Primary Research When the Raven Mocker returns to Boynton, Oklahoma, in the fall of 1918, he brings with him the great worldwide influenza pandemic that claimed fifty million lives. World War I is still raging in Europe, but Alafair Tucker is fighting her own war as the epidemic sweeps through… Read More »Research and The Return of the Raven Mocker by Donis Casey
Southerners didn’t write the book on eccentricity, but we’ve certainly supplied literature with more than our share of audacious characters and plots. From the Lesters of Tobacco Road and Boo Radley, to Ignatius J. Reilly and the denizens of Yoknapatawpha County, Dixie has produced a bumper crop of picaresque folk.… Read More »The Wild Man, The Goat Woman & the Mississippi Miser by Michael Llewellyn
The Normans were conquerors. Even more, they conquered. It was what they did. It was only natural, then, that eventually one of them would set his sights on Ireland. That someone, in this case, was Richard de Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow. Now, Strongbow wasn’t entirely at fault for what came… Read More »The Normans in Ireland by Sarah Woodbury
One of the many things that drew me to set a historical mystery series in Leadville, Colorado, was the avalanche of crime that descended upon the hapless community during the big silver rush that started in the late 1870s. Footpads, claim- and lot-jumpers, garrotters, bunko steerers, confidence tricksters: to them,… Read More »Law and order (or not) in the Colorado “silver rush” by Ann Parker
If you write a mystery series set in Regency England, eventually you will have to send your sleuth down to Brighton, the seaside playground of the Prince Regent and his cohorts, because the possibilities for crime are too tempting to resist. Those bathing machines and bathhouses used for taking the… Read More »Taking the Cure in Regency Brighton by Libi Astaire