Clea Simon's Blog, page 6

“The cats steal the show…”

Talk about an embarrassment of riches! Yesterday, the Bristol Public Library book blog also weighed in on To Conjure a Killer. I encourage you to visit the original blog site (here: http://bristol-library-bookblog.blogspot.com/2024/01/to-conjure-killer-by-clea-simon.html) but I’m also cutting and pasting the full review. The kicker sums it up nicely:

“The characters are well drawn. Becca is an appealing protagonist, with her kind heart and empathetic nature. There are some intriguing supporting characters as well… But I have to say that the cats steal the show—as well they should.” THANK YOU, Jeanne Powers of the Bristol Public Library!!

Bookblog of the Bristol Library

Reviews by the Reference Department of the Bristol Public Library, Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee.

Monday, January 29, 2024To Conjure a Killer by Clea Simon

Reviewed by Jeanne

Becca Colwin, witch detective, is walking home from her job at the New Age shop Charm and Cherish when she sees a kitten darting into the street.  Becca springs into action, chasing the kitten into an alley to rescue it—and finding a dead body in the process.  It’s not just any dead body either:  the deceased is Becca’s former boyfriend, Jeff.  

Of course, that’s when the police show up.

While Becca isn’t arrested, she is a person of interest in the slaying. After all, she was found standing over the body.  In order to clear her name, Becca is going to have to use all her powers, supernatural or otherwise, in order to solve the case.  This means she’s going to have to find out about the people in Jeff’s life and about the software program he was working on—one that people are saying could have been an electronic game changer.

Fortunately for Becca, she’s not the only one on the case.  Her three cats also have a vested interest in keeping her out of jail—and her cats are the ones with actual supernatural powers.

Nowadays, there are many mystery series with some otherworldly touches, but this series stands alone in that, unbeknownst to her, Becca’s cats are the ones with magic.  In fact, Becca’s belief that she has powers is due to luxury loving Harriet deciding to conjure up a more comfy pillow.  Harriet and Laurel, the two older cats, are more concerned that Becca bring home the cat food and attend to their every need, while Clara is devoted to Becca as her person and tries to help in every way she can.  The new kitten adds a layer of intrigue to the story as well:  is she just an ordinary cat or is she a witch cat as well?

The characters are well drawn.  Becca is an appealing protagonist, with her kind heart and empathetic nature. There are some intriguing supporting characters as well, especially the enigmatic Elizabeth, whose sister owns Charm and Cherish. The suspect gallery in this one is quite good.  But I have to say that the cats steal the show—as well they should.

Conjure is “a treat”!

Librarian Lesa Holstine’s Lesa’s Book Critiques is a must-read for mystery fans, and I’m thrilled that she has weighed in on To Conjure a Killer, calling it “a treat for cat and cozy mystery lovers.” Here’s the full review, but please click through to her wonderful blog here (https://lesasbookcritiques.com/to-con...)

TO CONJURE A KILLER BY CLEA SIMON

I felt a little melancholy in reviewing Clea Simon’s fourth Witch Cats of Cambridge mystery, To Conjure a Killer. Sandie Herron reviewed the third one, A Cat on the Case, a couple years ago. Sandie should have been here to review the latest one.

Becca Colwin works at Charm and Cherish, and thinks she’s a witch who can cast spells. She doesn’t realize it’s her three cats, Harriet, Laurel, and Clara, littermates, who have the magical abilities, and do their best to keep Becca out of trouble. They’re not there, though, when Becca chases a tortoiseshell kitten down an alley. The police are. They find Becca with blood on her, and her ex-boyfriend, Jeff, dead in the alley.

When Becca tells her best friend, Maddy, and the women in her coven, that she’s going to investigate Jeff’s murder, no one is enthusiastic. Jeff cheated on Becca, and it has been a year since they were together. She’s shocked to learn he left his job as a software designer, and struck out on his own. Jeff’s former co-workers seem to think his latest software design was worth a great deal of money. But, did it lead to Jeff’s murder?

Since Becca is the primary suspect in Jeff’s death, she asks a few too many questions, ones that could get her in trouble. But, her three cats, along with the new tortie kitten, have their own plans to protect their person. 

Fans of mysteries featuring cats will enjoy Simon’s latest book. Anyone who enjoys Sofie Kelly’s Magical Cats, Owen and Hercules, will want to meet Clara, Laura, and Harriet, cats with their own magical powers. Add in the new mysterious tortie kitten, and To Conjure a Killer is a treat for cat and cozy mystery lovers.

Clea Simon’s website is https://www.cleasimon.com/

To Conjure a Killer by Clea Simon. Polis Books, 2023. ISBN 9781957957340 (hardcover0, 270p.

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The best gift!

As a very lovely solstice gift, Harvard Book Store (my favorite local indie) just sent me the link to the event a truly wonderful and generous group of local authors did of my new “To Conjure a Killer” on Nov. 15. (I was recovering from surgery so couldn’t do it). If you want to see the likes of Joe Finder, Caroline Leavitt, Vicki Croke, Kate Flora, Susan Oleksiw, Dana Cameron, Toni L.P. Kelner, and Leslie Wheeler tackle a cat cozy, here’s the link. (If it asks, the pass code is: %PYR1cZC ) The way they brought my little cozy to life just warmed my heart – and then this great group of writers engaged in a thoughtful discussion of mysteries and the craft of writing. That alone is worth the price of admission (which is free, by the way). What a wonderful gift!! And thanks as well to Gabriel Valjan for the lovely graphic.

PS – If you want to support Harvard Book Store as a way of thanking them, here’s the direct link to CONJURE: https://shop.harvard.com/book/9781957957340

Of if you want to see the reading and prefer to. (Again, if it asks, the pass code is: %PYR1cZC)

Conjure is “irresistible”!

That’s the verdict of Purrs of Wisdom, Ingrid King’s superlative all-things-cat blog! Here’s her glowing review in full:

To Conjure a Killer is the fourth book in Clea Simon’s charming Witch Cats of Cambridge series, and like the other books in the series, the combination of mystery with a touch of the paranormal is irresistible. And is this not the most adorable book cover?

Protagonist Becca, a fledgling witch detective and employee at the New Age shop Charm and Cherish, is coming home from her job when she sees a tortoiseshell kitten run down an alley – leading to a dead body, which turns out to be Becca’s former boyfriend. Becca becomes embroiled in the investigation both as a person of interest, and by using her detective skills to try to solve the case. Meanwhile, the little tortie kitten seems to have some powers of her own, much to Becca’s three resident cats’ dismay.

As is the case with all of Clea’s books, her trademark descriptive writing style makes this book a pleasure to read. She excels at writing both human and feline characters that you just can’t help but fall in love with.The cats, including the little tortie, are delightful, each with a very distinct and unique personality, and each lending their mystical gifts to helping Becca solve the murder and clear her name.

If you enjoy feline-centric mysteries, fantasy, and a touch of magic, you will love this book. It can be read as a standalone, but why not treat yourself to the whole series?

How wonderful! Thank you, Ingrid! And thank you, Purrs of Wisdom!

Tonight! Harvard Book Store Zoom event

HOW GENEROUS IS THIS? I can’t do my own event for the launch of “To Conjure a Killer,” but an extremely talented bunch of my fellow/sister authors are doing one for me! (Thank you so much to Sisters in Crime New England’s Kate Flora for organizing!) Won’t you join us online on Nov. 15? It’s free (and online) but you do have to register: https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_to_conjure_a_killer/

Happy CONJURE day!

Today’s the publication day of my new Witch Cats of Cambridge cozy cat mystery, To Conjure a Killer!

When Becca chases a stray kitten into an alley and stumbles over a body, you know things will get tense… especially when she brings that stray kitten into the apartment she shares with three bonded sister cats! Won’t you join us as the fun and fur flies?

Clea-TourDownload

CONJURE in the house!

They’re here! TO CONJURE A KILLER, the fourth witch cats of Cambridge cozy cat mystery, officially comes out next week – Nov. 14 – but you can pre-order yours here or here!

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Thank you, Booklist!

The first review for my upcoming (Nov. 15) TO CONJURE A KILLER is from Booklist, which gives a fun synopsis of the book before concluding: “Becca is a likable sleuth, though her successes are due to her feline companions. Readers who live with cats may find the cats’ paranormal powers believable.” I kind of think that’s the point of these books, but maybe that’s just me! What do you think?

What about the cat cozies?

WHAT’S UP WITH THE CAT COZIES? While I’m so proud to have announced that Severn will be publishing my psychological suspense THE BLUE BUTTERFLY and the rookie reporter-turned-amateur sleuth BAD BOY BEAT (which we’re hoping will launch a new series), you might be wondering, “what’s with the cat cozies”? Well, there’s a plan! As I read through the page proofs for TO CONJURE A KILLER (witch cat #4), I was realizing how much I adore Clara, Becca, and all the rest… and so I chatted with my agent. Severn House is willing to work around any new Polis “witch cat” books, and I’m willing to write them. SO — if Polis (the “witch cat” publisher — agrees, we’ll keep going. THAT SAID, I don’t have a contract for any more witch cat books, so if you like them and want the series to continue, please consider pre-ordering TO CONJURE A KILLER:  Pre-orders are what get books into bookstores and libraries, and those are what convince publishers to continue series!

I got to interview Jill Lepore!

Cutting and pasting from the Sunday Boston Globe. This is maybe a quarter of our conversation. She’s a genius! (Excuse the weird lines of apparent links – those are the ads that I couldn’t cut out.)

AUTHOR PROFILE

Jill Lepore has seen the inside of time

By Clea Simon

Jill Lepore, professor at Harvard University and author of “The Deadline,” a new collection of essays.STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HARVARD UNIVERSITY

The concept of a deadline is a complicated one for Jill Lepore. In addition to the obvious meaning — her new book, “The Deadline,” is a collection of essays written for the (mostly) weekly New Yorker — in the title essay, the historian explains the original idea of a “dead line”: the border around a prison outside of which escaped prisoners were shot. In the same essay, she recalls a more personal application: the inability of a dear friend to meet any of her own writing goals, or to have children, both of which Lepore was doing as her friend succumbed to leukemia, her own permanent deadline.

This may be the most moving essay in her substantial collection, but Lepore, Harvard’s David L. Kemper ’41 Professor of History, provides similarly multifaceted and readable deep dives into topics ranging from Constitutional originality to the #MeToo movement.

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History, all of it.

“I’m a writer who writes about the past,” said Lepore in a phone interview. “I am mostly interested in the relationship between the living and the dead, which is a way to think about change over time.”Get The Big To-DoYour guide to staying entertained, from live shows and outdoor fun to the newest in museums, movies, TV, books, dining, and more.Enter EmailSign Up

Along those lines, “The Deadline” is roughly divided between personal essays (“mostly elegies to the dead people that I loved”) and those dealing with “the American past,” as the historian puts it.

“A lot of what I’ve been working on lately as a scholar is the nature of written Constitutionalism, which is a really interesting relationship that the living have with the dead, and one that has a binding authority,” she noted. She adds that originalism has an intellectual place, but “as a Constitutional interpretation for judges to use as they think about the law and as a form of populism, it’s kind of wild and unhinged, and I think can be quite dangerous. So I’ve been trying to think through ways to investigate these problems of our time and to gain some historical vantage on them.”

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To that end, in the essay “The Age of Consent,” she unwraps the background of the Constitution, debunking its reputation as wholly unique by rooting it in documents ranging from Catherine the Great’s Nakaz (or Great Instruction) to the numerous similar proclamations popular across 18th-century Europe and Asia.

The collection draws from the past 10 years of New Yorker pieces — a period, notes Lepore, that has made history feel especially relevant to many readers. “Between the election of Trump and the pandemic and the daily evidence of catastrophic climate change, I think most ordinary people have a sense of living in an unusual historical moment. A kind of historical consciousness, a historicism, is fairly acute for most people, and it’s quite acute for young people who feel that they’ve walked into this doomed historical moment. I have found this really interesting, because historians are always thinking about where we are in historical time.”

It’s a perspective that isn’t always pretty. She likens the process of becoming a historian to something comparatively dark: a friend’s experience of dissecting a cadaver in medical school. “[T]here’s a feeling of joining a cult. Like, when you cut open a human body and explore it, you are joining a minority of humanity that has seen the inside of a human body.

“Becoming a historian is quite a bit like that, or it has always felt that way to me. That there’s an unseen inside to time that I think about all day. And when I talk to other people who are historians, we can share that strange set of perceptions. But what’s been weird about Trump to the pandemic to global climate catastrophe is that now everybody’s seen the inside of time. And that’s sad because it is actually mostly ugly.”

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And history, Lepore warns, doesn’t necessarily provide answers.

“When I started to collect these, it seemed to me the question that was haunting all of the things that I was writing was: Has it ever been this bad before? Has this ever happened before?”

But that question, she said, “rests on the assumption that if it had, we could look to the past and figure out how the dead dealt with it. That somehow there’s a message in a bottle out there, and the historian’s job is to set sail in the ocean and go find that floating, bobbing bottle somewhere in the sea and then bring it back to shore and say, ‘Look, here’s what we should do. This is what these people did, or we should not do what they did because this ended in disaster for them.’ And I just don’t think there are those answers in the past.”

What historical observation offers, instead, is a lens through which to view our own political movements, giving them a context that both illuminates and challenges our understanding of what we’re witnessing. In “The Return of the Pervert,” one of three new essays in the collection, Lepore dissects the complex nature of the #MeToo movement.

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“The #MeToo movement is many things,” she explained. “It’s a squirrelly political protest. It’s part of a political movement. It’s a social media campaign. It has legislative outcomes with regard to criminalization of certain kinds of acts of harassment and violence against women and sexual assault. It is also a moral crusade. And the female moral crusade has a really elaborate and actually mostly distressing history.”

It’s a history that bears some scrutiny for what it says about the status of women in the past. “One of the reasons that women’s political activity is written out of political history is because political historians don’t recognize the female moral crusade as a political act. But it is a political act. And before women had the right to vote, a moral crusade was really the only way to engage in politics.”

Historical observation, for Lepore, also offers insight into our shared humanity. “I think there’s an extraordinary amount of illumination in the past,” she said. During the first month of the pandemic, she read Daniel Defoe’s 1722 “Journal of the Plague Year,” an account of the bubonic plague.

“I found it unbelievably moving that the experiences he was describing, looking back at London in 1665, were ones that I was having and that my world was enduring,” she said. “But it didn’t tell me what we should do.

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“The past is not an instruction manual. But I find I like thinking about other humans and how they deal with things because generally they screw up and so do we. And that actually is a form of solace and comfort.”

Clea Simon is the Somerville-based author most recently of the novel  “Hold Me Down.”