FEATURED AUTHOR: LESLEY A. DIEHL

ABOUT THE BOOK

EMILY RHODES DOES IT AGAIN!

This time she nosedives into a mud puddle at a Seminole War battle reenactment and finds she’s sharing the muck with a dead body. As usual the hunky detective she loves to aggravate, Stanton Lewis, cautions her against getting involved in the case, and as usual she ignores him. Emily’s sleuthing pays off, revealing disturbing information about the victim’s past. Is it the reason behind his murder? With the help of her family and friends, Emily sets out to uncover secrets kept too long and puts herself and the people she loves in the killer’s path. Too late she realizes Detective Lewis was right. Her snoopiness proves to be a deadly idea.

Bonus feature inside: Emily’s neighbor shares her recipes. Make them for your favorite sleuth!

Book Details:


Title: Scream Muddy Murder

Author: Lesley A. Diehl

Genre: Cozy Mystery

Publisher: Creekside Publishing

Print length: 352 pages

On tour with: Great Escapes Book Tours







LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT INTERVIEW WITH LESLEY A. DIEHL

A few of your favorite things: Chocolate, wine (preferably white), my cottage on a trout stream, my husband, warm weather, writing, my cats, and having afternoon tea with my neighbors.
Things you need to throw out: Many of my clothes, most of my shoes, “stuff” in the house
.

Things you need in order to write: Organized closets, a sense of humor.
Things that hamper your writing: Too much noise, my cat hogging the keyboard
.

Things you love about writing: When the plot comes together, writing funny scenes, writing short stories, using my relatives as characters in my work.
Things you hate about writing: Lying awake at night and realizing I have a huge plot issue which needs to be resolved. The worry keeps me awake for hours while I ruminate about how it can be fixed. You’d think I’d get up and work on it, but, no, I just lie there and worry. The fact that I am the world’s worst typist and must redo everything—why did I never take that typing class in high school?

Easiest thing about being a writer: The ideas seem to be never ending. I should have begun doing this much earlier in my life!

Hardest thing about being a writer: Spending so much time inside when I’d prefer to be out by the stream or walking in the woods.


Things you love about where you live: I divide my time between Upstate New York and rural Florida. I love the peacefulness of both places because there is so little traffic. New York is beautiful in the summer and early fall, but brutal in the winter. Florida is warm.
Things that make you want to move: In New York we must navigate a huge hill to get out of our village to restaurants and to shopping, but it’s only a real problem in bad weather. In Florida, we are isolated from restaurants, shopping and entertainment. We love the coast but must travel 40 miles to get there. However, we never get flooded where we live in Florida, but we have had floods of our creek in New York.

Things you never want to run out of: Chocolate, wine, PBS, and Netflix.
Things you wish you’d never bought: Most of my shoes and most of my clothes. I don’t need all this stuff!

Words that describe you: Dedicated to my writing, love my husband and my cats, not too dumb, funny.
Words that describe you but you wish they didn’t: Impatient, controlling.

Favorite foods: Lobster, cod, mahi mahi, potatoes, anything chocolate, raspberries, peaches, crusty bread, chicken piccata, a good Italian dressing.
Things that make you want to throw up: Egg yolks, when somebody else has thrown up, Karo syrup, liver. 

Favorite music: Anything by the Eagles.
Music that make your ears bleed: Some opera. 



Favorite beverage: Wine or tea.
Something that gives you a pickle face: Liver.

Favorite smell: Lilacs or lily of the valley.
Something that makes you hold your nose: Burning rubber.

Something you’re really good at: Writing humor (I hope).
Something you’re really bad at: Writing romantic scenes.


Something you wish you could do: Write romantic scenes.
Something you wish you’d never learned to do: Crochet—a waste of time, and I’m bad at it.

Something you like to do: Crosswords.

Something you wish you’d never done: Worked with some of the idiots I worked with.

People you consider as heroes: People who rescue children and animals.

People with a big L on their foreheads: People who are full of themselves, self-centered, and can only talk about how great they are or how much money they have.



Last best thing you ate: Chicken piccata last night.

Last thing you regret eating: I can’t think of anything in the recent past. I only eat what I love!

Things you’d walk a mile for: My husband, my cats, a really good donut.
Things that make you want to run screaming from the room: Most of the programs on TV.

Things you always put in your books: Humorous dialogue and funny scenes.

Things you never put in your books: Sex.

Things to say to an author: I love your books; can I buy 100 copies of each of them to gift to my friends and family?

Things to say to an author if you want to be fictionally killed off in their next book: That must be a vanity publisher because I’ve never heard of them.

Favorite places you’ve been: Africa, Tuscany, Disney (please don’t tell anyone), train across Canada.
Places you never want to go to again: High priced, but over-rated restaurants with lousy food and poor service; most large cities.

Favorite books: Mysteries of any kind.

Books you would ban: I don’t believe in banning books. If you don’t like them, don’t buy them or read them.

People you’d like to invite to dinner: Any of the courageous young women athletes on the Olympic gymnastics team who spoke up and took that horrible doctor down. They are role models for young women, and I’d like to tell them that.

People you’d cancel dinner on: That horrible doctor and everyone who protected him.

Favorite things to do: Cooking, writing, gardening, hiking, watching Sunday night PBS.

Things you’d run through a fire wearing gasoline pants to get out of doing: Watching most contemporary sitcoms.

Things that make you happy: Watching pet videos on Facebook.

Things that drive you crazy: Watching television programs about people deciding which 1.2-million-dollar house to buy. Why do I tune in to that stuff?

Proudest moment: When I got my first book published.


Most embarrassing moment: When my music teacher in junior high told me not to sing, but to “just mouth the words.” She almost cured me of ever wanting to sing again. I was mortified because she said it in front of the entire class.


Biggest lie you’ve ever told: Said in an English accent, at a disco way back when, “I’m from Great Britain.” The guy was so impressed, but my accent slipped as the night wore on.

A lie you wish you’d told: “I weigh 120 pounds.”


Best thing you’ve ever done: Retired early to follow my partner to New Mexico. It turned out well, however. We later married, and he’s been the biggest supporter of my writing.

Biggest mistake: Not taking that vacation to Greece.

Most daring thing you’ve ever done: Went on a wildlife management safari to Kenya.

Something you chickened out from doing: I discontinued my riding lessons after the horse threw me.

The last thing you did for the first time: Tried to watch a superheroes movie. I guess I’m not a superheroes fan.

Something you’ll never do again: Although we love our cottage on the trout stream, I now know better than to buy a house located on the outside of a bend in the river. The water eats at your property and you end up with many feet less of lawn.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lesley retired from her life as a professor of psychology and reclaimed her country roots by moving to a small cottage in the Butternut River Valley in Upstate New York.  In the winter she migrates to old Florida—cowboys, scrub palmetto, and open fields of grazing cattle, a place where spurs still jingle in the post office, and gators make golf a contact sport.  Back north, the shy ghost inhabiting the cottage serves as her literary muse.  When not writing, she gardens, cooks and renovates the 1874 cottage with the help of her husband, two cats and, of course, Fred the ghost, who gives artistic direction to their work. She’s presently interviewing for a coyote to serve as her muse for her books and stories set in rural Florida.
She is the author of several mystery series and mysteries as well as short stories, most featuring her quirky sense of humor and a few characters drawn from her peculiar family.




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

Buy the book:
Amazon  | Barnes & Noble

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