Author R&R with Jane Brookwood

Jane Brookwood writes cozy mysteries steeped in tarot symbolism, intuition, and the quiet magic that lingers in small towns. Though she lives just outside the fictional Pineridge Hollow, she knows its back roads and hidden corners by heart. Its shop windows, whispered rumors, and moonlit secrets inspire much of her work — and often feel as real to her as any place on a map. Jane has always been drawn to the moment when an ordinary day tilts into something strange, meaningful, or unexpected. She writes to capture that shift — the sense that something powerful is moving just beneath the surface, waiting for the right person to notice. When she’s not writing, she’s reading tarot, wandering through forests, visiting cafés that remind her of The Velvet Fig, or sharing quiet evenings with her cat, Rosie, who insists on chiming in whenever a mystery gets tense. Jane lives in British Columbia, where Pineridge Hollow grows a little more vivid with every sunrise.

The Hanged Man centers on Fiona Miller, who runs a metaphysical gift shop in Pineridge Hollow. She reads tarot, sells crystals, mixes tea and generally minds her own business. Until she can't. When the son of her long-lost best friend Maggie turns up dead, Fiona has decided she's getting to the bottom of it before she's even aware of the decision. What stops her cold is the timing — moments before the call, she pulls The Hanged Man tarot card on the heels of a monster zoomie rampage by her cat and familiar Rosie.

Maggie's son, found hanging in an eerie echo of the boy on the card. Two blond young men, gone too soon. Accident? Suicide? Murder? The town has already decided. Fiona's tarot deck isn't so sure. In her little corner of nowhere, with only her tarot to guide her through the stickier situations, Fiona is making her way blindly with little or no technology to guide her. The cat though...

Rosie brings some much-needed intuitive skills along with the Chief, who brings something else. With her Pineridge Hollow crew and Rosie at her side, Fiona follows the cards into buried grudges, old money, and secrets the town spent decades hiding. On top of everything, The Hanged Man keeps making himself known. Flip it on its head, he whispers. Look...really look, and then, be prepared to wait. You just might be surprised...

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

 

Standing on the Shoulders of the Greats: How Tarot and Jung Unlocked My Mystery Voice

By Jane Brookwood

The research for my books, or the true seed of the idea, came from Sara Donati’s Queen of Swords from her Into The Wilderness series. In fact, all my writing comes from every book I’ve ever read. Everything I’ve learned about writing has come from standing on the shoulders of the greats; Dickens, Auel, Sheldon, Bronte, Austen, King and Tolkien, to name a few.

Donati’s book was the spark. She wrote into being an irresistible character who reads Tarot cards, taking the narrative from the card and unspooling it into her immediate circumstances. She used tarot cards to cajole, prompt, needle, and motivate other characters—which was immensely satisfying to me. Her book came a good fifteen years into my own research and study of Tarot. Maybe it was the Catholic school upbringing which gave the cards their own delicious taboo, but I think it has more to do with their symbolic nature. My brain works better with pictures than words, and when I connect a card with a lived situation, the understanding hits harder, in a more visceral way than explanation on its own ever could.

Beyond Fortune Telling: Moving into the Consciousness

Angeles Arrien’s The Tarot Handbook was the first time I’d come across a book which extended beyond the reach of mere fortune-telling. She expanded my view of tarot as a method to peer into consciousness itself, which led me to Carl Jung and his exploration of the shadow self.

The trigger to write came from recent cataclysmic changes in my life which left me without work for a year. I’d moved to a small town from the big city and had nothing but time on my hands. And, of course, there was a cat. It was this specific confluence of events which brought me to the precipice of the idea for this book, but I didn’t know how to write a novel. So, I just began—and, in the writing, I found it. My voice.

Casting the Archetypes from the Inside Out

I’m a Gen X kid raised with television as my babysitter. When I write, I need to find the character first. I look at him or her from the inside out. I put my casting director’s hat on and find the actor who would play them. I write until I can hear their voice and see their motivations, and when I get stuck, I pull the cards.

Tom, one of my long-lost characters from revision four (of six) of The Hanged Man, was a complete puzzle to me. Nothing I wrote felt anywhere close to the truth; there was just no juice in the squeeze. I knew Tom as a bombastic man who needed to oversee everything, but I didn’t understand his internal motivations. Why was this man hiding the truth?

So, as I do with all unanswerable questions in my life, I pulled the cards. They answered with the Wheel of Fortune reversed, the Devil, and the Five of Pentacles. In other words: Tom has a gambling problem, he owes money to the wrong people, and he’s got nothing left to lose. Once I understood him, he came alive, and I was caught in the flow once more.

The books come from a career built from behind a cash register and then a desk, watching people responding to their internal motivations. Maybe it’s enough.

You can learn more about Jane Brookwood via her website and follow her on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, and Goodreads. The Hanged Man is now available via all major booksellers.