A Wicked Welcome to Lara Bricker!
by Julie, disliking the wintry mix in Somerville
I was delighted when Lara Bricker agreed to be on the blog today. Fans of Crime Writers On will know her from the podcast. She is also an author of a cozy series, the Piper Greene Exeter series. Welcome to the blog, Lara!
Finding Piper Greene
I always knew I wanted to set a book in the very real town of Exeter, New Hampshire, where I’ve lived for almost 25 years. Seriously, the town could be the set for a Hallmark movie with its historic brick buildings and quaint AF downtown. Locals affectionately refer to Exeter as Stars Hollow, as a nod to the Gilmore Girls. In my imagination, Exeter was screaming to be the setting for a cozy mystery.
But finding my amateur protagonist wasn’t as easy.
Throughout my career, I’ve worked as a journalist, a private investigator and have written a true crime book. I considered several career paths for my sleuth as I brainstormed what is now the Piper Greene Exeter mystery series. I rewrote the opening chapters with different protagonists about four times, but nothing felt right, and so I put them off in a drawer, and returned to the rest of my life.
And then the pandemic hit. I found myself at home, supervising remote school for my son, and suddenly laid off from my job.
It was time to write my Exeter cozy mystery and now the protagonist came easily. I thought about where I would like to be other than an extrovert stuck at home during a global pandemic, and I homed in on the old weekly newspaper newsroom I’d worked at for my first job out of college. That’s where I wanted to be. The characters in the newsroom and the town came to life as did Piper Greene, a journalist who returned to Exeter to look after her eccentric Aunt Gladys. I love Piper but Aunt Gladys is who I want to be when I grow up.
People often ask me if I am Piper Greene and I tell them that Piper is like a version of me on steroids. I’m also asked if the characters in the book are based on real people in Exeter. The characters in the book are more mashups of the many interesting people I’ve met during my career. But the town of Exeter, its landmarks and its history are very real. Businesses and people are figments of my very overactive imagination.
About Lara:
Lara Bricker is an award-winning journalist, podcaster, licensed private investigator, certified cat detective and true crime author. She is one of four crime writers on the hit podcast, Crime Writers On and the author of the true crime book Lie after Lie: The True Story of a Master of Deception, Betrayal, and Murder.
Her work has appeared in the Portsmouth Herald, the Exeter News-Letter, the Hampton Union, the New Hampshire Union Leader, Woman’s World magazine, USA Today, Vulture, and the Boston Globe. In 2008, she covered the first death penalty case to go to trial in New Hampshire in almost fifty years for the Associated Press. As a news reporter, she has received numerous awards from both the New Hampshire Press Association and the New England Newspaper & Press Association for her crime and investigative reporting.
Dead on Deadline and The Final Curtain, the first two books in the Piper Greene Exeter mystery series, were the best sellers of the year at Water Street Bookstore in 2021 and 2022.
Lara lives in Exeter, where she can often be found walking around Exeter pondering where her next local murder mystery will take place. www.larabricker.com
About Dead on Deadline:
Just as her journalism career in the city is taking off, Piper Greene returns to her tiny New England hometown to care for her beloved aunt, Gladys. She takes a job at the Exeter Independent, where her days are filled with stories of church bazaars, runaway turkeys, and news from the garden club.
Piper assumes her assignment to cover the American Independence Festival, honoring her town’s role in the Revolutionary War, is just another mundane event. But when a body dressed in a Red Coat soldier jacket is found hanged from the top of the historic Town Hall, Piper finds herself in the middle of a murder. The victim is her news editor, Charlotte Campbell, and there is no shortage of people who would be glad to see her dead.
Suspicion quickly lands on the paper’s photographer, who was fired the day before, but Piper cannot believe he is capable of murder. With the help of her high school crush, now a detective, her best friend at the bakery, and the town historian, Piper sets out to prove her friend’s innocence. But as she persists, she learns that unearthing small-town secrets is harder than she thought—and that some parts of local history can be deadly.
