I've changed the blog and included the cover of the second Hera Knightsbridge Master Brewer series.
The second book is Poisoned Pairings. Here's a short blurb on it:
A student helping set up for a beer and food pairings event in Hera Knightsbridge’s microbrewery dies there under suspicious circumstances. At first the death looks like a suicide, but the medical examiner determines it is murder, and Hera and her lover, Deputy Sheriff Jake Ryan again find themselves partners in searching for the killer. Not only does murder threaten the community, but something more explosive has come to the valley—hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a controversial gas drilling technique whose proponents say can take the poor families of the region out of debt. Hera and her fellow brewers are convinced it will contaminate the water supply, as it had in other places, and change forever the pristine beauty of the valley. Connections among the student, the family of a dead brewer, a religious leader and the gas companies lead Hera and Jake into a maze of confusing and conflicting clues. Before the two can unravel the case’s tangled threads, Jake is called away to another job, leaving Hera alone to uncover the identity of the killer before she becomes the next victim.
And a bit more to whet your appetite for beer and murder:
Rafe Oxley, my closest brewing friend, and I sat next to each other in a darkened room in the county office building. My fellow microbrewers in the Butternut Valley and other interested members of the county gathered to watch a video portraying gas exploration using hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a horizontal drilling technique injecting water, sand and chemicals under pressure to shatter underground shale and release the gas trapped inside.
Some individuals in our valley desperate for the income had already signed gas leases. Others worried the drilling would change the valley forever, destroying roads, polluting the air, poisoning our water.
The image on the screen was that of a drilling rig juxtaposed against the verdant background of virgin forest. To its left, a Caterpillar tore a trench through a nearby meadow leaving a gash which ran straight through grass and wildflowers into the scrubby pines behind the site. The camera panned to a fracking pond where the water and chemicals used to force the gas to the surface collected in a landscaping tarp to prevent leakage back into the ground.
The scene shifted to water tumbling over rocks in a small stream. A voice from off-camera said, “Let’s see if we can light this.”
A hand flicked a butane lighter and touched the flame to the water. With a whoosh, the stream caught on fire. The unexpected explosion startled me. I jumped and reached for Rafe’s hand.
“Mrs. Attenby down the road had her well explode on Christmas Eve last year,” said the man who had lit the water.
“The state has stopped the drilling, right?” asked the reporter covering the story.
“Right, but now the water around here is undrinkable. The companies are trucking in safe drinking water to the people who signed drilling leases. ‘Course, since there’s no more gas being taken, the people don’t get their monthly checks.”
Rafe and I glanced at one another, knowing what the other was thinking. Water was the lifeblood of micro brewing. We bought our malt, yeast and hops, shipped them in from other places. Some hops came from as far away as New Zealand. But the main ingredient in our beer, water, came from our wells.
Rafe leaned toward me and whispered what all of us must have been thinking.
“Our wells are connected. We saw that this summer. When one dried up, so did the others. If one well is contaminated, all of them will be. We have to stop this madness.”
Rafe and I turned to look at Teddy Buser, the largest brewer in the valley. He was scowling and shaking his head, the only one of the Butternut brewers who thought making money from natural gas seemed like a good thing. Teddy could afford to buy water, but what of the rest of us? Rafe and I scowled back at him.
The book will be available May 1 from Mainly Murder Press, Amazon, and your favorite indie bookseller.
Showing posts with label beer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beer. Show all posts
Monday, April 2, 2012
Monday, July 25, 2011
A day to curl up with a good book
This morning was cloudy. By noon we got rain, a real downpour, although we could use more. I thought I'd never say that after all the rain in May and early June.
The second Hera Knightsbridge Mystery
Food and Brews
Countdown to Motorcycle Widowhood: Murder on Route 66 hits the road
The cowboy is off on his book promotion trip, leaving around the middle of August. He left the date open. I hope he doesn't think he can sneak off, not with those pipes! If you live in the southwest or anywhere near Roue 66 and hear a roaring in the distance, that's him riding by. Give him a wave and wish him well. Send me some cyber scotch in which to drown my loneliness.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
I go back to high school for an afternoon
My garden changes daily, weekly. This was last week. this week these flowers are gone and have been replaced by lilies, hydrangeas, late blooming iris, and peonies. Who knows what will be there in a few days. But this beauty makes it difficult to sit in front of my computer and write. Or go to school.
Genre Literature in High School?
This week I had the opportunity to visit a local high school English class made up of graduating seniors. The instructor asked me to talk about writing because she said some of her students were interested in writing and getting published. I usually believe adolescents would rather win the lottery and, if they did, would give up the book thing altogether.
It’s been many years since I’ve been in front of a class of young adults, but this one seemed not unlike those freshman classes I taught about ten years ago. The setting was not ideal for talking about the publishing enterprise or any other subject for that matter. These were, as I said before, graduating seniors, and their minds seemed to be more attuned to the summer ahead than to the woman sitting at the front of the room yammering away about writing, research, and the difficulty of getting work published. The room was in the new section of the school, the section the builders goofed on when putting in the air circulation system. The air conditioning did not work well (not at all), and the windows didn’t open. It was hot in there. If I had been one of the students in that room, I would have been asleep after the first five minutes, but to their credit, no one dropped off.
They were polite, but not intensely interested in what I had to say. But their questions were telling. One young man said he liked to read and where could he buy my book. His tone conveyed a sense of impatience, implying that I could have come into the room and said, “Buy this at blank store.” I don’t think he was one of those who had aspirations to write, but I was darn glad to hear he read.
Another guy asked the bottom line question. “Can you make any money at this?” I told him Stephan King did, but I didn’t. Then I doubly disappointed him by saying I didn’t think I ever would get rich off my cozy mysteries, but that I continued to write because I loved it.
When I related stories about researching my topic, microbrewing, I stirred a certain admiration among the guys sitting in the back corner. “Cool,” they said or some contemporary equivalent of that phrase in teen talk.
I asked them a few questions also, and I want to share the answers with you because their replies tell us something about how we are educating the readers of the future.
Who knew the name Agatha Christie garnered a negative response from everyone in the room with the exception of the teacher. When I asked what literature they read in class, I was told they read mainstream literature and the classics. That translated into an abundance of work by men over women even factoring in sensitivity to the gender issue in contemporary work. I was pleased to hear they had just finished The Life of Bees, which the young women liked and the young men were lukewarm about. They had read no genre literature at all, yet I suspect that some of them did read it on their own. The popularity of Harry Potter and Vampire themes is not because their parents have these under their pillows.
Do I think genre literature should be part of what seniors read in their classes? Well, of course, but I’m biased because that’s what I write. Yet we all know that’s often what we read. The other night a woman of my generation said, “I love mysteries. Always have. For me it began with Nancy Drew.”
What I’m curious about is how students today think of their private choices in literature in comparison with their assigned reading in English classes. It may help explain the attitude I encountered in one of my early writing groups. The leader told the group and me that she’d “never read a mystery.” The disdainful curling of her lips was a precursor to the attitude she displayed at each meeting when I read from my first cozy manuscript.
As an academic, I was used to the snobbery practiced by some of my colleagues. I think of genre literature as literature with guidelines or writing habits specific to the individual genre.
I hope I successfully communicated my love of the mystery genre and its particular characteristics to that class, so that its members never are made to feel defensive in choice of book to read. Or to write.
This week I had the opportunity to visit a local high school English class made up of graduating seniors. The instructor asked me to talk about writing because she said some of her students were interested in writing and getting published. I usually believe adolescents would rather win the lottery and, if they did, would give up the book thing altogether.
It’s been many years since I’ve been in front of a class of young adults, but this one seemed not unlike those freshman classes I taught about ten years ago. The setting was not ideal for talking about the publishing enterprise or any other subject for that matter. These were, as I said before, graduating seniors, and their minds seemed to be more attuned to the summer ahead than to the woman sitting at the front of the room yammering away about writing, research, and the difficulty of getting work published. The room was in the new section of the school, the section the builders goofed on when putting in the air circulation system. The air conditioning did not work well (not at all), and the windows didn’t open. It was hot in there. If I had been one of the students in that room, I would have been asleep after the first five minutes, but to their credit, no one dropped off.
They were polite, but not intensely interested in what I had to say. But their questions were telling. One young man said he liked to read and where could he buy my book. His tone conveyed a sense of impatience, implying that I could have come into the room and said, “Buy this at blank store.” I don’t think he was one of those who had aspirations to write, but I was darn glad to hear he read.
Another guy asked the bottom line question. “Can you make any money at this?” I told him Stephan King did, but I didn’t. Then I doubly disappointed him by saying I didn’t think I ever would get rich off my cozy mysteries, but that I continued to write because I loved it.
When I related stories about researching my topic, microbrewing, I stirred a certain admiration among the guys sitting in the back corner. “Cool,” they said or some contemporary equivalent of that phrase in teen talk.
I asked them a few questions also, and I want to share the answers with you because their replies tell us something about how we are educating the readers of the future.
Who knew the name Agatha Christie garnered a negative response from everyone in the room with the exception of the teacher. When I asked what literature they read in class, I was told they read mainstream literature and the classics. That translated into an abundance of work by men over women even factoring in sensitivity to the gender issue in contemporary work. I was pleased to hear they had just finished The Life of Bees, which the young women liked and the young men were lukewarm about. They had read no genre literature at all, yet I suspect that some of them did read it on their own. The popularity of Harry Potter and Vampire themes is not because their parents have these under their pillows.
Do I think genre literature should be part of what seniors read in their classes? Well, of course, but I’m biased because that’s what I write. Yet we all know that’s often what we read. The other night a woman of my generation said, “I love mysteries. Always have. For me it began with Nancy Drew.”
What I’m curious about is how students today think of their private choices in literature in comparison with their assigned reading in English classes. It may help explain the attitude I encountered in one of my early writing groups. The leader told the group and me that she’d “never read a mystery.” The disdainful curling of her lips was a precursor to the attitude she displayed at each meeting when I read from my first cozy manuscript.
As an academic, I was used to the snobbery practiced by some of my colleagues. I think of genre literature as literature with guidelines or writing habits specific to the individual genre.
I hope I successfully communicated my love of the mystery genre and its particular characteristics to that class, so that its members never are made to feel defensive in choice of book to read. Or to write.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Why beer for a scotch drinker?
I'd like to tell you a bit more about myself, to make clear why I created a microbrewer as my protagonsit in my new mystery A Deadly Draught. Let me give you a quick tour through my drinking history. I'll do this over several postings. I call it "Memories of Brew" and I'll begin with the early years.
Memories of Brew
The Early Years
Let me tell you a bit about myself. If you already know me, then the question you may ask is, why are you writing about beer? Aren’t you a wine drinker? Or a scotch drinker? Or didn’t you say you like to sip pomegranate cosmos in the summer out by your trout stream?
Yes to all those questions, but beer and me, well, we go way back. And perhaps if beer hadn’t betrayed me in my early college years, I’d have discovered microbrews a long time ago.
I was raised on a dairy farm in Illinois in a family where the only booze in the house was a dusty old bottle of Mogan David wine left over from a Thanksgiving dinner right after the war, that’s WWII. As a child of three, I found it, and then my mom found me, a little silly on the back porch floor.
A continued interest in spirits continued throughout my preschool years fueled by the attentions of my father’s sister, my Aunt Fernie, a six foot tall, redheaded, blue-eyed, opinionated woman who often baby sat for me when my mother was not feeling well, which was often (I wasn’t a bad child, but I was a trying one, much like Aunt Fernie). Fernie worked as a part-time bartender at one of the local bars called the Brass Rail. My mother discovered years later that Fernie was a creative babysitter who took me with her to work, sat me on a bar stool, and served me Shirley Temples. I found them not so exciting as that bottle of Mogan David.
I didn’t learn much about beer, but I did get insight into beer drinkers. First, you can drink a lot of beer if you run back and forth into the bathroom frequently. You can also make your beer regain its head by putting salt into it. Most importantly, beer is cheap so you can drink a lot of it and, you know, run to the bathroom. And if you want to make the brew even more healthy than it already is (think cereal in liquid form) dump in tomato juice. It’s called a red one.
By the time I entered kindergarten, I considered myself quite sophisticated. My mother considered me corrupted.
Memories of Brew
The Early Years
Let me tell you a bit about myself. If you already know me, then the question you may ask is, why are you writing about beer? Aren’t you a wine drinker? Or a scotch drinker? Or didn’t you say you like to sip pomegranate cosmos in the summer out by your trout stream?
Yes to all those questions, but beer and me, well, we go way back. And perhaps if beer hadn’t betrayed me in my early college years, I’d have discovered microbrews a long time ago.
I was raised on a dairy farm in Illinois in a family where the only booze in the house was a dusty old bottle of Mogan David wine left over from a Thanksgiving dinner right after the war, that’s WWII. As a child of three, I found it, and then my mom found me, a little silly on the back porch floor.
A continued interest in spirits continued throughout my preschool years fueled by the attentions of my father’s sister, my Aunt Fernie, a six foot tall, redheaded, blue-eyed, opinionated woman who often baby sat for me when my mother was not feeling well, which was often (I wasn’t a bad child, but I was a trying one, much like Aunt Fernie). Fernie worked as a part-time bartender at one of the local bars called the Brass Rail. My mother discovered years later that Fernie was a creative babysitter who took me with her to work, sat me on a bar stool, and served me Shirley Temples. I found them not so exciting as that bottle of Mogan David.
I didn’t learn much about beer, but I did get insight into beer drinkers. First, you can drink a lot of beer if you run back and forth into the bathroom frequently. You can also make your beer regain its head by putting salt into it. Most importantly, beer is cheap so you can drink a lot of it and, you know, run to the bathroom. And if you want to make the brew even more healthy than it already is (think cereal in liquid form) dump in tomato juice. It’s called a red one.
By the time I entered kindergarten, I considered myself quite sophisticated. My mother considered me corrupted.
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