Blogs

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.

Where is Amish country? If you were to ask that question in Ohio, the answer would be Holmes County. There we have the largest Amish settlement in the world. In truth, this region of Plain People sprawls out over all of the adjoining counties, too, but Holmes County is the center of it. Its rolling hills and secluded pasture lands reminded the earliest Amish settlers of their lands in the foothills of Germany and Switzerland, and the first group settled here in the Killbuck Valley in 1807, led by Jakob Miller, who brought a group over from Somerset County in Pennsylvania.

I'm not sure when my TBR (to be read) pile of books got out of hand. Maybe it started when I joined a professional writers group and started to buy members' books at signings. Then there were books purchased at conferences, books bought because publishers suggested reading books in their lines before submitting, and books published by my favorite authors. Sometimes someone gave me books they'd read, or I got books as gifts. I also liked to browse book stores. Some books have short shelf lives, so if you wanted those, you had to grab them while they were out.

It started in Wal-Mart about ten years ago – Amish men stepping to the cash register with their checkbooks, after all the items had been scanned. Before that, all such purchases would have been done with cash. And an Amish father might typically carry several hundred dollars in cash to town, enough at least to cover all of the stops the family wanted to make. You’d see the fathers and grandfathers clustered just inside the doors, or outside on the Wal-Mart parking lot, passing the time of day, while the women shopped for food, or shoes, whatever.

Last night I had one of those common nightmares--you are late for class, unprepared for the exam, and you can't even seem to get your clothes on. I just finished a very short story on my blog about these nightmares (http://michaelberes.blogs...). You can read it front to back, or back to front.

For the latest in finding out who's naughty or nice:

http://www.huffingtonpost...

Thanks to the success of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson stories, one would be safe saying that the series is the very foundation of the mystery genre. Mystery fans all have their favorite series novelists (some of mine include Sue Grafton, Lillian Jackson Braun, Rett MacPherson and Carolyn Hart). From Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple to Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight, readers who love a good puzzle have a multitude of settings and characters they can return to again and again, some cozy and comfortable, some more edgy and tragic.