You can now pre-order the first Lotus Bay Mystery

I'm so happy to announce tht my first Lotus Bay Mystery, WITH BAITED BREATH, is now available for pre-order for ebooks.  (The Trade Paperback will be avaiable ... as soon as I figure out how to get it out there for preorder ,.. if it's possible.  Keep in touch!)

Here's a brief description:

Tori Cannon and her grandfather, Herb, return from her grandmother’s funeral, and it’s with sadness that she learns the bait shop and small motel they ran has fallen on hard times. Jammed into one of the motel’s units is the body of one of Herb’s customers, his mouth filled with spikes. The victim had no enemies, except for the rich woman who wanted to level his eyesore of a home. But he’s also got a daughter who’s resentful her father wasn’t a major force in her life, and friends who were anything but.
Tori’s friend, Kathy, arrives to help spruce up the property, and the two of them find themselves mixed up in the petty jealousies and deadly consequences that murder entails. Can they save the bait shop and find a murderer before they, too, sleep with the fishes?

For more information about the series, check out my website.
For preorder, click one of the links below:

Kindle | Kindle Worldwide

iBooks |  Kobo  |  Nook

If you haven't read the prequel, it's avaiable now.

Tori Cannon and her BFF, Kathy Grant, get together for a girl’s weekend of wine, cookies, and laughter, but there’s also the specter of a panty pincher hanging around the laundry room of the complex where Tori lives. Kathy thinks they can catch the culprit red-handed in a panty raid!
This mini mystery introduces the two main characters of the upcoming Lotus Bay Mysteries.

Kindle  |  Kindle Worldwide
iBooks  |  Kobo  | Nook
Smashwords

Opinions, please!

The yard sales are few and far between at this time of year, but Saturday there were three we found.  At one of them was a display of teapots--all pretty cheap.  I bought one.  But ... is it a teapot or is it a chocolate pot?



What do you think.  (BTW, it's Hall china.)

Celebrate a cheesy day!

For cheese lovers, like my character Angelica Miles, the happy day has finally arrived! National Moldy Cheese Day! (She can hardly curb her excitement!)

And to celebrate, here's a recipe for blue cheese dressing.

¾  cup sour cream
1/3 cups mayonnaise
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
½  teaspoon dry mustard
½  teaspoon garlic powder
½  teaspoon salt
½  teaspoon ground black pepper
4 ounces blue cheese, crumbled

In a large bowl, whisk together the sour cream, mayonnaise and Worcestershire sauce. Season with the mustard, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Stir in the blue cheese. Cover, and refrigerate for 24 hours before serving.

Yield:  2 ½ cups

Foodie Friday: Tacos for everyone!

Today is National Taco Day ... and my character Angelica Miles of the Booktown Mysteries is celebrating with her own recipe.  It's from the fourth book in the series, Chapter & Hearse.

Here's the recipe.

Hacienda Tacos

Ingredients
3 cups coarsely chopped or shredded (pulled) simmered chicken
1 onion, chopped
½  green pepper, chopped
1 ½ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 ½ to 2 teaspoon chili powder (according to taste)
1 (8 oz.) can tomato sauce
8 oz. water
12 corn (or flour) 8 or 9 inch tortillas (or taco shells)
1 cup lettuce cut into strips
1 tomato, chopped
¾ cup grated or shredded Cheddar cheese
Your favorite bottled salsa

In a large skillet, mix together the chicken, onion, green pepper, salt, pepper, chili powder, tomato sauce and water. Cook covered over low heat for about 15 minutes. Cook, uncovered for five to ten minutes, until excess liquid is gone. Oven heat the tortillas and fill the lower 3/4 with chicken mixture and the remainder with the tomatoes, cheese and lettuce. Top as needed with a spoonful of the salsa. 

Celebrate cats!

Here at Casa de Lorna, we celebrate cats every day.  How about you?

This shouldn't be such a hard decision on National Coffee Day

Honestly, this shouldn't be that hard a decision. Tricia buys her ground coffee FROM The Coffee Bean across the street.  (She's a good neighbor and supports the other businesses in Stoneham!)

Still, what do you think she should do???

It's Foodie Friday! Pancakes on the menu

Some days you just need to eat breakfast for supper ... or lunch ... or even (heaven forbid!) breakfast.

That's the beauty of National Pancake Day -- you can eat them any time of the day or night. (Especially if there's an IHOP nearby.)

Pancakes have a number of aliases, too.  Like flapjacks, griddle cakes, hotcakes, crepes, blintz ... they all sound yummy to me.

So celebrate!

Related articles

FOODIE FRIDAY: Why British Food Doesn't Suck

Take a look at my new cover!

Here's the cover for the first Lotus Bay Mystery, WITH BAITED BREATH I hope to have it available for pre-order sometime in October. Cross your fingers.



Meanwhile, Here's a brief description of the story.

Tori Cannon and her grandfather, Herb, return from her grandmother’s funeral, and it’s with sadness that she learns the bait shop and small motel they ran has fallen on hard times. Jammed into one of the motel’s units is the body of one of Herb’s customers, his mouth filled with spikes. The victim had no enemies, except for the rich woman who wanted to buy his eyesore of a home. But he’s also got a daughter who’s resentful her father wasn’t a major force in her life, and friends who were anything but.

Tori’s BFF, Kathy, arrives to help spruce up the property, and the two of them find themselves mixed up in the petty jealousies and deadly consequences that murder entails. Can they save the bait shop and find a murderer before they, too, sleep with the fishes?

For more information about the series, check out my website!

International Day of Peace

With all that's going on in the world today, I sometimes wonder where we would be if Mark Chapman hadn't killed John Lennon. I like to think that the world would be a much better place where we didn't have to worry about radicals intent on destroying and where Gene Roddenberry's vision of a world at ‪#‎peace‬ reaching out a hand of friendship to the those who live upon other worlds would come to pass. We can't go forth in space in peace until we find it here. We're a long way from that, I'm afraid.

 
Today is International Peace Day.  Let's give it a chance.

Query ...

Will my new Union Jack mug be obsolete tomorrow?

And the logo is revealed!

We're working on the cover for the first Lotus Bay Mystery, With Baited Breath. This is the "finalized" version of the logo for the series. Of course, depending on what the cover designer wants, we can change the background color to match whatever she does. I hope to reveal the cover by early next week (if not sooner).


To read more about the series, check out my website page for The Lotus Bay Mysteries.

Now available in Japan!

Today the UPS man brought the my author copies of the third Booktown Mystery (Bookplate Special) in Japanese.



Here're the first three books together.  So cute!  Now, if only I could read Japanese!

Never enough cake!

Today is my brother's birthday. Back when we were kids, there were five of us in the family. That meant you were assured of having cake more than just on your own birthday.

Well, Mr. L likes pies. On my Mom's birthday, we have fruit cake (*shudder*) so it's now just once a year I get birthday cake. I'll bet my brother hasn't even had a cake in 20 years.

I think I'm going to have to start having an UN-birthday a couple of times of year, otherwise when am I going to get cake?

Do you have an unbirthday?  (If not, would you like to have one?)

A couple of letters makes a big different

To make a good pot of tea, you're supposed to scald the pot with hot water first, then make tea.  Not only do I scald the pot, I also scold it. ("Oh, you naughty teapot!")  Which do you think is more traumatic for the teapot?

P.S. Teacup Tuesdays will soon return!

Related articles

Teacup Tuesday: How do you take your tea?

Teacup Tuesday: Just Drink it!

Happy National Peanut Day!

Don't you just love having something to celebrate?

That's what the name on the paint chip said

Painted my mother's front door. The color is "blueberry pie." It should look good with the yellow on her house.



I read on Pinterest that baby oil will magically take latex paint off your skin. Well, only if the magic includes a scrub brush.

A new voice in mystery: M. Ryan Seaver

I was lucky enough to read (and blurb) No Bad Deed, first in a new series by a new voice in ‪#‎mystery‬ M. Ryan Seaver. All I can say is WOW! It's dark and it's riveting. I couldn't put it down.

Here's the description:

Private detective John Arsenal can’t tell you what terrible crime he committed to wind up in a sweltering urban hellscape, surrounded by thieves, drug addicts and murderers—only that it was very bad, and now he’s being punished. That’s because in Hell—or Brimstone, as the damned prefer to call it—your identity, your memories, even your name, are stripped away from you.

John is relatively comfortable in his damnation, working easy cases and making himself at home in the grimy squalor of the afterlife. That is, until a mysterious woman appears in his office, begging him to find her missing sister, and promising him the impossible in return—a glimpse of his old life, before Brimstone. 

To track down the enigmatic Sophie, John must delve into Brimstone’s darkest recesses, where murderous children run wild in packs, and a strange and terrifying new drug promises to deliver the user to the heights of ecstasy, but at the risk of being snuffed out of existence altogether. All the while, John must grapple with the vivid nightmares that have haunted him since his arrival in Brimstone, and confront the thing he desires and dreads the most—the truth of what he did to deserve damnation.

It's now available for preorder on Amazon and will be available on September 15th. Go for it!

First Tuesday = New Cozy Mysteries!

Okay, I admit it -- I took most of the summer off from blogging.  I hope to get back into the swing of things as the weather turns colder and I'm inside more.

In the meantime, it's the first Tuesday of the month and two of my Cozy Chick blog sisters have new books out.

My good pal Mary Jane Maffini is one half of the mother-daughter writing team of Victoria Abbott. Today, the third book in their Book Collector Mystery series, THE WOLFE WIDOW, is officially released.

As Thanksgiving approaches, Jordan Bingham is grateful for her job researching rare books for Vera Van Alst, the infamous curmudgeon of Harrison Falls, New York. But when an uninvited guest makes an appearance, much more than dinner is disrupted—and Jordan is thankful just to be alive…

Vera Van Alst doesn’t normally receive visitors without appointment, but she agrees to see the imperious Muriel Delgado upon arrival. Shortly thereafter, Jordan is told that her position is being terminated. Evicted from the Van Alst House, Jordan is determined to find out what hold Muriel has over her erstwhile employer.

Amazon  |  Kindle |US  |  Kindle Worldwide

Barnes & Noble   |  Nook

Indigo  |  Chapters

Kobo  |  iBooks

Mary Kennedy is a psychologist who just happens to write mysteries, and NIGHTMARES CAN BE MURDER is the first in her new Dream Club Mystery Series.

Business consultant Taylor Blake has eturned to Savannah, Georgia, to help her sister Allison turn her dream of running an old-fashioned candy store into a reality. Allison is also interested in dream interpretation and invites Taylor to her Friday night Dream Club, where members meet once a week to share and analyze their dreams.

When a local dance instructor, Chico Hernandez, is found dead in his studio, and the murder scene has an eerie resemblance to one of the dreams shared at their meeting, Taylor can’t help but be intrigued. And when her sister, who was briefly involved with the dance teacher, becomes the prime suspect, Taylor and their fellow club members can’t be caught napping. It’s up to them to dream up a solution to the murder before Allison faces a real-life nightmare.

Amazon  |  Kindle US  |  Kindle Worldwide

Barnes & Noble   |  Nook

Kobo  | iBooks

I hope you'll enjoy both of these wonderful mysteries as much as me!

Happy Labor Day!

That sounds like the perfect (un)Labor Day to me.  What are you up to today?

A happy and sad celebrations

It was just under a month ago that our family celebrated my mother-in-law Mary's 100th birthday.  She was surrounded by her family (her children, her three favorite nieces, and me, my mother, and my sister-in-law).  Mr. L made a video. We all took loads of pictures.

 The nursing home provided pizza, punch, and we brought a wonderful (HUGE) birthday cake that was gobbled up in no time flat. A good time was had by all.  It was a happy day we will long remember.

Sadly, two days later, Mary suffered a devastating stroke. A week later, she was gone.

Wow. How could such a small lady leave such a big hole in our lives?

The Cozy Chicks sent us a lovely dish garden that we will enjoy for years to come. Every time we see it we think of Mary and of the friendships we've made with the wonderful women here on this blog.  (Love you guys!)

Mary loved Nilla wafers and hard candy. We bought her boxes and boxes of wafers and pounds and pounds of candy, which she shared with members of the nursing home staff.  When we cleared out her room, we found the last box of Nillas in a drawer. It hadn't been opened.

Truthfully, neither of us are fond of Nillas (I'd prefer a GIGANTIC OATMEAL COOKIE with walnuts and raisins!!!) so we aren't likely to eat them. But ... I know that other recipes use Nillas as a base.  Among them, bourbon balls.  Our friend Jean used to make bourbon balls and bring them to work every year at Christmastime. Boy, they sure were the hit of the office party.  (She did NOT spare the bourbon!) I'm sure Mary would have enjoyed bourbon balls (although she drank beer when she was younger, and white wine these past couple of decades).

I've made bourbon balls before, but I was wondering if there were other recipes out there that use Nillas as a base and that you guys have made and enjoyed.  I know I'd be pleased to know about them, and I'm sure those reading the comments would, too.  So, if you have a recipe, please share it.  (If I make one, I'll let you know the results.)

Thanks!

Happy Day for The Cozy Chicks

It's a great day for the Cozy Chicks.  Not only did our own Ellery Adams hit the New York Times Best Sellers list at #1 for her debut novel in the Book Resort Mystery series, MURDER IN THE MYSTERY SUITE ...



Not only that, but Leann Sweeney hit the list at #25 with The Cat, The Vagabond and the Victim!

So true ...

Don't miss these two new great books!

I love the first Tuesday of the month because that means NEW BOOKS!

This month, two of my best friends have books out:

New from Leann Sweeney:  The Cat, The Vagabond and the Victim
When Clyde the cat travels two hundred miles back home only to find his former owner dead, the story makes national news. While everyone seems eager to tell Clyde’s incredible tale, someone needs to step up to care for him. Because the media attention is creating chaos at the local shelter, cat quilter Jillian Hart agrees to foster the loyal orange tabby, hoping his location is kept secret.

But while the media circus around Clyde continues, Jillian learns the real story behind his owner’s death—he was murdered. Why would an eldery man already dying from a serious illness become a murder victim? As the local police search for an answer, Clyde makes another escape. Jillian is drawn into the case when she finds Clyde has returned to his home again—and he’s found another body. When the motive behind these murders is finally revealed, Jillian understands Clyde is in danger of becoming the next victim, and she must help find the killer before the claws really come out.…

Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Kindle | Nook | iBooks

First in a new series by Ellery Adams
Tucked away in the rolling hills of rural western Virginia is the storybook resort of Storyton Hall, catering to book lovers who want to get away from it all. To increase her number of bookings, resort manager Jane Steward has decided to host a Murder and Mayhem week so that fans of the mystery genre can gather together for some role-playing and fantasy crime solving.

But when the winner of the scavenger hunt, Felix Hampden, is found dead in the Mystery Suite, and the valuable book he won as his prize is missing, Jane realizes one of her guests is an actual murderer. Amid a resort full of fake detectives, Jane is bound and determined to find a real-life killer. There’s no room for error as Jane tries to unlock this mystery before another vacancy opens up…

Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble
Kindle  |  Nook  |  iBooks

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New-Book Tuesday! Try These Out!

The Cat, the Lady and the Liar: A Cats in Trouble Mystery downloads

It's a PANTY RAID!

Get it's while it's HOT!

Tori Cannon and her BFF, Kathy Grant, get together for a girl’s weekend of wine, cookies, and laughter, but there’s also the specter of a panty pincher hanging around the laundry room of the complex where Tori lives. Kathy thinks they can catch the culprit red-handed in a panty raid!

Kindle | Kindle Worldwide | Nook | Kobo | Smashwords

(coming soon to iBooks!)

This mini mystery introduces the two main characters of the upcoming Lotus Bay Mysteries. With Baited Breath arrives Fall 2014.

I've got a new cozy mystery series coming soon!

by Lorraine Bartlett / Lorna Barrett / L.L. Bartlett

Writers write, but not always in a logical sequence.

Before I finished the first Jeff Resnick Mystery, Murder on the Mind, I'd already started Room At The Inn (what later became the third book in the series). Before I'd finished Room At The inn, I was already writing Cheated By Death (#4 in the series). Bound By Suggestion (#5 in the series) was written before Murder On The Mind (#1) ever saw print. (And Murder on the Mind is FREE for all e formats.)  Confused?  Yeah, me, too!

In between all those Jeff books (written under the name L.L. Bartlett), I started writing the Victoria Square Mysteries. A Craft Killing (then called A Matter of Murder, and I still prefer that title) and The Walled Flower were already written (under the name Lorraine Bartlett) before I wrote one word of Murder is Binding (and under another name--Lorna Barrett).

Confused yet?

In the past couple of weeks, I've been working on the first story in a new cozy mystery series that will be called the Lotus Bay Mysteries. The thing is, the idea for it came to me more than nine years ago. Poor Tori Cannon has been toasting her buns on the back burner for all those years! Now, finally, I'm beginning to tell her story. Tori is going to solve a number (and I hope a GREAT number) of crimes with the help of her BFF Kathy Blake. And they've got new friends, too. (I haven't written their parts yet, but I know that Noreen and Anissa will be very important to them WHEN I FINALLY GET TO WRITE THEM).

So, what am I trying to tell you?

I've written a prequel to the Lotus Bay Mysteries, which I've sat on for more than a year because during that time I wrote my short story, Blue Christmas (which I only sat on for about four months), and then Dark Waters (Jeff Resnick #6) and Evolution (a collection of Jeff Resnick short stories which took place BEFORE the first Jeff Resnick Mystery, except -- most of them were written DURING the course of writing the first four books).  Still, Tori kept poking my brain and saying, "Hey, START WRITING ABOUT KATHY AND ME NOW!"

(And what about Sabina, who's been sitting around even LONGER than Tori waiting for her story to be told.  And then there's Lee, a cozy male protagonist (which my 4th agent said would never sell ... but NEVER say NEVER to me).)

So, I'm almost ready to release Tori's and Kathy's first (mini) mystery. It's called PANTY RAID and I hope it will be available by next week. It's currently being copy edited. (Sorry, but it's short, so will only be available in e format.)

So, when will the first book in the Lotus Bay series (in e and print formats) be available?  I'm shooting for early October.

Meanwhile, I've got plans for a new Jeff Resnick short story (the next book is still percolating on the back burner), and a new paranormal series (like Jeff, it'll be edgier than my cozies), and I'm already plotting Booktown #10 (#9 will be published next June ... and oh, poor Tricia ... she needs a break).

Gosh, I feel exhausted just thinking of all the work I need to do in the next few months/years ... but you know what? I anticipate it all being a LOT of FUN, too!  And I hope my readers feel the same way.

I'll be announcing the availability of PANTY RAID next week on my Facebook pages and on my website. Oh, and it will come out under my Lorraine Bartlett name.

Stay tuned!