Cathy Spencer's Blog, page 3

Spooky Halloween Mystery

Looking for a spooky Halloween mystery? Look no further than Town Haunts from the award-winning Anna Nolan series. With the motto It takes a witch to catch a ghost, you'll enjoy the Halloween thrills and chills as Anna and her friends try to figure out why cemetery caretaker Sherman Mason's wife is calling to him from the other side of the grave.

To read an excerpt, click here.

E-book from Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, and other retailers.
Paperback  can be ordered from CreateSpace, Amazon, Amazon Europe and your favourite bookstore

And just to get you in the mood, here's a favourite childhood Halloween song of mine, "Black and Gold."



Happy trick-or-treating!

If you'd like to be notified when new novels are released, just leave your name and e-mail address with the Contact Cathy app to the right of this post, and I'll include you on my mailing list. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here in Ontario, after an unusually warm September when folks were still dressing in shorts and sandals, the weather has finally turned cooler and the leaves are vibrant hues of scarlet, orange, and yellow. This morning after I hurried downstairs to turn on the furnace, I looked out the windows to see frost glinting on the lawn and on our neighbours' rooftops. The skies are blue, the sun is shining, and the air is crisp and cool in the shade. It's a perfect autumn holiday.

Free Award-Winning Mystery Novel

Okay, I'm doing something that I've never done before. I'm offering the 2014 Bony Blithe Mystery Award Winner, Framed for Murder, free until September 15 through all of my e-retailers. Why would I offer my e-book for free, you ask? Because I'm counting on all of you to love the story and the characters so much that you'll want to read the other books in the series too. So don't waste any time; get the e-book for free today!

E-book from  Amazon, B&N, Apple iBooks, Smashwords, Google Play, Kobo, and others.


Here's a brief synopsis. Anna Nolan discovers her ex-husband, Jack, on a deserted country road one night ‒ dead, unfortunately.  He could only have been in town to see Anna, unless Jack was looking for their son, Ben.  At least, that’s how the tall, cool Brit leading the police investigation sees it.  To divert suspicion away from her son and herself, Anna delves into Jack’s personal life, only to discover that the actor had been romancing three very different women on a nearby film set. With some rather unorthodox ideas on how to conduct a murder investigation, Anna sets about meeting her ex-husband’s lovers, with harrowing results!

". . . a true 'chiller thriller' that I couldn't put down!" - Mysterynet.com

"I seldom give five stars for a book but in this case I don't have another possibility. It's an absolutely brilliant story." -  Goodreads Review

To read an excerpt, click here.

If you'd like to be notified when new novels are released, just leave your name and e-mail address with the Contact Cathy app to the right of this post, and I'll include you on my mailing list. 

Summer Reading - Last Instalment

It's Saturday of the Labour Day Weekend, Summer's last slow, sweet kiss before the kids go back to school, the weather turns cooler, and we all get busy with lessons and meetings again in an inexorably quick slide toward Christmas. Whew! Makes me feel tired just thinking about it.

Putting all that aside, today is the last instalment of my Summer Reading list, and it's a special one.
Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett. It's not the first book of the Discworld fantasy series, but it's the first Discworld story I ever read over twenty-some years ago. It also features one of my two favourite Discworld characters from Mr. Pratchett's mad collection, Lancre witch Granny Weatherwax. (My other favourite is Sam Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.)

Now Granny Weatherwax is probably the most powerful witch that the Discworld has ever known. She's tall, thin, wears her grey hair in a steely bun, and doesn't hold with none of that occult kind of nonsense. She believes in headology, or using the lore of witchcraft to help people believe so that they can help themselves when real witching isn't required. Or tricking people, as Agnes (Perdita X.) Nitt, a hefty young woman with good hair and a wonderful personality who doesn't want to become a witch but has a voice with an impossible range and who can sing harmony with herself, thinks. Agnes has just run away to the big city to audition for the Ankh-Morpork opera. And although she doesn't have the stage presence that the dimwitted but beautiful Christine has, she can still be useful as Christine's voice. Except that there's a problem, a ghost in the opera house who leaves insane notes telling the owner what operas to perform and occasionally murders people who get in his way.

While all of this is happening, Nanny Ogg, Granny Weatherwax's long-time friend and the second witch in the Lancre coven, has just  had a cookbook printed. It's called The Joy of Snacks. Not that she does much cooking herself, not when she has a slew of daughters-in-law to do her cooking and house cleaning. And it's more of a cookbook with entertaining sexual anecdotes, something else Nanny is good at after having buried three husbands. Only she's no good at math and doesn't realize that her cookbook is a best seller and is making lots of money for the publisher, who returned her printing fee but hasn't paid her any royalties. Granny Weatherwax figures it out, however, and so the two witches head for Ankh-Morpork to claim the money that's owing to Nanny, as well as to check up on Agnes, for whom they've seen a disturbing picture in their tea leaves. (Not that tea leaves can tell the future. That's just part of that occult nonsense and got nothing to do with real witching.)

Aside from the delightful story, which is a send-up of the Phantom of the Opera tale, readers can also be entertained by the cartoonish and colourful cover that make the Discworld novels stand out from the other books on the shelf. The Maskerade cover, pictured above, is a good example.

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Now it's time to recount all of the books that were part of my Summer Reading diary. They were:Funny Girl by Nick Hornsby  Superfluous Women, a  Daisy Dalrymple Mystery by Carola Dunn The China Study Solution  by Thomas Campbell, MD Girl Waits With Gun  by Amy StewartThrones, Dominations by Dorothy L Sayers and Jill Paton WalshMiss Julia Speaks Her Mind and Miss Julia Takes Over, both by Ann B. RossMaskerade by Terry PratchettI hope you've enjoyed my summer reading series and discovered some new authors to savour. Have a great Labour Day Weekend, and squeeze in a few hours of lazy reading, if you can. Cheers!
If you'd like to be notified when new novels are released, just leave your name and e-mail address with the Contact Cathy app to the right of this post, and I'll include you on my mailing list. 

Summer Reading, August 23, 2016

Today I'm recommending a series, The Miss Julia books by Ann B. Ross. Pictured are the first two books, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind and Miss Julia Takes Over. The heroine of these stories is Julia Springer, a recently bereaved, mature and wealthy lady who lives in a small town in North Carolina. A strong-willed woman with standards and a pillar of her local Presbyterian church, she's not stuffy, but she likes things done a certain way and she's not afraid to tell you so. She lives with her dead husband's mistress and her 9-year-old son, by the way, who's the spitting image of his father. Kind of an unusual arrangement? Well, these two were sprung on Miss Julia shortly after her husband's funeral and she was pretty stricken at the time, but she's not going to let the whole town pity her and talk behind her back. Besides, Miss Julia's so mad at her dead husband that she doesn't care what people say about him, so she holds her head up high and parades her husband's illicit affair right out front where everyone can see them. In fact, she becomes so fond of Hazel Marie, who's had a truly tough life up until now, and Little Lloyd that she forces her friends to accept them too.

These stories have larger than life, quirky characters and funny conflicts, since Miss Julia's generally fighting other people's battles. If you've enjoyed Fannie Flagg's humorous books about small town life in the deep south as much as I have, I think you'll appreciate this series too. And the author, Ann B. Ross, has written nineteen Miss Julia books so far, so you can look forward to having lots to read.

 If you'd like to be notified when new novels are released, just leave your name and e-mail address with the Contact Cathy app to the right of this post, and I'll include you on my mailing list. Cheers!

Summer Reading, August 14, 2016

I'm a Lord Peter Wimsey fan. In case you're not familiar with his stories, they were written by Dorothy Sayers, one of the three queens, along with Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham, of the golden age of British detective fiction. Lord Peter is an aristocratic amateur detective who turns to solving murders, with the help of his faithful man servant, Bunter, to overcome the effects of shell-shock suffered during WWI. He disarms people with his bland appearance and silly conversation, as did the Scarlet Pimpernell, but is actually brilliant, athletic, and intuitive. He's also kind and wears his heart on his sleeve for crime novelist Harriet Vane, whom he gets off a murder charge in the poisoning death of her ex-lover, and ultimately marries. If you like stylish historical mysteries that are cleverly written with an endearing detective, I highly recommend the series.

I revisited Thrones, Dominations last week. It's set after Busman's Honeymoon, when Harriet and Peter have only been married a few weeks and Harriet is being introduced into "society" as Peter's unconventional wife. The 13th Lord Peter novel, Sayers began writing it in 1936, but never finished it prior to her death in 1957. It was published in 1998 after the trustees of Sayers' estate asked novelist Jill Paton Walsh, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, to finish it.

You see this happening time and again when a famous series novelist dies and the trustees ask another author to finish a story or even write a brand new one. The books are often a disappointment; just not quite good enough. Thrones, Dominations, however, is very good. It's faithful to the characters as Harriet struggles with continuing her writing career while dealing with servants, social obligations, and whether or not to have children, and Peter investigates the murder of a beautiful married woman who is an acquaintance of the couple. Amusing, suspenseful, and well-crafted, it's well worth the read for those who hunger for just one more Lord Peter Wimsey story.

I can't resist adding this picture of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, as portrayed by Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, in a  1987 BBC dramatization of Have His Carcase.


 If you'd like to be notified when new novels are released, just leave your name and e-mail address with the Contact Cathy app to the right of this post, and I'll include you on my mailing list. Cheers!

Summer Reading, July 27, 2016

It's been a couple of weeks since I've blogged about my reading due to a decision to only talk about books I've enjoyed and can recommend. (Aside to one of my fellow authors: "Witty" banter can be overdone and can't take the place of character or plot development!) But I've just finished a book I can recommend, Girl Waits With Gun, the first in a blossoming series about the real-life Kopp sisters. Author Amy Stewart bases her novel on newspaper articles that were published as the result of a 1914 accident between the three sisters, who were riding in their buggy, and a car driven by a wealthy factory owner who plowed into them. When the eldest sister, thirty-five-year-old Constance, tries to claim $50 in damages from the factory owner, Henry Kaufman, she sets off a string of nasty persecutions from Kaufman and his gang of hoodlums. Attacks escalate from rocks with threatening messages being hurled through the sisters' bedroom windows in the middle of the night, to shots being fired at the house, to attempted arson. Isolated on a small farm outside of Paterson, New Jersey, the sisters enlist the help of Sheriff Heath, a stalwart, dedicated, and forward-thinking lawman who develops feelings for Constance, but it is through her own efforts to solve the case as well as to help a young factory worker whose infant son, fathered by Kaufman, has disappeared, that retribution is made.

Although the story starts a bit slowly, I soon became enamoured with the sisters. Constance, tall for a woman, strong, and resourceful, seems to be waiting for her life to begin and has a big secret. Norma, the middle sister, never wants to leave the farm and spends her spare time training homing pigeons to carry cut-out newspaper headlines back to her sisters. Fleurette, a teenager, is the spoiled, artistic family beauty who dramatizes everything and can't wait to escape the isolation of their lives. I also enjoyed the historical detail, the homeyness of the sisters' lives, and the sensibility of women who are trying to act like ladies while dealing with some very unladylike problems and a judicial system that fails them.

There is a second book in the series, Lady Copp Makes Trouble (another actual newspaper headline, I assume), that I'm looking forward to reading. But check out Girl Waits With Gun first.

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Summer Reading, July 10, 2016

Well, now for something completely different in my summer reading diary. My husband and I have been reading a non-fiction book called The China Study Solution by Thomas Campbell, MD. The sub-title is: The simple way to lose weight and reverse illness, using a whole-food, plant-based diet. That pretty much says it all. (The book was first published as The Campbell Plan.)

To give some background, Dr. Campbell's father is T. Colin Campbell, PhD, a nutritional biochemist who spent his career researching the influence of diet on cancer at Cornell University. Dr. Campbell, Sr. came to the conclusion that the healthiest diet may in fact be essentially devoid of all meat protein and dairy. In fact, he believes that the only diet capable of reversing cardiac disease is a diet based on whole food, plant-based protein. The China Project, upon which this book is based, was a survey of 6,5000 adults in 65 counties in rural China, a population that consumed only small amounts of animal foods. The result of the research, stated simply, is that populations of more well-to-do countries that eat more animal proteins have higher levels of cholesterol which, in turn, are related to other types of disease, such as several types of cancer and diabetes. The doctors maintain that a whole food, plant-based diet may partly prevent or treat a number of illnesses and conditions, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, ulcers, kidney stones, obesity, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, a variety of cancers, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, cataracts, and macular degeneration. That's a lot to claim, isn't it? Together, father and son co-authored the results of the China Project in The China Study, a pretty weighty tome of over 400 pages. The China Study Solution gives you the nuts and bolts of the research and a proposed diet plan.

The diet allows you to eat fruits and vegetables, whole grains (breads,cereals, and pasta), nuts and seeds, legumes (beans), and non-dairy beverages such a soy and almond milk. You are allowed small amounts of sugar. The diet does not allow you to eat meat, fish, dairy, or fats. Have you heard that olive oil is heart healthy? Dr. Thomas Campbell calls oil an "unnatural pure-fat product" that is the most energy-dense (high calorie) known food. For example, here's what he says about soybeans and soybean oil on page 62. Soybeans are incredibly nutrient-rich foods. One hundred calories of raw soybeans has abundant protein and fiber and a wide variety of good vitamins and minerals that are nicely packaged with a good balance of fats. A quarter cup of raw green soybeans has as much calcium as about a half cup of 2% milk. Soybean oil, on the other hand, has had almost every good nutrient stripped away, providing you with nothing but pure fat and ultra-concentrated calories.

The China Study Solution cites a vast number of medical studies and ends with several recipes and a shopping list to get you started. It also discusses vitamin supplements and warns you that healthy kids and adults should take a B12 daily supplement of 100 micrograms as you cannot get this essential vitamin by eating a whole food, plant-based diet.

My husband and I, who both want to lose some weight and die peacefully in our sleep after an active, healthy long life, started the diet yesterday. Afraid that I might find the diet monotonous, we went to a bookstore today and bought 2 cookbooks written by Dr. T. Colin Campbell's daughter, Leanne Campbell, PhD, and other contributors: The China Study Cookbook and The China Study All-Star Collection. Since both my husband and I had been given gift certificates for this bookstore chain, the cookbooks cost us nothing and give us a wide variety of recipes from which to choose. They also have lovely colour photos. Paging through the book, I saw a picture of what looked like macaroni and cheese. Knowing that you can't eat cheese on this diet, I was curious and checked out the recipe. Turns out that the whole wheat macaroni is teamed with cooked and mashed butternut squash and, coupled with onion and garlic, has a delicious-looking sauce of ground cashews and soy milk with seasonings. Can't wait to try it!

I'll let you know how we do on the diet in a subsequent post, particularly after we visit our doctor for our annual physicals in a few months. Here's to good living and healthy eating!

You can subscribe to my blog or follow it by e-mail by clicking on the icons on the bottom right of the page. If you'd like to know about new releases, leave your name and e-mail address through the "Contact Cathy" app at the top right of the page.

Cathy Spencer, Author: Summer Reading Diary, Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Cathy Spencer, Author: Summer Reading Diary, Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Summer Reading, Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Just finished reading Carola Dunn's cozy mystery, Superfluous Women, the latest installment in the Daisy Dalrymple series. I've already read a few of the other books in the series and enjoyed them. The setting is England after the first world war and features Daisy, a poor but titled young woman who makes her living by writing and selling magazine articles, and the Scotland Yard Detective Chief Inspector she marries.

In this episode, Daisy is convalescing after a bout of bronchitis in the small town of Beaconsfield, where she meets up with an old school chum who has just moved to town with two other women. These three young "spinsters" are some of the "superfluous women" referred to in the title who will never find husbands because of the 700,000 British men who died during WWI. Wanting a home of their own, they pool their resources and skills to buy a house, but it turns out that the house comes complete with a dead body locked in the wine cellar. Soon Daisy is tottering around town in between naps to help solve what appears to be a murder, and it doesn't take long before her husband is drawn in out of his jurisdiction to aid with the investigation.

What do I like about the series? I like the historical elements and the traces of humour in the writing. The primary characters are interesting and likable, and no one owns a craft store or has a cat who solves the crimes. But mostly, the mysteries are gentle - no gore, no overt violence, and Daisy is seldom threatened herself. They're a nice, easy-going read, perfect to relax with before turning out the lights and going to sleep. We don't always want our reading to be spicy or thrilling, so if this kind of story appeals to you, I recommend it.

The covers are also quite attractive, don't you think?


Catch the next book in my summer reading diary, coming soon. Cheers!

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