Welcome to Readers Write to Know! I asked you, my readers, what questions they would ask their favorite authors if given the chance. This week, I am so excited to introduce to you mystery author Lisa Lickel. I LOVE cozy mysteries — I cut my reading teeth on them — and her upcoming release The Map Quilt sounds so good. (And, it’s nice to know that (1) I’m not the only person to get an idea for a book during a sermon; and (2) this season’s drought affected gardeners other than myself!)
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Hi, Hallee and friends, thank you so much for having me here today. I’m about to turn fifty-one, and still marveling over the feeling of living half a century and wondering what’s to come. I suppose I’ll have to look back one of these days, but so far…I just keep plowing ahead. My husband and I have two grown sons who are married to lovely women. We live in an old house in eastern Wisconsin and have a big garden which didn’t do so well this year in the drought that struck the Midwest. I didn’t start writing professionally until I was in my forties. I’m an historian but don’t often write history because I’m finicky about details. I love to read more than I love to write and can occasionally be found pretending to play guitar in church.
Tell us about your current release.
I’m celebrating the release of my fifth novel, The Map Quilt, which is…okay, alert people, pay attention here: the sequel to a book that was commissioned by the defunct Barbour Publishing’s Heartsongs: Mysteries book club, The Gold Standard, which came out in 2009 the year the book club closed. It took me two years and the coming and going of agent numero dos to find another publisher for this proposed series of four. Soooo…MuseItUp Publishing of Canada bought the Second Book in the series, then I got the rights back to book number One, which is being cleaned up, re-covered, and re-released September 21 as The Last Bequest.
LOL – those of you still with me: The Map Quilt is a cozy mystery, which means the crime usually takes place off stage and the sleuth is an amateur. The Map Quilt is the story of a woman set to reclaim her family history, and nothing—not bulldozers, not the absence of funds, and especially not the dead body that she may or may not have had anything to do with, will stand in her way. Should Judy and Hart (the main characters) help her? Hart isn’t sure, and since Judy is ready to give birth to their first child any second, his mom’s making eyes at the chief of police which is just plain wrong, and it was his boss who was murdered by the way, life is rather dicey for everyone.
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