Past & Present: A Marketville Mystery
Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
Superior Shores Press (September 21, 2018)
Paperback: 232 pages

Synopsis

Sometimes the past reaches out to the present…

It’s been thirteen months since Calamity (Callie) Barnstable inherited a house in Marketville under the condition that she search for the person who murdered her mother thirty years earlier. She solves the mystery, but what next? Unemployment? Another nine-to-five job in Toronto?

Callie decides to set down roots in Marketville, take the skills and knowledge she acquired over the past year, and start her own business: Past & Present Investigations.

It’s not long before Callie and her new business partner, best friend Chantelle Marchand, get their first client: a woman who wants to find out everything she can about her grandmother, Anneliese Prei, and how she came to a “bad end” in 1956. It sounds like a perfect first assignment. Except for one thing: Anneliese’s past winds its way into Callie’s present, and not in a manner anyone—least of all Callie—could have predicted.

Guest Post

I don’t know about you, but I love libraries and book clubs!  I belong to a book club and use our public library especially now that I can check out eBooks!

Libraries & Book Clubs: A Winning Combination

Judy Penz Sheluk

Do you belong to a book club? I have to admit that, despite being an avid reader (I average a book a week), I’ve never belonged to one. As an author, however, one of my favorite things to do is meet readers—especially readers who like my books! Since the publication of my debut novel The Hanged Man’s Noose, I’ve had the good fortune to be a guest author at a few local book clubs. The idea is that if a club selects my book, on the day of their monthly meeting, I show up and answer questions. I don’t charge a fee (although I do love homemade cookies) because it’s nice to know that the group has selected and read my book. The hope, of course, is that they’ll want to read my other books, and I’m always grateful for reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. A couple of times these visits have led to paid speaking engagements.

It helps that my local library owns two book club “sets”—one set of The Hanged Man’s Noose, generously donated by a group in memory of their late founder, and the other, Skeletons in the Attic, donated by me because I love libraries and book clubs in equal measure. It also helps that I live in an area that appears to have a lot of active book clubs.

I’d like to tell you that my book club visits generate rave reviews from every member, and in most cases, that’s been the case (or at least the members were too polite to criticize the book in my presence). This past winter, however, while visiting a local Senior’s residence, it became clear that “amateur sleuth mysteries” did not meet up to the standards of previous Pulitzer Prize winning literature they’d been reading. One woman went on to tell me that there were “too many dead bodies,” before sniffing loudly and bringing the conversation around to an NHL hockey player, long dead (of natural causes, I assume, though I’m not entirely certain).

But for every dead hockey player, there have been far more wonderful experiences. This past Spring, a book club held a “Hanged Man’s Noose Pub Night” in celebration of reading The Hanged Man’s Noose, complete with Treasontinis, Full Noose Nachos, and shortbread. (You can find the recipes on the Food & Drink page of my website:  http://www.judypenzsheluk.com/recipes/).

Authors tend to be solitary creatures that make up stories in the comfort of our own preferred space. Getting out there with others can help fuel our imagination…or at the very least, reassure us that someone out there is reading what we wrote.

If you are part of a book club and would like to select one of my books, please contact me. At the very least, I can send your group bookmarks, and answer your questions by email after you’ve read the book—we may even be able to set up an online visit. For those book club members with long commutes, most of my titles are also available on Audible, iTunes, and Amazon.

About the Author

Judy Penz Sheluk is the author of two mystery series: The Glass Dolphin Mysteries (THE HANGED MAN’S NOOSE and A HOLE IN ONE) and The Marketville Mysteries (SKELETONS IN THE ATTIC). Judy’s short crime fiction appears is several collections. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and Crime Writers of Canada, where she currently serves on the Board of Directors as the Regional Representative for Toronto/Southern Ontario. Find Judy on her website/blog where she interviews and showcases the works of other authors and blogs about the writing life.

Website/Blog * Facebook * Twitter * Goodreads * Amazon * Pinterest * Audible