The Dark Petals of Provence Is Now Available!
Hi everyone, Just a quick note to let you know my new novel, The Dark Petals of Provence, is now available in all formats: paperback, ebook, and even audiobook. As I mentioned in my newsletter, I was terribly disappointed when the physical book was out of stock for a while but it’s now available. Whew! Dark Petals was inspired by the evocative yet sinister books by the French writer Marcel Pagnol. Pagnol grew up in Provence and created stories based on his childhood experiences for both literature and film. One…
Author J.A. Jance Imagined a Colorful Epic Garden
You know I love visiting gardens so when thriller author J. A. Jance invited me to tour her Seattle-area garden, I jumped at the chance. It’s a wonderfully imagined colorful space inspired by an epic poem by C. Day-Lewis. Jance fell in love with the poem decades ago at a reading. “Baucis and Philemon” is based on Ovid’s mythical tale, which tells the story of how Zeus and Hermes visited a town where Baucis and Philemon, a simple couple who lived in a rustic cottage, took them in and showed…
How an Odd Stain on a Sidewalk in Russia Inspired My Novel
It was late afternoon in St. Petersburg, Russia. A cloudy day but warm. I was walking back to the inn where I was staying for a writer’s workshop through the Summer Literary Seminars program. Soon, I came to a strange dried puddle on the sidewalk and almost stepped in it. I had to take a wide turn into the street to go around. Red and crusted, about a two-foot-wide blob, I thought it was paint. I looked up at the line of apartment windows, wondering where the scaffolding or ladders…
Murder on the Left Bank Left Me Breathless
Reading a Cara Black mystery is like a brisk jog. You trot alongside private investigator Aimée Leduc as she pieces together clues and sometimes runs for her life while solving a murder. Meanwhile, the sights and sounds of Paris go by: hot bread, honking horns, lovers in a park. It’s always a chic, action-filled journey and Black’s latest novel, Murder on the Left Bank, is no exception. Book number 18 of the Aimée Leduc Investigation series focuses on the murder of a young man tasked with transporting a very desirable…
Why I Wrote a Novel About a Unique Apple: Excerpt
During these last few weeks, I shared two posts about the origins of and botany in my novel about a unique apple, Harvesting the Sky. The first article covered how I merged issues of an emotional past with plants and the second, my inability to eat apples and subsequent fascination with them. This week I’m posting the final segment of this series with an excerpt from the book’s first chapter. It takes place in Kazakhstan while the rest of the novel, as in The Forgetting Flower, takes place in Paris. I…
