Blogs

Naomi Johnson reviews NSTW at The Drowning Machine: "Although I thoroughly enjoyed the first Genevich story, The Little Sleep, I wasn't sure that the narcoleptic detective would be as convincing in a second book. No worries. This second book is even better, with more weight and a tighter plot."

In Holmes County, Ohio, the largest Amish population in the world can be found sprawled across the rolling hills and down in the narrow valleys that so much reminded the first Amish settlers here of their homelands in Germany. It’s a diverse Amish population, and we have everything from the most conservative Schwartzentruber Amish to the rather more urbane and liberal sects who interact extensively with the non-Amish, or English, population.

From literary agent Colleen Linday's (FinePrint Literary Management) blog:

I am thrilled to announce that the good folks at Backspace (an incredible online writers community THAT YOU SHOULD JOIN IMMEDIATELY! GO! NOW!) have once again graciously agreed to donate two scholarships to their upcoming Backspace Writers Conference & Agent-Author Seminar, which will be held in New York City from May 27th through the 29th.

Courthouse square in Millersburg, Ohio, is often a setting used in my Ohio Amish Mysteries. On a prominent block in the center of town, there is a red-brick jail, a civil war monument, and the ornate sandstone Holmes County Courthouse, all surrounding a central lawn. I thought you would like to see pictures of these landmarks, and I have already posted a photograph of the jail. Here is one of the courthouse. They say that when it was first being built, you could see the gleam of the shiny copper top from the high ground in Salt Creek Township, twelve miles to the north.

In my Ohio Amish Mysteries, soon to be republished as the Amish-Country Mysteries by Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA), the old red-brick Holmes County Jail is featured prominently, and I thought my readers might like to see what it looks like. Here is a picture taken just a few years ago, after Holmes County moved its real jail to a modern facility in the countryside north of town.

We have had snow on the ground in northern Ohio since Christmas, and today we are getting another good dusting. It isn't as bad as last year - at least not yet. Then, we had over a foot of snow on the ground for nearly three months, and about a year ago in the middle of that, I was out in Holmes County to see how Amish people there were coping with the snow and cold, and I got this photo of a new parochial school on Salt Creek Township Lane 601, just south of Fredericksburg, Ohio.

Finished second of 14 part Mort and Millie mystery series and the first..Fatal Betrayal is in the process of being made into a movie. I am now working on the third in the series The Wrong Verdict..

In what has lately been a very hard winter here in Ohio, we got a break in temperatures these last few days, and I made a trip to Holmes County to see what the Amish people there were doing with the respite. In typical fashion, they were out using the day to good purpose, mucking out the stalls and loading up manure spreaders. Almost everywhere we turned, we saw teams hitched to red spreaders, walking slowly over the fields, pitching manure left, right and aft, preparing the soil for spring planting, or working over a field planted earlier with winter wheat.

Empowered by the Estate of Leslie Charteris to write new adventures of Simon Templar, I penned CAPTURE THE SAINT, the first new Saint novel since 1983's Salvage for the Saint. Without a TV series, however, publishers saw little market for Saint adventures. I had achieved my life long dream of writing Saint books, only to have the market shrink faster than an all wool sweater in an industrial dryer.

If you’re like me, you are worried. Times being what they are, we are worried about the economy, we are worried about politics, and we are worried about global conflict. It’s an almost irresistible sense of worry that draws us to the news reports each day to learn what the latest crisis has been. Or to learn what has become of our retirement accounts. Or to listen to the politicians talk about what should be done to fix this or fix that. I think it is an affliction—this modern, electronic, hyper-sense of doom. And I often wish I were immune to it. Like the Amish are.