After their flight to Mexico is cancelled, Clyde and her detective boyfriend, Mac, end up snowed in with their families at a supposedly haunted hotel. Clyde’s tarot card reading mother, Rose, is making dire predictions for the weekend, and self-proclaimed pet psychic Aunt Vi is enchanted by the legend of the hotel’s ghost—until the power goes out and a body turns up.
With a hotel full of stranded suspects, Clyde will have to draw on all her skills—both the police ones she’d rather forget and the psychic ones she’d rather ignore—to solve the bone-chilling mystery before someone else gets iced.
Indulging the Muse
Writers
like to amuse themselves. Particularly mystery writers. That mean grocery clerk? Victim number two in
the next novel. Enjoy zip-lining? Write a murder disguised as a zip-lining accident.
Like cookies? Set your novel in a bakery. Not every idea can be used, of course.
For instance, I love chimpanzees but haven’t figured out how to incorporate them
into a murder mystery, yet.
Sometimes
an idea strikes and it just won’t let go, even if it seems impossible to fit it
into the fictional world you have created. In 2010 I had the great fortune to
spend several days in an Irish castle. It was beautiful. Idyllic. Serene.
However, my mystery writing brain turns almost any setting into a murder scene.
So, I sipped tea in the library while the original owner and his horse glowered
at me from the portrait over the fireplace, and happily contemplated a murder
mystery set in a secluded castle.
A few
years later, I launched The Family Fortune Mystery series. It was set in Western
Michigan, in a small town on the coast of Lake Michigan. There were pets, and
psychics, and pet psychics. There were quirky characters, a romance or two, and
murders. But there wasn’t a castle in sight.
And then
I saw it. On the way to my favorite Michigan vacation spot I saw a billboard
advertising a castle hotel. In Michigan. Even though I was in the middle of
writing the second book in the series, Clyde Fortune and her family immediately
began packing.
I delved
further into the idea of American castles. It turns out, there are countless
castles in the US. They might not be 800 years old, but many are surrounded by
myth and legend. And a lot of them are haunted. For anyone who has read the
first two books, you can imagine how excited Aunt Vi became at this news. What
could be better than a haunted castle?
As the
writer of this operation, I had to take control. The Fortune family couldn’t
just pack up and go to a haunted castle and wait for a murder to occur. There
were things to consider, logistics to arrange. Plus, I also really like
knitting. If I was going to move everyone to a castle to indulge a whim, I
might as well have some knitting. And just to complicate matters, I threw in a
blizzard.
In A Fright to the Death, I stranded the
gang in a haunted castle, in a blizzard, with no electricity or phones. And I
added some exuberant knitters, just because it amused me. Not surprisingly, a
murder occurred. I’m not going to tell you whether there were chimpanzees.
I also very much enjoyed the characters, as always. Clyde, Mac, Vi and the rest of the gang made me laugh and entertained me from start to finish. I just absolutely ADORE them.
This series is seriously so much fun. I'm excited to find out what's in store next!
Rating: 5 stars
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All conclusions reached are my own.
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