Guest Post & Giveaway – Death of a Proper Bostonian by Anne Louise Bannion
Death of a Proper Bostonian (Old Los Angeles)
Historical Mystery
6th in Series
Setting – Boston, 1873
Publisher : Healcroft House, Publishers
Publication date : June 12, 2026
Synopsis
A deadly homecoming
It’s August 1873, and at long last, physician and winemaker Maddie Franklin Wilcox makes the journey home to her beloved native Boston. Her business is to deliver her ward and apprentice, Elena Ortiz, to the local women’s medical school, and that also includes visiting her father, her sister and her family.
But at a dinner with the family of Maddie’s late and very much unlamented (at least, on her part) husband, young John Wilcox, a cousin there to entertain the guests with his nature talk, is shot. Then the next morning, the eldest of the Wilcox brothers is found shot in his bed. Maddie quickly concludes that the shooting of the oh, so charming naturalist was but a distraction for the shooting of her former brother-in-law.
Chased by a corrupt Boston police officer, confronted again and again by the relentless prejudice of the city’s medical practitioners, and in danger of losing her heart to young John Wilcox (who had plenty of reasons to want his cousin dead), Maddie’s happy homecoming becomes a morass of suspicion with someone willing to kill her and the people she loves.
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Guest Post
How to Find a Proper Title
By Anne Louise Bannon
I don’t know why, but for my process as a writer, finding a good title is integral to the early parts of my pulling together a story. I have changed titles of various projects when the story went some other than what I expected. But it is very hard for me to start writing if I don’t have a solid title for whatever project I’m working on.
Worse yet, I can’t exactly explain how I pick my titles. It’s one of those intuitive things where I often know I have the right one from the first second I have my premise. I even have a future project that had a title even before I came up with the idea that fueled the story. I just knew that it was a great title (Passion Fierce as the Grave), and wanted to use it.
Another one in this category is Running Away to Boston, my tech thriller. By the way, if you don’t like strong language, you don’t want to read that book. It may also be one of my weaker titles because the story actually takes place in Southern California. Everyone thinks it’s about Boston, but it’s about finding safety, and the concept of running away there defines the relationship between my main character and her mother. So it’s an accurate title, just not in the way a lot of people think.
When book one in the Old Los Angeles series first started whispering to me, I knew the title was going to be Death of the Zanjero. It had a really good ryhthm, and was just obscure enough that it would trigger curiosity. I mean, what’s a Zanjero? I would have picked up a book with that title in a nano-second.
That the other books in the series follow the Death of [the principal victim] naming pattern, I’m not sure how that happened. It was too late when I realized that M.C. Beaton had subconsciously inspired me with the titles of one of her series.
Still, how do I choose between Death of the or Death of a/n? I have no idea. It’s in the rhythm of how it rolls off my tongue. Death of an Heiress just feels better than Death of the Heiress.
And I tried both. I do a lot of that, even after I get the lightning strike of inspiration. You just can’t get too attached to something too early in the process. Being audially-oriented as a writer, I hear everything before I write it. So I noodle my new title around in my head for quite some time before officially settling on it, feeling the rhythm – there’s that word again. But rhythm is a big part of how I write. The rhythms of dialog, especially when someone has an accent.
I had a major problem with the title for Death of a Proper Bostonian, my latest Old Los Angeles story. It was originally Death of a Boston Brahmin. But when I started researching that august bit of society, I discovered that the Brahmins were a very specific group of families, none of whom were named Franklin or Wilcox, the two primary families. It felt off dumping two fictional families into that very real set of people.
Fortunately, Charlotte McLeod came to the rescue. I started re-reading her Sarah Kelling series. The Kellings are completely fictional, but obviously Brahmins, and it was good research even though the action happens at least a hundred years after my story happens. However, McLeod rarely uses the term Brahmin, and instead references the group by their other nickname: Proper Bostonians. Ding, ding, ding!
It feels right. A Proper Bostonian, rather than The Proper Bostonian. And so that’s what we have.
About the Author
Author Anne Louise Bannon’s husband says that his wife kills people for a living. Bannon does mostly write mysteries, including the Old Los Angeles Series, the Freddie and Kathy series, and the Operation Quickline series. She has worked as a freelance journalist for magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She and her husband, Michael Holland, created a wine education blog, and she co-wrote a book on poisons. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters.
