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Author Spotlight: Mystery Writer Carol Light Has a New Release and a Giveaway!

September 7, 2023 /

Congratulations to Linda May! You are Carol’s gift card winner! Carol will be in touch with you. Thanks to everyone for stopping by–we can’t do this without our dear readers and followers–we appreciate you!

I gotta tell ya, mes amies, having Tule Mystery author Carol Light in the Spotlight is a special treat because she’s not only a fantastic writer, she’s also a good friend and a great conference/retreat roomie! She’s here with book two in her Cluttered Crime series and a fun giveaway!

Carol is an avid reader and writer of mysteries. She loves creating amateur sleuths and complicating their normal lives with a crime that they must use their talents and wits to solve. She’s traveled worldwide and lived in Australia for eight years, teaching high school English and learning to speak “Strine.” Florida is now her home. If she’s not at the beach or writing, you can find her tackling quilting in much the same way that she figures out her mysteries—piece by piece, clue by clue.

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Carol–you’re up, roomie!

Spotlight:  Deadlier Than Fiction

Thanks, Nan, for spotlighting my second Cluttered Crime mystery, Deadlier Than Fiction. Like most of you who read Nan’s blogs and her wonderful romances, I love reading and I love books. You wouldn’t have to be a detective to deduce that fact if you visited me. Just inside my front door is a crammed bookcase, one of three in the hallway. There are more bookcases in my office/den, filled shelves in the living room, stacks of cookbooks on top of my kitchen cupboards… Can we say bibliophile? I also love libraries and, not wanting to invest in more bookcases, I borrow most of the books I read today. Then there’s my Kindle and the world of e-books—thousands of stories at my fingertips! Even so, I’m not ready to clear out my shelves. I wouldn’t know who I was if I wasn’t surrounded by hardcover books and paperbacks.

Novels play a key role in Deadlier Than Fiction. My protagonist, professional organizer Crys Ward, is helping her client, Barb, clear out clutter in her den, which is going to be transformed from her granddaughters’ playroom back to an adult space. The den also briefly served as a bedroom for Barb’s mother-in-law in her final days. Among the furniture brought in to make the invalid more at home was a squat bookcase of bestselling novels from the sixties and seventies.

It’s hard for me to believe that not everyone reads novels, including Barb and her husband, Don. Grandma’s books have only been collecting dust, not readers, for years. Barb is happy for Crys to dispose of the old tomes, so she donates them to a bookstore that organizes charitable donations to hospitals and schools. Unfortunately, Don has promised the books to his brother and throws a fit when he realizes they’re gone. To keep her clients happy, Crys assures Don she’ll try to recover them. However, she soon realizes that it’s not going to be easy. Also, she’s not the only one on the hunt for the bestsellers. If she can’t recover them and discover the secret they’re hiding, Crys may reach the end of her career and her life.

There were many great authors in the sixties and seventies, like Herman Wouk (Winds of War), Alex Haley (Roots), Danielle Steel (too many books to mention and still writing!), and James Herriot (All Creatures Great and Small). Some of these authors’ novels are still on my shelves. They’re old friends who introduced me to historic events and places through memorable characters. It was a fun trip down memory lane curating a collection for Crys’s clients.

I also enjoyed creating Back Stack Books, the fictitious used bookstore in Chicago where Crys donated the novels. Old volumes are arranged haphazardly on shelves and treasures are waiting to be discovered in the musty interior. Inside Back Stack, you’ll meet Clark, the intellectual but disorganized owner, and Pen, a former business executive who’s found a new home working in the stacks. Just be careful crossing the busy street when you visit, and watch out for the man in the parking lot who claims to be picking up his dry cleaning. People, like book covers, can be misleading.

Thank you for stopping by. I hope you’ll enjoy Deadlier Than Fiction. Be sure to save room on your shelves or e-readers for future Cluttered Crime mysteries!

Giveaway! I’m giving an Amazon gift card worth $10 to one of Nan’s readers! Just tell me  your favorite place to read. A winner will be chosen at random and announced Sunday.

Deadlier Than Fiction

 

Can she get the right read on this situation before someone ruins the ending?

Professional organizer Crystal Ward is at a crossroads with her business, Organizing Chicago. Her husband, Rick, isn’t on board with online advertising, and their friends and family are running out of referrals. And now her client’s husband is outraged to learn that Crys donated novels he had promised to his brother. Crys’s only hope of salvaging the situation is to recover the titles.

But she shouldn’t have judged those books by their covers. The secret they contain is valuable, and she’s not the only one trying to find them. What’s more, she’s now hiding a secret of her own. She’d promised Rick, a former homicide detective, that she’d avoid sketchy situations that could land her in danger. Her best move? To team up with a retired detective, who suddenly has his own agenda.

With danger mounting, she must use all of her sleuthing skills to sort out friend from foe and fact from fiction before a killer can write her own final chapter.

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