Dad, I used your joke. That dedication to my late father starts the third Sydney Brennan PI Mystery, The Perils of Panacea. It’s a hard one to live up to. Not because of any emotional baggage or anything like that on my part. Some might suggest it’s because our digital reading tech (e-readers and reading apps) is so close to where it needs to be, but not quite there… I write fiction, so I prefer to think someone somewhere is an evil math joke hater. [Mike] came out in jeans and a T-shirt that read, “π r squared, π r round.” Read more…

It’s time for another installment in my recurring series of Magpie Moments. These are bits I snatched from real life and incorporated, magpie-like, into my fiction. Literary Easter eggs, if you will. How many of us—show of hands—have never ignored a car dashboard warning light? Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. A lot of sitting on hands. There is admittedly a hierarchy among the insistent little buggers. I have a TPMS light that’s been glaring at me for about a year now. I refuse to pay that much money to replace a sensor whose sole purpose is to tell me, you Read more…

I’ve written here before about the challenges of series continuity, by which I mean maintaining consistent details from scene to scene and book to book. In my Sydney Brennan PI Mysteries, remembering Syd is a redhead and drives a VW Cabrio named Cecil is pretty easy. Beyond that, it can get tricky. Does she wear a watch? Like chunky or creamy peanut butter? Shower daily, and morning or night? Even the “gimmes” I noted can cause me headaches, say when she’s wearing a baseball cap or driving a rental car. One way to try to get around this: use my Read more…