Author R&R With Margaret Fenton

 Margaret Fenton was born in Florence, Alabama, and grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in Ocean Springs. She received her B.A. in English from the Newcomb College of Tulane University in New Orleans, and her Master of Social Work from Tulane. She worked in Children's Mental Health for fourteen years before becoming a writer. Hence, her work tends to reflect her interest in social causes and mental health, especially where kids are concerned. She has been a planning coordinator of the mystery conference, Murder in the Magic City, since its inception in 2003. Margaret lives in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover with her husband, a retired software developer, and their three adorable Papillons.

Margaret's series featuring child welfare social worker, Claire Conover, includes Little Lamb Lost, Little Girl Gone, and the most recent installment, Little White Lies, in which the office of Black mayoral candidate, Dr. Marcus Freedman, is bombed. While Marcus is found safe, his campaign manager, Jason O'Dell, is discovered dead in the rubble. Claire's office gets a call about Jason's daughter, Maddie, who was left in daycare and becomes Claire's latest charge as she investigates what happened.

There are more questions than answers when it's revealed that Jason O’Dell was living under an assumed name. He's actually Jason Alsbrook, son of prominent local mine owner, James Alsbrook, whose mining company has an unseemly notoriety for having the most mining accidents and deaths in Alabama. Not surprisingly, there are many people who would wish harm to him and to his family. But who would’ve acted on that hatred?

As she works to keep little Maddie safe and find out who would’ve harmed Jason—and why—Claire uncovers a complex web of deception, secrets, and lies. While she struggles to piece together this dangerous puzzle, Claire weathers the storms in her personal life that threaten to rip apart everything Claire holds dear. In the end, will all the little white lies come with a big cost?

Margaret Fenton stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about her writing:

 

Hi everyone! My name is Margaret Fenton and I write the Little social work mysteries published by Aakenbaaken and Kent.  Three books are out in the series so far: LITTLE LAMB LOST, LITTLE GIRL GONE, and LITTLE WHITE LIES.  I’m working on number four, titled LITTLE BOY BLUE.  The books feature child welfare social worker Claire Conover, who is an investigator for the Jefferson County Department of Human Services in Birmingham, Alabama.  She’s been doing this job for several years and comes from a family of people who are service-minded, especially her father. 

First, a little about me, the author.  I have a Master’s Degree in Social Work from Tulane University, and for close to fifteen years I worked as a mental health consultant for the Department of Human Resources here in the real Jefferson County.  My team would evaluate children and families who came under the oversight of DHR, and offer them services including in-home family therapy, case management, psychiatric services, and more.  The goal was to try to keep them out of foster care. I worked very closely with all the child welfare social workers in the county at the time and became familiar with how things in that world worked.

From this short bio, I’m sure it’s not hard to see that my research into some aspects of the books comes from reality.  Claire’s character comes from several of the social workers I knew in real life, who were dedicated and determined to do the best for their clients. I got to see first-hand how the work affected their lives and families as well as some of the frustrations they faced.

That being said, I also break some of the rules.  In LITTLE GIRL GONE, Claire meets a 13-year old black girl named LaReesa Jones, and they develop a long-term relationship. She eventually becomes her foster mother, but in real life that would never be allowed.  Social workers are allowed to foster, but the child cannot be one that they have investigated or have had anything to do with professionally.  LaReesa is a culmination of all of the resilient kids I worked with over the years. Kids who have faced so much strife and stress and somehow manage to succeed, even with some bumps along the way.

Most of my characters are based on real people. There is a romance that develops when Claire meets Grant Summerville in LITTLE LAMB LOST.  He’s a very tall, very cute man who becomes Claire’s boyfriend.  Oh, but then there’s Kirk Mahoney, the sexy bad-boy reporter from the News. Claire is not allowed to share any information with him about any of her cases, but that doesn’t stop him from asking. Again and again.  Both Grant and Kirk are based on different sides of my husband’s personality. He likes to guess which ones.

Thank you for allowing me to share all this with you, and I hope you’ll check out the books!

 

You can find out more about Margaret Fenton via her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. Little White Lies is available in digital and print editions via all major online booksellers.

Author R&R with Charles Salzberg

 Charles Salzberg is a novelist, a journalist, and an acclaimed writing instructor. He has been a Visiting Professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Hunter College, the Writer's Voice, and the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a Founding Member. He is a consulting editor at the webzine Ducts.org and co-host, with Jonathan Kravetz, of the reading series, Trumpet Fiction, at KGB in New York City. His freelance work has appeared in such publications as Esquire, New York Magazine, GQ, Elle, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, The New York Times Arts and Leisure section, The New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He is the author of the Henry Swann detective series, including Swann's Last Song, which was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel, and the upcoming Swann's Lake of Despair.

His new novel, Man on the Run, follows master burglar, Francis Hoyt, who walked away from his arraignment in a Connecticut courtroom and is now a fugitive who has to figure out what he’s going to do with the rest of his life. So he heads west to Los Angeles, where he meets Dakota, a young true crime podcaster who happens to be doing a series on Hoyt. At the same time, he’s approached by a mysterious attorney who makes Hoyt an offer he can’t refuse: break into a "mob bank," and liberate the contents.

Charles Salzberg stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing the book:

 

When I started writing for magazines, I had no journalism background other than being a big fan of magazines like Esquire, GQ, New Times and The New Yorker, plus three months working in the mailroom at New York magazine.

I learned pretty quick there are essentially two different approaches to research. The first, embodied by my friend Tom, is to do as much research as possible on a subject before you start the interviewing process. Tom reasoned that knowing as much about a subject as possible will help the interview process, by opening up subjects for discussion you might otherwise miss. But for me, there was a downside to that approach: I was afraid if I knew too much about a subject, I might not ask the questions that might need to be asked, because I already knew the answers. Instead, I treated interviews more like organic conversations, uncovering all kinds of information and it encouraged me to ask questions I might otherwise not think to ask. It also resulted in me paying more attention to those answers, which resulted in sometimes having the conversation head in unexpected directions. The other looming concern was that to rely too much on information already in public domain, is potentially tricky because not all information out there is true. I was also afraid that if I knew all the answers before even asking the questions, I’d get lazy or, even worse, bored.

There was another potential problem inherent in researching and that is it’s often hard to know when to stop, which means you often wind up with so much research that when it comes time to write, you’re paralyzed. How much information does the reader need to know? Is it possible if I know too much about a subject that I’ll never get out of the weeds, which means never actually writing. Will I go down too many rabbit holes, much of what I find out totally unnecessary? Will all this research result in asphyxiation by information?

In journalism, it’s extremely important to get all the facts right—for obvious reasons. But in fiction, it’s just as important. There’s nothing that’ll turn a reader off more than finding inaccuracies, even those as simple as having a character drive down a one-way street in the wrong direction. And if you have any thoughts about getting away with inaccuracies, forget about it, because inevitably there’ll be some reader out there (usually more than one), who’ll catch you red-handed.

My latest novel, Man on the Run, required me to not only get inside the mind of Francis Hoyt, a master burglar, but it also meant I had to take a crash course in how to burgle a house, and how to elude alarm systems. Hoyt was a character in an earlier book, Second Story Man. He sprung from an article I read in The New Yorker way back in 2004. “The Silver Thief” chronicled the career of master burglar Blane Nordahl. For some reason, that article stayed with me and when, almost fifteen years later, I decided to do a book about what I think of as America’s obsession with winning, with being the best, sometimes at any cost, I decided to create a master burglar who is obsessed with being the best in his field. And so, I began researching everything I could on burglars. As a result of that research, I discovered another legendary second story man, Alan Golder, known as “The Dinnertime Bandit.” He only robbed houses at dinnertime, when he knew the chances were good that everyone was in the house, which meant all the valuables were upstairs, waiting to be plucked.

I never intended to revisit Francis Hoyt, but after completing the novel I was working on at the time, Canary in the Coal Mine, I was looking for my next project. For some reason, Francis Hoyt kept popping up. What, I wondered, happens to Hoyt after Second Story Man ends? Having escaped from the authorities, he’s on the lam. Where would he go? What would he do next? And so, from that curiosity arose Man on the Run.

During the pandemic, I discovered true crime podcasts. I listened to dozens of them, many the result of deep-dive investigations. It sparked an idea: What if a true crime podcaster decided to do a series on Francis Hoyt? And what if he found out about it? What would he do? And so, another character entered the picture: Dakota Richards, a former newspaper reporter who starts her own true crime podcast.

I knew nothing about the ins and outs of podcasting, so I did what I’d do as a journalist: I contacted a podcaster, Lauren Bright Pacheco, and she was happy to cooperate. I peppered her with dozens of questions about the ins and outs of podcasting. What equipment would my character need? Did she work alone? What editing skills would she require? How do podcasts make money? Lauren was happy to answer all my questions.

At one point, near the end of the novel, I needed a particular location where Hoyt could get rid of a hot car. I’ve been to L.A. many times, but that isn’t the kind of information I ever picked up, so I called up my friend, Janet, told her what I was looking for, and she came through with the perfect spot.

Generally speaking, because I’m one of those annoying people who doesn’t outline plots, I have no idea where I’m going when I sit down to write. As a result, I tend to research on the fly. When I reach a point where I need to do research, I’ll stop and do it.

 

You can learn more about Charles Salzberg via his website and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Man on the Run is now available from Down & Out Books and via all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Matt Cost

 Matt Cost started out as a history major at Trinity College and later went on to own a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing histories and mysteries. Cost has published four books in the Mainely Mystery series, with the fifth, Mainely Wicked, due out in August of 2023. He has also published four books in the Clay Wolfe Trap series, with the fifth, Pirate Trap, due out in December of 2023. Cost combines his love of histories and mysteries into a new historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry.

Velma Gone Awry follows Hungarian private eye, "8" Ballo, whose mother was certain he was going to be born a girl, but when he comes out a boy, she writes down simply the number 8, as he has seven older siblings. Now, in his mid-thirties, 8 is a college educated man, a veteran of the Great War, jilted in love, and has his own private investigator business in Brooklyn, New York. When he is hired to find the young flapper daughter of a German businessman, life suddenly becomes much more complicated in a search that will lead him to cross paths with Dorothy Parker, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Bugsy Siegel, Babe Ruth, and many more.

Matt stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching the book:

 

I write histories and mysteries. The difference in research between the two genres varies, but in reality, is not all that different.  

The historical fiction that I write requires a great deal of preloading. I have written historical fiction novels about Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, and New Orleans during Reconstruction.

 The most important facet of doing the research for these books was visiting the place where they took place, getting in tune with the locale, and allowing that knowledge to make my writing more sincere. I visited countless American Civil War battlefields for At Every Hazard, and even spent so much time at Gettysburg where the defining moment of Joshua Chamberlain’s life and potentially the turning point of the Civil War occurred, that my son ended up going to Gettysburg College.

That same son went to Cuba with me as my translator for researching I am Cuba. I had worked with a company to develop a twelve-day journey across the island of Cuba following the revolutionary war path of Fidel Castro, getting guides as necessary, and gaining an appreciation for the terrain, the cities, and the people.

The most important thing that I learned on my travels through Cuba was how 300 bearded guerillas were able to defeat an army of 10,000 Cuban soldiers. This knowledge was gleaned by climbing the Sierra Maestra through dense jungle and stifling humidity to the camp of Fidel Castro (a historical site in Cuba that only the brave hike to). The soldiers simply didn’t have the desire or the mettle to flush them out of this jungle mountain hideout.

My wife and I had a grand time researching New Orleans for Love in a Time of Hate. Fascinating historical details by day, and by night, fabulous food, music, and drink. What’s not to like?

But on to the mysteries. I write two different mystery series with a third debuting in April. My Mainely Mysteries and Clay Wolfe/Port Essex books are fast-paced, action on every page, but also complex and twisting, with an underlying educational theme that has grabbed my attention and incorporated itself into my books. These themes include nuclear power, potent lobbyists, heroin smuggling through lobster traps, cults, genome editing, and unidentified aerial phenomena.

While the characters, or the good guys anyway, are set, as is the setting for these PI mysteries, the plot requires preloading by reading up on these topics, and then diverging into internet searches and documents. The rabbit hole is real. Through the course of writing the books, I am constantly dropping nuggets of information to family and friends regarding the fascinating thing that I learned that day. Some of this research comes before I put fingers to keyboard, but most of it occurs as I write. The subject, the topic, and the plot are constantly evolving, so the research must follow suit. I quite often will have ten or twelve tabs open at the top of my browser with such things as heroin laced with fentanyl, how to poison somebody, famous serial killers, and so on.

I am debuting a historical PI mystery set in 1923 Brooklyn, Velma Gone Awry, in April of this year. This is a combination of my love of histories and mysteries and also contains probably the most unique research tool that I have utilized. There is a site, www.newspapers.com, that has archived onto their site most of the newspapers in the history of the United States. Perhaps the world, I’m not sure, as I have not needed to cross outside the country since I found it.

This is a treasure trove of information. I can read a number of papers such as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for the time period I’m research, in this case, 1923. The unique thing that I’ve come up with regarding research is I read this newspaper every morning before writing. Front to back for the days that I am currently writing about. From this I get a feel for the politics, the news of the day, what things are being advertised, and so on. It has been a fantastic tool and I’d highly recommend it to anyone writing historical fiction.

I love every part of the writing process, but delving into a topic that interests me and peeling away layer after layer is gratifying and fascinating and a part that I truly do love. But I equally like writing, editing, and marketing my books.

Write on.

 

You can find our more about Matt Cost via his website and follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Velma Gone Awry: A Brooklyn 8 Ballo Mystery is now available via Encircle Publications and all major booksellers.