Peg Herring's Blog - Posts Tagged "amateur-sleuth"
A Lethal Time and Place
My next book is making its way through the various channels, a confusing and stressful process for me. I get emails from the production people, asking if I'm SURE the manuscript is exactly as I want it. I get checklists to fill out, webpages I have to go to and upload this or that, and requests for things I have only a vague understanding of. (What is metadata, anyway?) Luckily, they're nice people who tolerate my questions, my delays while I think through what it is they want, and my sometimes clueless questions.
This book is a mystery, of course. (FYI: the next Loser and Dead Detective books are somewhere in Publishing Space, without specific dates; the fourth Simon & Elizabeth is written, and I'll be submitting it to my publisher soon.) A Lethal Time and Place is a stand-alone, so different that it's hard to describe. The setting is Chicago in the 1960s, but one of my beta readers, a twenty-something, claims that not being alive at the time in no way dimmed her enjoyment of the book. I like my mysteries a little different from the everyday, with intriguing characters and unexpected events. This one certainly follows that path.
In order to give my readers a taste, I thought I'd do a series of blogs, each presenting one of the characters. So without further ado, here's Leo!
Older man, dignified-looking, with longish gray hair and strong hands. He speaks with an Italian accent.
"I didn't come here voluntarily. Though I'm used to city life, this city is not like the ones in Europe, and for some time I found that hard to accept. Over time, though, I've come to like Chicago. I spend my days walking its streets or reading in one of the libraries.
"Of course the four of us need to eat, so I do my share, seeking out churches and missions where meals are provided and taking whatever I can hide in my coat pockets home with me: rolls, whole pieces of chicken, and a baked potato or two. Occasionally I steal food from stores around the Loop, but that always leaves me feeling unhappy. One of my companions is much better at it than I and less bothered by the moral questions, so we usually depend on him.
"We can hardly say we're content, living unnoticed in the basement of an old museum, but we make do. At least we did until the series of events you'll be reading about changed everything. A young girl, a deadly murder, and a nosy museum curator changed everything. Is it for the better or worse? We can't say. We only know that now we must run for our lives."
This book is a mystery, of course. (FYI: the next Loser and Dead Detective books are somewhere in Publishing Space, without specific dates; the fourth Simon & Elizabeth is written, and I'll be submitting it to my publisher soon.) A Lethal Time and Place is a stand-alone, so different that it's hard to describe. The setting is Chicago in the 1960s, but one of my beta readers, a twenty-something, claims that not being alive at the time in no way dimmed her enjoyment of the book. I like my mysteries a little different from the everyday, with intriguing characters and unexpected events. This one certainly follows that path.
In order to give my readers a taste, I thought I'd do a series of blogs, each presenting one of the characters. So without further ado, here's Leo!
Older man, dignified-looking, with longish gray hair and strong hands. He speaks with an Italian accent.
"I didn't come here voluntarily. Though I'm used to city life, this city is not like the ones in Europe, and for some time I found that hard to accept. Over time, though, I've come to like Chicago. I spend my days walking its streets or reading in one of the libraries.
"Of course the four of us need to eat, so I do my share, seeking out churches and missions where meals are provided and taking whatever I can hide in my coat pockets home with me: rolls, whole pieces of chicken, and a baked potato or two. Occasionally I steal food from stores around the Loop, but that always leaves me feeling unhappy. One of my companions is much better at it than I and less bothered by the moral questions, so we usually depend on him.
"We can hardly say we're content, living unnoticed in the basement of an old museum, but we make do. At least we did until the series of events you'll be reading about changed everything. A young girl, a deadly murder, and a nosy museum curator changed everything. Is it for the better or worse? We can't say. We only know that now we must run for our lives."
