Knot My Sister’s Keeper (A Quilting Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
6th in Series
Kensington (July 31, 2018)
Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages

Synopsis

In tracing her ancestry, quilter Martha Rose discovers a ritzy half-sister, a stash of family secrets, and a decades-old mystery that only she can unravel . . .

Martha Rose is shocked to find she has a half-sister, especially one so different from her. Giselle Cole is wealthy, widowed, and lives a glamorous life in West Los Angeles. At least her grandmother was a quilter! But Giselle can’t answer Martha’s many questions about their father—he disappeared when she was only a child and the few clues left behind indicate he may have been murdered. So Martha and Giselle team up on an investigation that weaves them through the streets of L.A., their father’s hidden love affairs, and into some mysterious unfinished Cole family business . . .

Guest Post

A BAD SEED, or Are Killers Born That Way?

By Mary Marks

What do you think? Are killers born that way, or does their environment bend them in that direction? If you recognize this as the old nature vs. nurture question, you’re right. I had an interesting conversation about that the other day, which got me to thinking about the killers in my stories.

A few of my perpetrators were driven to kill in the heat of desperation. Some of us may have found ourselves in similar circumstances where we feel panic, fear, anxiety, thwarted or threatened. Because we can identify with this state of mind, we may understand the impulse that could drive a person to kill another in a moment of blinding passion. But even though we may empathize, we ourselves do not commit murder, but cope in more acceptable ways. I, for instance, just write books about it.

More interesting to me was writing about those killers who planned their crimes and waited for just the right time to dispatch their victims. And gender didn’t matter. I wrote about both male and female premeditated killers. What did they have in common, if anything? What in their personalities enabled them to coolly plan and carry out the execution of another human being? Were they born that way, or did some early experience traumatize them so much it sent them down the path to murder?

Okay, I realize that my killers are fictional people and I get to decide what they are like. But in order to write convincingly about a character, the author has to have a picture of that person’s life: their history and their way of thinking and reacting. With this in mind, I examined the lives of my premeditated killers and found this in common: they were all narcissistic, self-absorbed people, with something important to lose if their victim lived. So they carefully engineered the deaths of the people who stood in their way. In other words, they were sociopaths; people with little or no empathy for others nor remorse for their actions.

Back to the nature vs. nurture question. Are sociopaths born this way, or does their environment create them? So far, the answer from science seems to be: both factors may contribute to the development of a sociopath. In other words, they don’t really know. What is important for me as an author, is that sociopaths have certain traits in common. And those traits become the structure around which I can build the character of a killer.

Here’s a little secret I’ll share with you. I write my stories organically. That is, I don’t necessarily know where the plot will lead when I begin to write. I just follow my imagination and see where it takes me. Along the way I’ll create several suspects who may turn out to be the killer. Only when I’m at least half-way through the story do I get a clear idea of who the killer ought to be and what their motive was. Sometimes it’s a “bad” person (sociopath), and sometimes just a desperate one. Either way, it’s always interesting for me to discover, along with the reader, which one it will turn out to be.

About the Author

Born and raised in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, Mary Marks earned a B.A. in Anthropology from UCLA and an M.A. in Public Administration from the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. In 2004 she enrolled in the UCLA Extension Writers Program. Her first novel, Forget Me Knot, was a finalist in a national writing competition in 2011. She is currently a reviewer of cozy mysteries for The New York Journal of Books.

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