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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GUEST POST BY LESLEY A. DIEHL

ABOUT THE BOOK


Emily Rhodes came to rural Florida for the cowboys, the cattle, and to do a little country two-step, not to fall head first onto a dead body in a dumpster. Ah, the golden years of retirement in the sunshine state. They’re more like pot metal to Emily, who discovers the body of the county’s wealthiest rancher in the Big Lake Country Club dumpster. With her close friend accused of the murder, Emily sets aside her grief at her life partner’s death to find the real killer. She underestimates the obstacles rural Florida can set up for a winter visitor and runs afoul of a local judge with his own version of justice, hires a lawyer who works out of a retirement home, and flees wild fires hand-in-hand with the man she believes to be the killer.


It seems as if Emily is destined to discover dead bodies. This time she finds one of the contestants at the local barbecue cook-off dead and covered in barbecue sauce in a beer cooler. She should be used to stumbling onto corpses by now and the question of who killed the guy should pique her curiosity, but Emily decides to let Detective Lewis handle this one, at least until she figures his theory of who did the deed is wrong, wrong, wrong. Lewis’ denigration of Emily’s speculations is condescending enough to stimulate her dormant snooping skills. As the two of them go on their separate paths to find the killer, Lewis’ old partner, Toby the dirty, tobacco-spitting cop interferes in the investigation leaving Lewis with the wrong man in jail. Killers, bootleggers, barbecue and feral pigs—it’s a lethal game of hide and seek in the Florida swamp.




GUEST POST WITH LESLEY A DIEHL



Challenging Your Protagonist

It’s clear that the most obvious way mystery writers reveal and test their protagonists’ character is to disrupt their world by presenting the heroine (or hero) with a murder. Aside from this obvious way to challenge the protagonist, there are many other disruptions  a writer uses to reveal the protagonist’s character.

Some challenges come from within the character and are related to the person’s emotional, psychological and social make-up. For example, is the main character shy and laid back? If so, how will she handle an aggressive male? Emily Rhodes in Dumpster Dying is a retired school teacher used to handling children not big, bad cowboys who come into her bar drunk. Her best friend, Clara, assumes Emily does not have the chops for unpleasant interactions, but Emily insists that handing unruly preschoolers is not easy and is preparation for the adult world. Emily may not be able to physically confront an aggressive man, but she uses her wit to find a way around the bass fisherman when he asks her to move a truck he thinks she cannot drive. She proves him wrong, but pays a price for her sass when she must count on him to rescue her from an alligator. So Emily is right about being able to cantankerous men, but she must also learn she might not have the last word.

Then there is the matter of romance, another emotional issue that Emily must come to terms with. She has reason to mistrust men, having committed to one who died without changing his will to include Emily and forcing her to find work in what she assumed would be her retirement years. Confronting Emily with two romantic possibilities, a detective and a bass fisherman, brings out Emily’s misgivings and adds tension to the story. Will Emily be able to overcome her misgivings about romance? Both of the men vying for Emily’s affection are difficult fellows, one a serious police detective who Emily seems to always disagree with. Emily must eventually be able to tell the difference between his dislike of her interference in his police work and his developing feelings for her masquerading as irritation (he also must come to the same understanding about himself). As for the bass fisherman who vassilates between like for Emily and his feelings of aggravation at what he calls “uppity, Yankee gals,” Emily finds him hard to read and is always surprised when he treats her with affection and respect. The reader roots for Emily to sort out these romance issues. 

A roadblock to Emily’s ability to adjust to life in rural Florida is her living situation. Fred’s will leaves everything he and Emily have shared—house, car, bank account—to his ex-wife. Emily must find it in her to challenge the will and to find the means to hire a lawyer to represent her. Again, Emily’s sweet, laid-back nature is tested by these demands. There is nothing like a financial crisis to generate problems for the protagonist to solve and create uncertainty as to whether she will be able to be successful. In this case, the reader finds that financial exigency and her personality interact to create problems for Emily. While she correctly fires her crooked lawyer, she has no back-up plan for legal representation.

There are other issues to make the story exciting. While these challenges are external to the person, they tell the reader about the character. In Emily’s case, drought conditions near her house result in a fire in which she loses contact with a family member and finds an unlikely partner to help her find the way across an alligator infested slough. The fire and Emily’s response to it provides tension and excitement as well as an occasion for Emily and her unlikely rescuer to interact in a way that wouldn’t have happened under normal circumstances.

It is important for the writer to challenge the character in ways other than presenting a murder to be solved. Issues generated by the environment or by the character herself enhance the plot, create subplots and move the protagonist toward self-growth.  A mystery is more than solving a crime. It’s all about telling a story.



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, frequents yard sales 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 is the author of a number of mystery series and mysteries as well as short stories. The third book in the Eve Appel murders (from Camel Press) A Sporting Murder was awarded a Readers’ Favorite Five Star Award and her short story "Gator Aid" a Sleuthfest (2009) short story first place. She has fired the alligator that served as her literary muse when she is in Florida and is interviewing applicants for the position.

Connect with Lesley:
Website  |  Blog  |  Facebook  |  Twitter 

Buy the book:
Amazon

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FEATURED AUTHOR: LESLEY A. DIEHL

ABOUT THE BOOK

Someone at Professor Laura Murphy’s college appears to be playing a joke on her by planting sexually explicit stories in her research results, but the joke turns deadly when one story details the recent stabbing murder of a coed. Laura’s close friend, Detective Derrick Pasquis from the local police, asks for her help in interviewing the prickly suspects who resist intervention from outside the campus community. Eager to search out clues, Laura ignores warning signs that playing amateur sleuth may jeopardize her newly developing romance with Guy. And of course her usual intrusive manner puts her at odds with everyone on campus—colleagues, the college administration, the head of campus security and fraternity members.  Is there no one Laura can’t offend in her eagerness to find the truth? The closer she gets to solving the crime, the more it appears that the past—the coed’s, that of a prominent faculty member and Laura’s own—is the key to the murder. Caught in an early winter blizzard, Laura must choose between wandering the mountains and freezing to death or taking her chances with a killer clever enough to make murder look like the work of an innocent student.

INTERVIEW WITH LESLEY A. DIEHL

Lesley, how did you get started writing?
When I retired from university life as a professor and administrator, my husband and I moved from the East Coast to New Mexico because he wanted to return to where he grew up in the West. He’d always wanted to be a writer, so he closeted himself in his office and began work. I had played around with creative writing over the years, but the need to publish scientific articles for my university position kind of kicked the “creative” out of me. But I thought, “What the heck. If he can write, I can, too," so I began a mystery (I’d always loved them) set on a college campus. Write what you know, correct?  Unfortunately, I had no idea how to write a mystery, and my first effort showed that, but I’m a stubborn gal, so I kept at it. After many awful attempts, that manuscript became the first Laura Murphy mystery, Murder Is Academic. Failure Is Fatal is the second in the series. Being mulish paid off.

What's your favorite thing about the writing process?
I love being able to create people and a world, all under my control, and the best thing about mysteries is that the writer makes everything turn out okay. How wonderful and hopeful is that!

I agree. What do you think is more important – characters or plot?
When I first started writing, I thought plot was most important. I was writing a mystery, a puzzle that needed to be solved. I reveled in the twists and turns and subplots I developed. Now that I am down the road a bit, I work harder on creating characters that my readers can admire, root for, get angry at, hate, love, identify with or want to become. For a series writer, that is important. A writer can have a really intricate mystery, but if the characters aren’t compelling, a reader won’t come back for the next one.

What books do you currently have published?
I have two books in the mircrobrewing series, two in the Big Lake murder mystery series, three in the Eve Appel mystery series (number four will be out in September), two in the Laura Murphy series, a standalone mystery and a number of short stories.


What do you know now that you wish you knew then?
Yeah, yeah, I know the big publishing houses don’t promote their writers like they used to, but they do have money and connections, all significant in the issues of discoverability and placement, the bane of the writer with a small publishing house or who is self-published. The road to discoverability with a small publisher can be a lot longer and requires the writer hang in there and write enough books to generate a respectable bookshelf.

Do you have any secret talents?
I think I write a pretty entertaining cozy mystery, and I hope that secret talent will be less of a secret one day! And I’m great at finding secondhand bargains. I furnished my cottage almost entirely from yard sales.


Is writing your dream job?
Yup, it really is. I set my own schedule, create my own characters and plots, never have to get permission from anyone to take a sick day, or go on vacation or have my pay (minimal as it is) docked, dress up for work, suffer sexual harassment from colleagues or bosses, suffer a long commute, attend long, boring meetings, or get out of my jammies if I don’t want to unless I’m doing a reading or library event (for those I do shower and spruce up a bit).

What is the worst job you’ve ever had? What did it teach you?
I had the title of “stripper,” not what you think. I worked summers for the intermediary to a publishing company. We would receive paperback books from retail stores, books that did not sell, and we would strip the covers off the books. These covers were sent back to the publisher who would reimburse the store for the book. The book itself went to the city dump. We were told we were not to take the books, but we all did anyway. I read a lot of cheap, sleazy paperbacks those summers. The work itself wasn’t really difficult, but it was boring. Required standing for eight hours on a concrete floor (no wonder I have back problems!) with fifteen minutes for lunch and two 10 minute breaks. I worked the three to eleven shift. The only job worse than that was in the bindery in a large printing plant. It was too loud on the floor to hear anything so you couldn’t speak to anyone. My job was to jockey stacks of catalogue pages so they were straight on all sides and then insert them into a bin that would feed them onto a conveyer and into an automatic binder. I had paper cuts up my forearms, and my nose was filled with paper dust.
What I learned from these jobs was that, despite the good money they paid, I needed a position in which my mind was engaged and one that didn’t threatened my physical health. I clearly knew why I was getting a college education.

Do you have any marketing tips you could pass on to indie authors?
No one knows what really works. I’m not being negative, just stating the truth. There is no magic bullet. Do what you feel comfortable doing, but be consistent. Probably the best thing you can do to sell your books is to write more books.

If you could only watch one television station for a year, what would it be?
PBS if only to watch the British mysteries. Or I could trash all of television for Netflix (and the British mysteries and comedies).

What five things would you never want to live without?
Netflix, PBS, books, a comfortable pair of shoes and jeans that fit.

What do you love about where you live?
Up north, I live in a 1874 cottage on a trout stream. I get to listen to that stream when I write. I hear the wind through the great leafy maple trees and revel in the chartreuses of spring.
The rest of the year I live in rural Florida. I love the handsome cowboys I see in the country bars, I adore all the herds of cows (I’m a cow lover) and am fascinated by the Brahman cattle there. Their floppy ears are so cute. We live on a small canal with abundant birdlife. As you can tell, I am truly a country gal.


What's your favorite treat for movie night?
A big, ol’ bag of theater popcorn. I can watch any film if I have that.

What’s your favorite fast food?
I love French fries, but almost never eat them because they are deep-fried and I try to stay away from the fat.

What’s your favorite beverage?
I love a good Sauvignon Blanc, one from New Zealand.

What drives you crazy?
People who talk on their cellphones in public, especially in a restaurant. Do they really think I’m interested in their conversation, and how can you not listen when they’re right in your face?

What is your superpower?
I think I’m pretty great at multitasking.

What is one of your happiest moments?
The day I married my husband. It took me over a half century to find him.

What do you like to do when there’s nothing to do?
Read, of course.

Where is your favorite place to visit?
I love the Florida Keys. We use to spend our winters there, but it got far too expensive. Now we pop down for a long weekend to visit friends in Key Largo. That place has the best yard sales and our favorite restaurant for fired whole yellow snapper. Our two cats were rescues from the campground there. The color of the waters as you drive to Key West is spectacular.

What’s your least favorite chore?
I hate dusting, and it’s my own fault for buying all those items at yard sales. Those little gems decorate all the horizontal surfaces in my house up north. Not only must I dust the surfaces, but the knick knacks have to be cleaned too. My house is pretty clean, but I have too much “stuff” and yet I’m addicted to used items, much like my protagonist, Eve Appel.
 In my family it’s a trait carried down from generation to generation—never buy new!


What’s in your refrigerator right now?
Always a bottle of wine, then vegetables usually green beans and broccoli, lettuce, cuke, kale, low fat mayo, assorted salad dressings, eggs, egg beaters, assorted cheeses, a jar of jam (that belongs to hubby), butter, margarine, Sicilian lemonade, half n’ half, melon and yogurt. The freezer usually contains fish of some kind, chicken, a little beef, and (guilty pleasure) gelato.

What’s one of your favorite quotes?
From Mark Twain: “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

What would your main character say about you?
From Eve Appel, “She’s smart and funny, but she dresses too conservatively especially her shoes. She never wears a heel higher than two inches. Where is the fun in that?”

What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to write?
Letters of recommendation to graduate schools for my students. When I wrote for someone, I knew I was holding a piece of their future in my hands, so I obsessed over getting it right, making it speak about their strengths, but not be dishonest about their abilities.


Where is your favorite library, and what do you love about it?
I love the library in Okeechobee. It’s a lovely open space with windows to the outdoors. It may not hold everything that larger ones do, but the librarians and staff there have been supportive of local authors, featuring them in programs throughout the year. They always act as if we are doing them a favor by being there while I know they are paying me a compliment by featuring me each year. The reading group there is active and loves having an author appear. The library also provided a space for the writers’ group which another woman and I started years ago.




You have a personal chef for the night. What would you ask him to prepare?
Sea bass, crispy, with asparagus. For dessert, anything dark chocolate.


How do you like your pizza?
Just plain. My protagonist, Eve Appel is right. I’m boring.


What is the wallpaper on your computer’s desktop?
It is a view of a waterfall with vegetation all around including a blooming rhododendron.


Describe yourself in 5 words.
Short, blonde, shy, smart mouth.

What would you do for a Klondike bar?
Dark chocolate? I’d write you a short story about murder, yours if you didn’t give me the bar.



Yikes! What are you working on now?
I’m beginning the sixth book in the Eve Appel mystery series. I’m also working on a novella featuring the characters I’ve written about in short stories, Aunt Nozzie, the grandmamas and their granddaughter. This one is all about apple picking, Halloween, and of course, murder.

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 is the author of a number of mystery series (Microbrewing Series, Big Lake Mystery Series, Eve Appel Mystery Series and the Laura Murphy Mysteries), a standalone mystery (Angel Sleuth) and numerous short stories.
       


Connect with Lesley:
Website  |   
Blog  |   Facebook 
  |  Twitter   
 
Sales links:
For Kindle and trade paperback  |  For all eformats

a Rafflecopter giveaway