A Dream of Death (A Kate Hamilton Mystery)
Traditional Mystery
1st in Series
Crooked Lane Books (April 9, 2019)
Hardcover: 320 pages

Synopsis

On a remote Scottish island, American antiques dealer Kate Hamilton wrestles with her own past while sleuthing a brutal killing, staged to recreate a two-hundred-year-old unsolved murder.

Autumn has come and gone on Scotland’s Isle of Glenroth, and the islanders gather for the Tartan Ball, the annual end-of-tourist-season gala. Spirits are high. A recently published novel about island history has brought hordes of tourists to the small Hebridean resort community. On the guest list is American antiques dealer Kate Hamilton. Kate returns reluctantly to the island where her husband died, determined to repair her relationship with his sister, proprietor of the island’s luxe country house hotel, famous for its connection with Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Kate has hardly unpacked when the next morning a body is found, murdered in a reenactment of an infamous unsolved murder described in the novel—and the only clue to the killer’s identity lies in a curiously embellished antique casket. The Scottish police discount the historical connection, but when a much-loved local handyman is arrested, Kate teams up with a vacationing detective inspector from Suffolk, England, to unmask a killer determined to rewrite island history—and Kate’s future.

Guest Post

THREE TRUTHS AND A LIE: The Perils of Following Advice

by Connie Berry

Author of the Kate Hamilton Mystery series

Have you played the game? It’s an icebreaker, a fun way to get acquainted, and usually calls for two truths and a lie. Today I need three truths because my topic is advice on writing, and there’s plenty of it out there to be had.

Years ago, when I first dreamed about writing a mystery series, I threw up a website and started blogging. One of my original topics was “What I Wish I Had Known.” I asked five mystery writers I admired to think about what they wished they’d known starting out. One of them, I hoped, would reveal the secret, the piece of advice which—if followed—would lead swiftly to a finished manuscript, an agent, and a publisher. Instead, I got a dose of reality: persevere, read widely in your genre, keep learning, build a community. Excellent advice.

But is all the writing advice out there worth taking to heart? Here’s my take on it. Three truths and a lie.

#1. Write what you know.

TRUE. Each writer has a built-in reserve of experiences, memories, and observations on which to draw. Among the most life-shaping experiences for me was growing up in the antiques trade. My parents were collectors first, then opened a shop, specializing in fine objects from Europe and the Orient. In our house, antiques weren’t a hobby but a way of life. Weekends frequently meant setting up a booth at an antique show. Family vacations were thinly disguised buying trips. Our house looked a bit like a museum—a crowded one. My father’s unspoken motto was “if one is good, three is better.” Every flat surface in our sprawling ranch-style house was occupied by something—an ivory figurine, a cut-glass bowl, a collection of silver snuff boxes, a life-size bronze head of Beethoven, a marble statue of The Three Graces.

I made my protagonist, Kate an antiques dealer. Write what you know.

Notice, however, the advice doesn’t say “write what you’ve lived.” Knowing something and living something are different things. Happily, a writer doesn’t have to commit murder to write about it. That’s where research comes in.

#2. Write what you love.

Also TRUE. Years ago, my thesis advisor told me to choose a topic I could live with for many months. I chose Shakespeare comedies and enjoyed every minute of the research and writing. I remembered this advice when I set out to plan my first book. Writing a 300+-page novel would take a lot more time than writing a 75-page thesis on The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare’s Comedies. So while my protagonist, Kate, is an antiques dealer—the world I knew—I put her in the UK, a place I love. I’m fond of the large city in Ohio where I live—I really am—but if truth be told, my heart yearns for that “sceptered isle…[that] precious stone set in a silver sea…that England.” (William Shakespeare, Richard II). There’s nowhere I’d rather be, physically or in my imagination—than Britain. I’ve never regretted my decision to write what I love.

#3. Write what pleases you.

A LIE—at least for first-time authors. The hard truth is, we must write what readers want to read. We must write what agents and publishers believe they can sell. That means learning the “rules.” A lifetime of reading and a master’s degree in English didn’t teach me about eliminating adverbs, avoiding exclamation points like the plague, and leaving white space on the page. I’d never heard of such things as head-hopping, info dumps, limiting dialogue tags, and avoiding passive voice. Established authors can break the “rules.” They often do. Unpublished writers don’t have that same luxury.

#4. Finish the book.

TRUE. Anne Enright, the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, was quoted in The Guardian as saying, “The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.” She also said, “The first twelve years are the hardest,” but we won’t go into that now.

Some manuscripts will never see the light of day. A few, to be sure, deserve to be abandoned as quickly as possible. But these exceptions don’t alter the fact that a writer must, sometime, actually finish a book. One of the mistakes I made early on was polishing words that would never make it into the final draft. I wasted time, lots of it, because revising is easier and more fun for me than putting words on a blank page. What I needed was to push ahead and finish the book. Only then did revision make sense. Every part of a book—chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences, even words—must be evaluated in light of the whole manuscript. Some writers claim they don’t really know what the book is about until they’ve finished the first draft. Some don’t write the opening scene until they’ve written the ending.

What advice have you been given—in writing or in life? Have you followed it? What advice have you ignored?

About the Author

Like her main character, Connie Berry was raised by charmingly eccentric antique collectors who opened a shop, not because they wanted to sell antiques but because they needed a plausible excuse to keep buying them. Connie adores history, off-season foreign travel, cute animals, and all things British. She lives in Ohio with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Millie.

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