Ghost Cat at the Mystery Hotel (A Tenth Life Cozy Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
3rd in Series
Setting – Oregon Coast
Independently Published (May 30, 2024)
Number of Pages: 246

Synopsis

The game is murder at the Mystery Beach Hotel.

When Camelia Collins meets her old college friend Anne Pine for a murder mystery weekend at the coast, death becomes more than a game.

Accompanied by her ghost cat companion Soji, Camelia begins to discover clues that have nothing to do with the role-playing storyline. A lurking stranger spies on Camelia from the house next door. A vengeful spirit haunts the hotel. A winter storm rages outside, threatening the old building, while a murderer roams the halls, threatening those within.
Will Camelia’s keen senses and Soji’s feline wiles be enough to catch the killer before they kill again?

Amazon

Guest Post

The Call of the Mystery Muse

What makes a relatively normal forty-year-old woman look out the window at the sunny side street one day and say to herself, “I’m going to write a murder mystery”? To decide that, instead of weeding the garden or going for a walk to greet the neighbors, she’ll lock herself away in a dark room with a computer and a cat and set her mind to twisted plots of death?
It’s been some thirty years since the writing muse hit me, and to be accurate, it was not a sunny day but closer to midnight when I found myself alone in my house with a story running through my head. My husband was working in Japan at the time, and I was at loose ends. Because we were having our bedroom remodeled, my sleeping quarters had been relocated to his office. In that office was a computer, a rarity at the time. That big fat monitor called to me as surely as a siren’s song.

I knew nothing about computers, and I didn’t want to mess up whatever arcane processes my husband had set up, so I popped in a floppy disk, one of those 5.25-inch squares, and began to type.

Before I knew it, I’d finished a beginning chapter of forty pages. Forty pages! To me, that was like reaching the first amazing plateau of a beautiful mountain. If I could write forty pages, I could write four hundred. And I did.

That first attempt at mystery writing (a manuscript which still lives only in the virtual drawers of my files) was the gateway work to what is now my rai·son d’ê·tre. Every morning, I get up and grab my laptop to find out what wonder is lurking in my imagination. No more floppy disks or heavy monitors, I can take my work anywhere—to the beach, on vacation, or to my favorite spot on the couch by the front window where I can watch the dog walkers go by. My two cats, Tyler and Clarence, come and go as I work, sometimes asking for attention and other times doing a bit of their own window-staring—the birds are plentiful this time of year.

But whether locked in a dark office or relaxing on my comfy couch, my mind inevitably turns to murder-most-cozy. I know I should go out and weed the garden, but what if there was a Mystery Weekend Event being held at a lonely hotel on a bluff at the coast? What if it was stormy? What if someone there was killed for real? And what if a ghost cat and a septuagenarian were the only ones who could solve the murder?

The weedy garden and neighborly walks can wait while my imagination strives to create a cozy mystery that’s impossible to put down.

About the Author

Cat Writer Mollie Hunt is the award-winning author of two cozy series: the Crazy Cat Lady Mysteries featuring a sixty-something cat shelter volunteer who finds more trouble than a cat in catnip, and the Tenth Life Paranormal Mysteries involving a ghost cat. Her Cat Seasons Sci-Fantasy Tetralogy presents extraordinary cats saving the world. She recently released a COVID memoir, which she calls “a tale of a plague and politics, of depression and inspiration, and an ode to the very real and healing presence of cats.” In her spare time, she pens a bit of cat poetry as well.

Mollie is a member of the Oregon Writers’ Colony, Sisters in Crime, the Cat Writers’ Association, Willamette Writers, and the Northwest Independent Writers Association (NIWA). She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and a varying number of cats. Like her cat lady character, she is a grateful shelter volunteer.

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