Once again, The Poisoned Pen hosted three authors. Tasha Alexander, Andrew Grant and Deanna Raybourn were interviewed by Barbara Peters, owner of the bookstore.

If you would like to see the program, check out the Livestream. https://livestream.com/poisonedpen/events/6866264

And, if you would like to order signed copies of the books, check the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com

Nick Petrie was just here at The Poisoned Pen, and his latest novel featuring war veteran Peter Ash, Burning Bright, is the Hot Book of the Week.

Here’s the synopsis from the Web Store.

“LOTS OF CHARACTERS GET COMPARED TO MY OWN JACK REACHER, BUT PETRIE’S PETER ASH IS THE REAL DEAL.”—Lee Child

In the new novel featuring war veteran Peter Ash, “an action hero of the likes of Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne” (Lincoln Journal-Star), Ash has a woman’s life in his hands—and her mystery is stranger than he could ever imagine.

War veteran Peter Ash sought peace and quiet among the towering redwoods of northern California, but the trip isn’t quite the balm he’d hoped for. The dense forest and close fog cause his claustrophobia to buzz and spark, and then he stumbles upon a grizzly, long thought to have vanished from this part of the country. In a fight of man against bear, Peter doesn’t favor his odds, so he makes a strategic retreat up a nearby sapling.

There, he finds something strange: a climbing rope, affixed to a distant branch above. It leads to another, and another, up through the giant tree canopy, and ending at a hanging platform. On the platform is a woman on the run. From below them come the sounds of men and gunshots.

Just days ago, investigative journalist June Cassidy escaped a kidnapping by the men who are still on her trail. She suspects they’re after something belonging to her mother, a prominent software designer who recently died in an accident. June needs time to figure out what’s going on, and help from someone with Peter’s particular set of skills.

Only one step ahead of their pursuers, Peter and June must race to unravel this peculiar mystery. What they find leads them to an eccentric recluse, a shadowy pseudo-military organization, and an extraordinary tool that may change the modern world forever.

Would you like a signed copy of Burning Bright? You can buy it through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2inXqkB

When Barbara Peters, owner of the Poisoned Pen, hosted the recent event at the bookstore, she referred to it as a Triple Threat program. Authors Brad Taylor, Ingrid Thoft and Nick Petrie all made a return visit to the store. They’ve been here for all of their books.

It was a well-attended program, as you can tell from the signing line afterward.

Here are a few photos from the event.

If you’d like to see the program, you can watch it on Livestream. https://livestream.com/poisonedpen/events/6866259

And, of course, you can order signed copies of the authors’ books through the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com/

In some ways, I’m glad the holidays are over since The Poisoned Pen is back to regular programming. It’s nice to be able to share the photos from the store events. The other night, Erich Wurster and Thomas Perry were interviewed by Barbara Peters, owner of the store.

Erich Wurster’s The Coaster is from Poisoned Pen Press. So, Rob Rosenwald, publisher of Poisoned Pen Press, was in attendance.

After time to mingle, Barbara Peters interviewed the authors. Then the audience had time for book signing.

You can watch the interview on Livestream. https://livestream.com/poisonedpen/events/6865846

If you’d like signed copies of your own, of The Coaster or The Old Man, you can purchase them through the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com

Douglas Preston was recently in town for an event hosted by The Poisoned Pen. He showed slides and talked about his adventures that led to his nonfiction account, The Lost City of the Monkey God.

If you didn’t read Dana Stabenow’s recent review, here’s the book summary from the Web Store.

“A five-hundred-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A stunning medical mystery. And a pioneering journey into the unknown heart of the world’s densest jungle.

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location.

Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.

Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn’t until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease.

Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.”

We do have a few photos from the event.

Here are a couple slides from Preston’s presentation.

If you would like to order a signed copy of The Lost City of the Monkey God, it’s available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2iHhsaH

Donis Casey’s latest Alafair Tucker mystery is The Return of the Raven Mocker. Donis will be at The Poisoned Pen on Tuesday, Jan. 24 at 7 PM to discuss and sign the book.

Michael Barson recently did a Q & A with Donis. It’s fun to read, so I hope you enjoy it.

1)  Return of the Raven Mocker is the ninth entry in your series featuring the indomitable Alafair Tucker of Boynton, Oklahoma and mother of ten (!). Did setting the story in 1918, at the height of the influenza pandemic that was running rampant in both Europe and the U.S., present any special research challenges?

Donis– Since my series is historical, I always do a lot of research before I start a novel. When I was writing my first Alafair Tucker Mystery, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, I was particularly concerned with the kind of life Alafair would have led in 1912, so much of my research consisted of  personal interviews with people who had grown up on substance farms, and lots of library time reading diaries and other personal accounts.

The passing years have made quite a difference, both for Alafair and for me. The outside world has intruded on Alafair in a big way, and my research methods have changed as well. The internet has exploded. I don’t have to rummage around in the dusty library stacks (even though I still do. Not everything is online, especially diaries.)

The official websites of the Cherokee Nation is where I learned the details of the Cherokee legend of Raven Mocker, an evil witch/wizard who takes the form of a raven at night and flies about looking for the old and the sick to torment and suck the life out of them. This, I thought, is the perfect theme to weave into a book about the flu epidemic of 1918. And a good title, too.

I learned from the websites for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that no one knows for sure how many died in the flu pandemic, but modern estimates put the number at somewhere between thirty and fifty million people worldwide. The U.S. Center for Disease Control estimates that more than six hundred thousand of those were Americans. In May of 2015, The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs listed just over 53,000 American battle deaths in World War I, which means that twelve times as many Americans died from complications of the flu than died in battle. I found most of my information about the desperate attempts of the medical establishment to find a cure, or at least an effective treatment for the disease, from a fabulous book by John Barry called The Great Influenza. Some of the cures doctors tried made things worse than they were.

One of my favorite research resources for any of my books is newspapers. In fact, for many years I have kept a file of interesting newspaper clippings for inspiration. I used to travel to libraries and read old newspaper archives on rolls of microfilm. Now I can find most early 20th Century newspapers online, including the Boynton Index. I am able find out about the weather for whatever day I want, and what was showing at the movies. I can learn the price of a bushel of wheat, a barrel of oil, a lady’s hat, and an automobile. Most importantly, I discover from letters to the editor and editorials what people were thinking about. It’s fascinating to see what people knew and when they knew it.

From the perspective of 100 years on, we know how things turned out. But they had no idea what was going to happen. During the horrible flu pandemic of 1918, the government actually encouraged news outlets to downplay the seriousness of the situation, because the first World War was still going on and nothing was to be allowed to interfere with war production! Eventually, factories all over the United States were no longer able to stay open because most of their workers were ill, and the stories in the papers began to change radically, printing all kinds of weird and generally useless advice about how to avoid becoming sick.

A few years ago, one of my cousins gave me a subscription to the Haskell News, a weekly paper from a little town near Boynton, in the same county. The News tells about the school lunch menu and such, but there is a historian who writes occasional priceless articles on local history for the paper. Many months ago he wrote a full page article on the effect of the 1918 flu epidemic on Muskogee County. Solid gold.

2) Is it fair to say that the mystery element of Raven Mocker takes a back seat to the vivid presentation you make of the influenza calamity that affected small communities like yours in Boynton, OK? It feels like the true villain of this piece is actually the pandemic itself.

Donis– I think that’s fair. Alafair is a farm wife with a very large family who lives in rural Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century. She knows her world and has made her place in it. Each of the books in the series features a different one of Alafair’s children, with whom Alafair either works to solve a crime, or works to save from him or herself.  Since each child has his or her own distinct personality and interests, this gives me a great deal of latitude to explore all kinds of things that people were into in the early 20th Century.

For each book I must come up with a compelling reason for a farm wife and mother of ten to get involved in a murder investigation. It’s not like Alafair is looking for something to do. I also have to figure out a convincing way for her to either solve the murder or contribute substantially to the solution.

When I first began writing the Alafair Tucker Mystery series in 2003, I had a story arc in mind that was going to carry through ten books. This is a wonderful idea, but as anyone who has ever written a long series knows, after a couple of books all your plans for a story arc have been knocked into a cocked hat. The reason this happened, at least to me, is that I seem to be writing about real people who have their own ideas about how things should be gone about, and once I put them into a situation, they react to it in ways I had never anticipated. Besides, I really want readers to be able to pick up any book in the series and have a satisfying experience without having to know anything about what went before.

This poses the million dollar question for the author of a long series: How do you keep it fresh? How do you make every story stand alone, yet in its place as well? I have found over the course of nine books in the same series that I have begun to depart from the usual mystery novel format. The later books are constructed more like thrillers than puzzles.

3) No doubt you often receive feedback from your readers as your series develops from book to book. Have you ever been struck by a comment to the extent that you incorporated the idea into a subsequent book?

Donis– The comments I get from readers often have to do with their own memories or stories they’ve heard about life in a large family or on a farm. I’ve used many delightful pieces of information from readers to bring Alafair’s world to life. Children carving their names into ice-covered window panes, boating down a rain flooded gully in a washtub, throwing hard-boiled eggs at a fence post, using kerosene-soaked corncobs to start a coal fire.

In The Return of the Raven Mocker, I used a story that I heard from a friend many years ago about the curative power of onion. When my friend was a young boy, he developed such a severe case of pneumonia that the doctor told his mother to prepare herself for his imminent demise. In an act of desperation, his mother sliced up a raw onion and bound it to the bottoms of his feet with strips of sheet, then put cotton socks on him. In the morning, his fever had broken, his lungs had cleared, and the onion poultice had turned black. Did the onions save his life? For my purposes, they did.

*****

The Web Store has signed copies of The Return of the Raven Mocker is you’d like to catch up with Alafair Tucker and her family. https://bit.ly/2iZRxvu

Do you subscribe to Jacqueline Winspear’s newsletter? The author of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries recently talked about her forthcoming book, In This Grave Hour.

It’s a little early to discuss her March appearance at The Poisoned Pen, but it isn’t too early for you to read her note about the background of the next story in the series. Check out the January newsletter for Winspear’s account. https://bit.ly/2icorL6 She’s very clear about history repeating itself. We’ll have the author and signed copies of In This Grave Hour  available in March.

Deanna Raybourn, author of the Veronica Speedwell mysteries, as well as the Lady Julia Grey ones, will be appearing at The Poisoned Pen on Thursday, January 12 at 7 PM. She will be joined by Tasha Alexander (A Terrible Beauty), and Andrew Grant (False Friend).

Deanna was kind enough to answer questions for “In the Hot Seat”. Thank you, Deanna.

Deanna, would you introduce yourself to readers?

Certainly! I’m a sixth-generation native Texan transplanted to Virginia where I live with my husband, daughter, and goldendoodle. I write, I read, and I spend way too much time on Twitter and Instagram.

Tell us about Veronica Speedwell. Veronica is an intrepid young woman making her way in the world as a lepidopterist. By traveling the globe in search of butterflies, she is able to provide for herself financially as well as satisfy her wanderlust—and her taste for discreet love affairs. Unfortunately, she’s formed the habit of stumbling over dead bodies and is far too curious not to take a stab at solving the murders herself. She’s also managed to acquire a sidekick in the form of the Honourable Revelstoke Templeton-Vane, a natural historian with a shady past. Veronica is loosely inspired by Margaret Fountaine, a butterfly hunter who traveled the world for decades, enjoying a robust series of love affairs as well as a successful career well into her 70s.

Without spoilers, tell us about A Perilous Undertaking.

PERILOUS is Veronica and Stoker’s second adventure, one that sees them feverishly attempting to right a miscarriage of justice and save a baronet from the hangman’s noose for a murder he didn’t commit. They are set on the trail of a cunning murderer at the behest of a very demanding woman who is not quite what she seems…

Your Lady Julia Grey books are also set in Victorian England. What draws you to that time period and setting? Late Victorian England has far more in common with modern times than most people realize. It was a period of enormous technological change, and those innovations caused repercussions in every area of life—how people dressed, how they ate, how information was communicated, who was permitted to own property, how status was determined. Nationalism was on the rise; women were demanding the vote; science was developing new theories that upended the status quo. Everything Victorians thought they knew about the world was being questioned or changed, and ultimately people had to, quite simply, adapt or die. That has obvious and fascinating parallels for us today, so it’s interesting to me to explore that in a setting that is familiar but still different enough to seem a bit exotic.

I heard you speak at Bouchercon, talking about the female travelers of the 19th century. Would you talk a little about them now?

My degree is in English and history, so I quite naturally gravitated towards the writings of the Victorian travelers. They were tireless recordkeepers, writing memoirs or travelogues, keeping journals, penning letters. They noted everything—geography, customs, languages, natural history, their own experiences—so the material makes for fascinating reading, and I was particularly intrigued to discover how intrepid these women were. We tend to think of Victorian women as sitting quietly in the parlor, sharing tea and sympathy with the vicar, but the fact is that there were a host of ladies who packed up their parasols and petticoats and set off to see the world. In some cases they had scores of porters haul trunks of formal gowns and tea services across deserts so they could dine in style, but in other cases the women simply carried a carpetbag and didn’t even travel with a maid. There were travelers who ventured into places men didn’t even dare to go, and those were the ones I was particularly interested in learning more about. I’ve spent the last 25 years or so researching these women, and I never fail to be fascinated by their determination, their unflagging resolve, their tireless curiosity.

The Lady Grey mysteries were optioned for a TV series in the UK in 2015. Has there been any progress? There has been progress, but nothing I can discuss yet! I hope to be able to give lots of details soon but until I get the green light from the producer I’m sworn to secrecy.

When I reviewed the first Veronica Speedwell book, A Curious Beginning, I said, “She’s a literary descendent of Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody, and an ancestor of Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce.” Those authors may actually not have influenced you in any way. What authors have inspired you? Those references are perfectly apt because they have influenced me tremendously. Elizabeth Peters had such a gift for repartee as well as sexual tension that was managed to be so subtle you could miss it if you weren’t careful but which was also utterly combustible. That’s a very tricky line to straddle. I think Alan Bradley is doing a superb job with Flavia; he’s created a heroine who is prickly and occasionally unlikeable and very certain of her own brilliance which are qualities she shares with Veronica, so they are kindred spirits! I also count Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle as tremendous influences as well as Victoria Holt.

What’s your favorite book you’ve written, and why? It varies—ask me on any given day and you’ll get a different answer from the day before. I have a soft spot for SILENT IN THE GRAVE because it was my first published book; I am also quite fond of A CURIOUS BEGINNING because it was the start of Veronica’s series. Right now I’m smitten with Veronica’s third adventure—the one I’m still writing—which is a good thing!

Other than your own, name several books you would never part with. Besides full collections of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie and the complete Sherlock Holmes canon, I’d keep some Georgette Heyers, THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, the Provincial Lady series, my Nigella cookbooks, and Helen Castor’s SHE-WOLVES, as well as anything by Judith Flanders or Lucy Worsley.

What was your favorite book of 2016? Lyndsay Faye’s JANE STEELE had its paperback release in 2016, so I’m going to count that on a technicality! I also loved Sherry Thomas’s A STUDY IN SCARLET WOMEN, a unique reimagining of the Sherlock stories.

Thank you, Deanna. If you can make it for an interesting, historical evening, please come to The Poisoned Pen on Thursday, Jan. 12 at 7 PM. Even if you can’t make it, you can buy a signed copy of A Perilous Undertaking through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2hvUO8f