FEATURED AUTHOR: JANET FINSILVER

ABOUT THE BOOK

When a local woman is desperate to find a couple she hasn’t seen since the 1960s, Redwood Cove Bed and Breakfast manager, Kelly Jackson, and the crime-solving group of seniors, the Silver Sentinels, offer to help out. They realize there is more to the search than they were aware of after the woman is found dead beside the body of a Greek fortune teller and a fellow Sentinel gets attacked. As Kelly juggles work and her responsibilities at a food and wine festival in town, she and the Silver Sentinels must confront a killer obsessed with old secrets and solve a murder mystery more than fifty years in the making.




 



INTERVIEW WITH JANET FINSILVER

Janet, do you have a writing routine?

Yes. I like to get whatever business or chores I need to get accomplished out of the way in the morning. This helps clear my mind. However, a lot of thoughts come to me when I’m exercising or doing routine tasks. I make notes throughout the morning. I do a combination jog/walk a couple of times a week. I often come back with four or five pages dictated on my iPhone of ideas I want to put in the book or problems I’ve worked out. I begin writing early afternoon, sometimes before that if I have a deadline crunch. My days don’t always work out this way, but this is what I like for my writing routine.

What is your writing style?
I write what are called cozy mysteries. When I do presentations, I tell people I feel it’s something of an oxymoron. If someone asks me what I do for a living, it sounds funny to say I write a cozy murder series. Cozy and murder don’t seem to go together. I then say I write safe whodunits. By safe I mean there won’t be any graphic violence. I’ve been disappointed in some authors I’ve read who had a great plot going and then out of nowhere threw in a torture scene. That’s not what I want to read. With a cozy you also know the regular characters will be back. They might get a little bruised once in a while, but they will return. Other aspects of the cozy genre are no bad language and no explicit sex.

What books do you currently have published?
Murder at Redwood Cove
Murder at the Mansion
Murder at the Fortune Teller’s Table

Is writing your dream job?
Yes. I love entering the world of my series. It’s fun to create what happens and to describe the beautiful area of Mendocino, California, which Redwood Cove is based upon. I also get to visit the town for my research which I really enjoy.

How often do you tweet?
I try to tweet at least several times a week. Twitter was new to me until this past spring. I never thought I’d be doing a lot of tweeting. I love the pictures I’m seeing. I’m involved with a lot of animal groups because of the dogs I have in each book of my series. If I need something to smile about, all I have to do is go to my Twitter account. I also have a number of writers and writing groups I follow and who follow me.

How do you feel about Facebook?
I really like Facebook. Again, this was a big change for me. At one point a while back, one of the members of my writing group wouldn’t let me leave at the end of our meeting until I posted something because I’d never put anything on Facebook. I was nervous about putting something out there for the world to see. Now I try to post on a regular basis. I have some readers who always respond to me on my author page. It’s been fun to interact with them.

What’s your favorite beverage?
Okay. Here it is. A Starbuck’s coffee frappuccino with an extra shot of espresso. Hmmm…good! Whenever I drive to Mendocino, it’s my treat half way there. It’s about a three and a half hour drive. The first half is freeway, and the second half is a windy two lane road, so the coffee helps with that part of the drive.

Where is your favorite place to visit?
San Ignacio Lagoon in Mexico. This is one of the places where gray whales go to have their babies. I’ve touched young whales, and it was an absolutely amazing experience. I’ve been three times. Recently I attended the Mendocino Whale Festival and my husband put together a slideshow of photos from our trips. It was fun to see the photographs and bring the memories back.

Do you procrastinate?
Okay. Truth time. Yes, sometimes I procrastinate . . . but only for a while. I know I need to push the book forward. At some point I remind myself of that and get to work.

What’s one thing that drives you crazy?
How quickly paper piles up in my life. I have difficulty keeping up with the magazines, catalogs, newspapers, and various other pieces of mail.

What’s in your refrigerator right now?
Let’s see. Green beans for the dogs. They needed to loose a few pounds and a friend suggested the beans to fill them up when I reduced their amount of food. They LOVE them. They’ve lost the weight, but I don’t have the heart to stop giving them the green beans. Their names are Kylie (Rhodesian ridgeback) and Ellie (coonhound/boxer mix). There’s cheese for the dogs . . . and an occasional slice for me. I cut it up into small pieces for an over-the-top treat for them. My husband has his Unsweetened Original Blue Diamond Almond Breeze Almond milk and there are lots of fresh vegetables and fruit.

What’s one of your favorite quotes?
“To live happily is an inward power of the soul.” Marcus Aurelius

What are you working on now?
Currently I’m working on my fourth book tentatively titled Murder at the Mushroom Festival. There is a contest to see who can find the widest variety of mushrooms during a given period of time. There are two animals trained to find fungi that help the hunters—a dog named Max and a pig named Priscilla. When a person if found murdered, the type of hunt changes. Kelly Jackson and the crime-solving seniors, the Silver Sentinels, begin looking for the killer to help one of their friends who has become a suspect in the investigation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janet Finsilver is the USA TODAY best-selling author of the Kelly Jackson mystery series. She worked in education for many years as a teacher, a program administrator, and a workshop presenter. Janet majored in English and earned a Master’s Degree in Education. She loves animals and has two dogs—Kylie and Ellie. Janet has ridden western style since she was a child and was a member of the National Ski Patrol. One of the highlights of her life was touching whales in the San Ignacio Lagoon. Murder at Redwood Cove, her debut mystery, was released on October 13, 2015. Her second book, Murder at the Mansion, became available on June 7, 2016. The third book, Murder at the Fortune Teller’s Table, was released on March 14, 2017.

Janet Finsilver and her husband reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. She enjoys cooking, and a recent attempt to reduce the number of cookbooks in the cupboard wasn’t very successful. She’s an avid reader—of course!

Connect with Janet:
Website  |  
Blog  |  Facebook  | 
 Twitter  |  Goodreads 

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