Virtual Tour & #Giveaway for Happy Homicides 4: Fall Into Murder by Various Authors

Welcome to my stop on the Virtual Tour, presented by Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours, for Happy Homicides 4: Fall Into Crime.  Please leave a comment or question for the authors to let them know you stopped by.  You may enter the tour wide giveaway by filling out the Rafflecopter form below.  You may enter Leslie Deihl’s giveaway by leaving a comment below.  You may also enter to win a copy of this anthology by filling out the second Rafflecopter form below.  

Happy Homicides 4: Fall Into Crime

by Joanna Campbell Slan, Linda Gordon Hengerer, Carole W. Price, Lesley A. Diehl, Nancy Jill Thames, Teresa Trent, Maggie Toussaint, Anna Celeste Burke, Randy Rawls, Nancy J. Cohen, Terry Ambrose, and Deborah Sharp

About this book:

Joanna Campbell Slan / Vendetta: A Cara Mia Delgatto Mystery – The House of Refuge on Gilbert’s Bar is known for its 150-year history as a way station for shipwrecked sailors. But when Cara Mia visits, the museum becomes the scene of a crime.

Linda Gordon Hengerer / Dying for School Tea: A Beach Tea Shop Novella – Chelsea Powell and her sisters are providing treats for Citrus Beach High School’s freshman orientation. Can they solve the murder of the beloved softball coach before someone else dies?

Carole W. Price / The Glass Birdhouse – Glass artist Bella hopes to find clues about her student’s death in the woman’s unfinished glass birdhouse.

Lesley A. Diehl / Bobbing for Murder – A visit from Darcie’s family is always chaotic, and this time the relatives bamboozle Darcie into having a Halloween party. It’s a decision that definitely comes back to haunt her.

Nancy Jill Thames / Raven House – When a reporter is murdered after a fundraiser at the historic Raven House, the police call on Jillian and her Yorkie Teddy to help them investigate.

Teresa Trent / Falling for Murder – Helpful hints columnist Betsy Livingston is an expert at household organization but her skills are put to the test when she’s called upon to conduct an efficiency review for a haunted house.

Maggie Toussaint / Dead Men Tell Tales – In this third installment of the Lindsey & Ike romantic mystery novella series, things don’t add up after a suspicious hunting accident. The more Sheriff Ike Harper and newspaper editor Lindsey McKay dig, the more questions they find.

Anna Celeste Burke / All Hallow’s Eve Heist – Date night for Georgie Shaw and handsome detective Jack Wheeler goes terribly wrong. A botched heist at Marvelous Marley World has everyone scrambling as trigger-happy bad guys head for the Halloween celebration in Arcadia Park.

Randy Rawls /Accident, Suicide, or Murder – Retired policeman Jonathan Boykin’s primary interest is improving his golf, but a grieving father’s request to investigate his son’s suspicious death is an entirely different ballgame.

Nancy J. Cohen / Haunted Hair Nights – As a new stepmother, hairstylist Marla Vail hopes to win brownie points by helping her daughter with a school haunted house project. Marla has her work cut out for her when she stumbles over a corpse on the spooky estate grounds.

Terry Ambrose / Spirit in the Rock – An invitation to a museum’s grand opening turns into a showdown with the spirit world for amateur sleuth Wilson McKenna.

Deborah Sharp / Haunting in Himmarshee – When a ghost comes to call, Mace must sort out the haunted from the homicidal in Himmarshee, Florida.

Bonus Story—
Joanna Campbell Slan /Kiki Lowenstein and the Doodoo – A fun family outings turns into a fearful fright, but Kiki Lowenstein is good at sniffing out bad guys.

Why No Men in Bobbing for Murder by Lesley A. Diehl

Bobbing for Murder, my novella in Happy Homicides 4: Fall into Crime features three unusual protagonists: Aunt Nozzie, Darcie’s six foot tall aunt with red hair and Darcie’s two grandmothers, Grandma Papa, Aunt Nozzie’s tiny, passionate about recycling mother and Darcie’s father’s grandmother, Grandma Mama, Swedish in her own unique way. There is a noticeable lack of male family members in this story, a vacuum the family seems quite used to and blasé about.

The family comes from the Midwest, a place I’m familiar with, having grown up there in a farm family. I think there’s an interesting interplay between genetic make-up and life on the farm especially for men. For the generation of men in my family and in the family in the novella, heart disease is not uncommon especially when paired with the high fat and cholesterol diet of those farm families. I grew up eating meat three meals a day. My family didn’t consider fish a protein, and the only form it took in my house was fish sticks. My father’s favorite snack was saltines with about a quarter inch of butter spread on each one. That’s a diet a person can only tolerate if paired with the physical exertion common for a farmer. My dad gained twenty plus pounds when he retired from running the farm. He continued to eat the same diet and died of a heart attack a year later.

Certainly some of the male relatives in Bobbing for Murder succumbed to heart disease and death from dietary issues, but it’s probably likely that the heart disease that got them was the result of marrying one of these unusual women. As the narrator of the story, Darcie suggests it’s because the women in her family are hard on the men. Aunt Nozzie and the grandmothers have a zest for living that ignores the rational. It’s hard to imagine any man flourishing, even enduring a family so dominated by females with such overpowering physical presence and eccentric personalities bordering on character disorders.

Family members assume that the lack of men in the family can’t be accounted for entirely by diet or the larger number of women to men with increasing age. All the family women share Darcie’s belief that the men disappear due to the interplay of domineering female personalities and what Darcie calls, “a weakness in the Y chromosome,” not that any of these gals is sanguine about the overabundance of estrogen in the air. Aunt Nozzie and the grandmothers seem to possess “guy” radar. Aunt Nozzie immediately shows an interest in the president of Darcie’s college, and the grandmothers almost come to blows competing for the next door neighbor. Between Aunt Nozzie’s compulsion to restart her cottage industry, her love for driving her motor home fast (and not well) and her pursuit of the college president, how can murder not be just a step away?

In the past, the Thanksgiving holiday has meant trouble for the gals. Aunt Nozzie lost her husband to murder and one of her boyfriends to an unfortunate incident with a bowl of mashed potatoes. All of these losses occurred at a Thanksgiving dinner, making this holiday one the family approached with tentative celebratory joy. Aunt Nozzie seems to have forgotten about what happens when the family celebrates a holiday, or perhaps she assumes only Thanksgiving comes with extraordinary bad luck for male guests (Aunt Nozzie is a true optimist in the romance department).  Darcie may be the only one of the group uncertain that a Halloween party won’t result in another bout of men biting the bullet.

The reader may come to understand why men just aren’t interested in joining this family clan, but even Darcie, now divorced and worried she may also be saddled with the family curse for driving away prospective suitors finds the state trooper at her door irresistible. Like her Aunt Nozzie she’s just not willing to back down even in the face of a hired killer.

The grandmothers decide to go trick or treating. At what age did you stop trick or treating? What would you do if two gals in their seventies came to your door trick or treating? Leave a comment below, and I’ll pick a winner for the first novel in my Eve Appel mysteries, A Secondhand Murder.

Bio for

Lesley A. Diehl

Lesley retired from her life as a professor of psychology and reclaimed her country roots by moving to a small cottage in the Butternut River Valley in Upstate New York.  In the winter she migrates to old Florida—cowboys, scrub palmetto and open fields of grazing cattle, a place where spurs still jingle in the post office, and gators make golf a contact sport.  Back north, the shy ghost inhabiting the cottage serves as her literary muse.  When not writing, she gardens, cooks, frequents yard sales and renovates the 1874 cottage with the help of her husband, two cats and, of course, Fred the ghost, who gives artistic direction to their work.

She is the author of a number of mystery series and mysteries as well as short stories. The third book in the Eve Appel murders (from Camel Press) A Sporting Murder was awarded a Readers’ Favorite Five Star Award and her short story Gator Aid a Sleuthfest (2009) short story first place. She hopes the Aunt Nozzie and grandmothers stories will not result in either her being thrown out of her family or possession by one of her deceased family members.        

Visit her on her website:  www.lesleyadiehl.com

Comes with a bonus file of recipes and craft tips!

All for just 99 cents!

Buy Link:  Amazon

Great Escapes Book Tour – August 29 – September 11, 2016

Find out about the authors on their webpages below.

Joanna Campbell Slan

Linda Gordon Hengerer

Carol W. Price

Lesley A. Diehl

Nancy Jill Thames

Teresa Trent

Maggie Toussaint

Anna Celeste Burke

Randy Rawls

Nancy J. Cohen

Terry Ambrose

and Deborah Sharp

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Tour Participants

August 29 – Reading Is My SuperPower – SPOTLIGHT

August 30 – Cozy Up With Kathy – GUEST POST

August 31 – The Pulp and Mystery Shelf – SPOTLIGHT

August 31 – 3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, &, Sissy, Too! – SPOTLIGHT

September 1 – A Holland Reads – GUEST POST

September 1 – fuonlyknew – SPOTLIGHT

September 2 – The Girl with Book Lungs – SPOTLIGHT

September 2 – My Funny View of Life – SPOTLIGHT

September 3 – Bibliophile Reviews – REVIEW, INTERVIEW

September 3 – LibriAmoriMiei – REVIEW

September 4 – Book Babble – SPOTLIGHT

September 4 – Sleuth Cafe – GUEST POST

September 5 – Laura’s Interests – REVIEW

September 6 – StoreyBook Reviews – GUEST POST

September 6 – Victoria’s Pages of Romance – SPOTLIGHT

September 7 – Back Porchervations – REVIEW

September 8 – Community Bookstop – REVIEW 

September 8 – Queen of All She Reads – GUEST POST

September 9 – Brooke Blogs – REVIEW, GUEST POST

September 10 – Island Confidential – INTERVIEW

September 11 – Shelley’s Book Case – REVIEW, GUEST POST

September 11 – Kaisy Daisy’s Corner – REVIEW

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