting Camilla Graham’s book, The Salzburg Train.

After that the resemblance to a Stewart novel ends, but it is still my love letter to the best writer of romantic suspense.

(My other favorite Mary Stewart titles include Nine Coaches Waiting, My Brother Michael, The Moonspinners, Airs Above the Ground, This Rough Magic, Thunder on the Right, and The Ivy Tree.

A Dark and Stormy murder (Berkley Prime Crime) was released  July 5, and is available for order on Amazon.

*Stewart, Mary. Madam, Will You Talk? London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1954.

Cozy Monday

A Dark and Stormy Murder (Writer's Apprentice Mystery #1) by Julia Buckley (Berkley Prime Crime mass market paperback, 5 July 2016).  

As soon as I read the epigraph to the first chapter, an excerpt from fictional novelist Camilla Graham's novel The Salzburg Train, I knew I would love this book.  The tone of the passage evoked for me the Mary Stewart romantic suspense novels that I read and reread when I was a teen.  

Protagonist, aspiring author Lena London feels the same way about Camilla Graham's work.  She has her favorites of the many books Graham wrote (almost one a year from 1972 to 2010!) which have become her comfort reads.

So when her friend Allison calls and tells Lena that Camilla belongs to her knitting group, Lena at first thinks Allison is joking.  Allison assures Lena that she is absolutely serious, and then informs Lena that she has told Camilla about her.  In fact, Allison even sent Camilla a copy of Lena's graduate thesis, a novel inspired by Camilla's work. AND, Camilla liked it so much she told Allison that she'd like to meet Lena, and offer her a job.

Thus, Lena serendipitously becomes her idol's assistant/ghostwriter, moving lock, stock and feline into Camilla Graham's house, which the author believes will make working cooperatively much easier.  

On her first day in the small town of Blue Lake, Indiana, Lena discovers the body of a local waiter named Martin Jonas on the beach below Camilla's house.  

Just like that, Lena is involved in the same type of mystery as the heroines of Camilla's novels.  This gives her a great background to investigate a crime that the local law enforcement would like to pin on the recluse who lives next door, who has become a friend of Lena's.

The clever Julia Buckley has managed to create snippets from some of Camilla's books, which Lena often mentally compares to events in her own life, and reacts accordingly.  Not only that, each chapter is preceded by an epigraph from The Salzburg Train, the novel that Lena is assisting with.

Fans of Mary Stewart, Phyllis Whitney and Helen MacInnes will devour this book, and will probably (like me) be anxious for the next!



The publisher has generously offered a copy of A Dark and Stormy Murder  to one of my readers.  Please comment below before 12:01 a.m. on Friday, July 22, 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.

The Story of Mick and Digby

by special guest Julia Buckley.

Or how the dog I made up for my cozy mystery ended up inspiring me to get a dog of my own.

The Big Chili, my cozy mystery which debuts in early October, was a book that I hadn’t planned to write. That happens a lot with books—they start out as one idea in your head, and then they morph into something entirely different. The same is true of characters: sometimes the ones you think you’ll

like end up fading away, and the ones you barely think about end up taking over your imagination.

For me, this was true especially of Mick, my main character’s dog. Mick is a chocolate Labrador; I’m not sure why I initially chose that breed for his sweet character, but as the books progressed (I’m now halfway through book three), I found myself growing more and more fond of Mick, and even getting a little jealous of Lilah because she has this sweet companion in her life.

I had my own canine friend, a beagle named Simon, but he was quite elderly and could no longer do the things that Mick could do—take long walks on crisp fall nights, run and romp in the yard, sit shotgun during long autumn rides in the car. Simon was, by his old age, a stay-at-home-and-sleep sort of doggie, and that was fine. Sadly, his health declined in the summer and in August we had to put him down.

This was more devastating than any of us could have anticipated, and initially we didn’t even want a new dog. But gradually we all realized that we are the type of family that likes to have canine companionship, so “The Dog Talks” began. Inspired by the sweet Mick in my books—my own dear creation, yet so real to me!—I wanted a chocolate Lab. My family voted this down because not only are these pups very expensive, but we would have to wait several months for a litter to be born and weaned. My younger son got to a point where he wanted a dog SOON. (And by “younger,” I mean seventeen!)

We started studying the website of an animal rescue site in Chicago. We found a litter of puppies who had recently been born on a Kentucky farm and had been surrendered to the rescue facility. They were “Lab mixes,” meaning Lab and who knows? We fell in love with a little puppy face on the site and made an appointment to see him at the facility. He was named Emory, and we adopted him on sight, but we soon changed his name to Digby, or Sir Digby, if we’re being formal.

Digby, like Mick, will soon be able to accompany us on long jaunts around town. He is very inquisitive and playful, and he LOVES to bite things with his little puppy teeth, especially—despite about forty dollars’ worth of puppy toys in his bed—our hands and toes. He has puppy breath and a puppy bark and true puppy affection, and we have fallen in love with him more each day.

Right now he’s sort of in quarantine, waiting for his puppy shots so that he can take walks and encounter other dogs. He’s investigating our house and finding interesting hiding places to take his naps in, and those naps are very long, since he is still essentially like a human baby.

If it hadn’t been for Mick, the dog of my imagination, we would never have found Digby, who will now spend the next ten to fifteen years with us. And someday, if we decide to get him a companion, it’s going to be a chocolate Lab!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Julia Buckley is a Chicago mystery author whose career started in 2006 with the publication of The Dark Backward. Since then her work has appeared on Kindle in the Madeline Mann series and the novel The Ghosts of Lovely Women.

She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Romance Writers of America, along with the Chicago Writer's Association. In addition, she has worked with the same writer's group since 2000.

Julia has taught high school English for twenty-seven years; she lives near Chicago with her husband, two sons, and three cats.*

*From Julia's website.

Cozy Monday

The Big Chili (Undercover Dish Mystery #1) by Julia Buckley (Berkley Prime Crime mass market paperback, 6 October 2015).


Lilah Drake has a secret.

When she's not working at her parents' real estate agency, she cooks for other people who don't have the time/energy/skill to do it themselves.   These people also don't want it known that the food they're serving was made by someone else.  Lilah doesn't mind (too much), as the money she earns is being saved for her Catering Business fund.

She's had no trouble with her deceptions, until the unpleasant Alice Dixon dies after tasting Lilah's chili con carne at a church function.  Nonetheless, Pet Grandy, who is taking credit for the dish, urges Lilah to keep her secret.  Lilah is uneasy about this, but agrees.

She feels even worse when she meets the detective in charge of the case, Jacob (Jay) Parker. Not only does Jacob happen to be the son of Ellie, one of Lilah's best customers, he's very handsome.

Lilah tries hard to convince herself she's not attracted to Jay, has to be very careful not to spill the beans (pun intended) about who really made the chili.  To assuage her conscience, she begins her own investigation into the murder.

Unusually for a cozy, the story is told in the first person, from Lilah's point of view.  As a result, we are able to identify with her strongly as we follow along with her thought processes while she conducts her investigation.

The town of Pine Haven, Illinois, and its residents are believable without being either clichéd or abnormal. Lilah is a smart, likeable protagonist, though she does tend to overthink things.  

Recipes for some of Lilah's creations are included at the end of the book.

The publisher has generously offered a copy of THE BIG CHILI to one of my readers. Please comment below by 12:01 a.m. on October 19, and don't forget to include an email address where I can contact you if you win. Entries from the U.S. only, please.

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