Welcome back to Mysterious Writers which has been on hiatus since Hurricane Harvey. I've missed interacting with guest authors and visitors to this site and will continue to feature veteran writers, including some bestsellers, who will not only talk about their new books but offer advice to fledglings. My guests may even reveal what inspired their mystery/suspense novels and what their writing lives are like. Each week a new author will appear here, occasionally offering a two-part series. So please join us to ask questions of the novelists  and offer comments. We'll also offer signed copies ..read more

Bill Kirton began his career as an English actor, playwright and broadcast script writer. He now balances his police procedural novels with promotional work for North Sea oil companies at his home in Aberdeen, Scotland. Bill,  Tell us about your books.  My efforts have been going into writing three books for students in a series of ‘Brilliant’ books published by Pearson. They’re called Brilliant Study Skills, Brilliant Essays and Brilliant Dissertations. The titles (I hope) are self-explanatory. But the latest novel to appear was The Figurehead. It’s a historical crime novel set in Aberde ..read more

John Locke is the author of How I Sold One Million eBooks in Five Months, which includes more than a dozen thrillers and westerns selling for 99 cents. John, why, after all your business successes, did you decide to write full time? Actually, I’m still a part-time writer, with a full-time job that keeps me busy most days. But I’ve wanted to write books since I was in high school. I’m stopping to do a mental calculation. Could that have possibly been 43 years ago? Wow. I wanted to try my hand at writing all these years, but never got around to it because life kept getting in the way. I kno ..read more

by Leighton Gage If you come to visit us in Brazil, you’ll occasionally see a stand where the offerings look like this: Literatura de Cordel (lit. “cord literature”) derives its name from the way the wares are often displayed, i.e. hung by a cord, usually with the aid of clothespins. Such stands are less common in the southern part of the country, but are a feature in many of the fairs and markets of the northeast, principally in the States of Pernambuco, Paraiba and Ceará. These little booklets are the last survivors of a form of popular literature with which an inhabitant of ..read more

by Carolyn Hart When I was eleven, I decided to be a reporter when I grew up. I had no idea I would end up devoting my life to murder. I worked on school newspapers and majored in journalism at the University of Oklahoma, back in the days of hot type, pica poles, and Speed Graphics. In j-school, I wore a trench coat, smoked Chesterfields (successfully discarded many years ago) and was sure I would be the next Maggie Higgins. But, as the adage informs, Man proposes, God disposes. I met a young law student, we married, and I worked on a local newspaper, then for public information at th ..read more