At last I am settled in my new home and am in the process of editing A Crisis in Cyprus, the fourth book in the Elspeth Duff mystery series. I hope to have it published by February 2016. The editing process takes more time than I wish it did. For those of you who missed…

Please forgive me for having been remiss in keeping my blog up to date. I recently made the major decision to return to the States after five years living and traveling in Europe. A week ago I arrived in Point Roberts, Washington, a small community about twenty miles south of Vancouver, BC, and I plan…

I love Malta. This wonderful nation appears in almost all of my novels. Elspeth is reacquainted with her friend Richard Munro there, and their developing relationship continues throughout my books. In A Secret in Singapore, due out this coming winter, the story opens in Malta, and later Elspeth visits Richard there in her search for the murderer of her fiancé…

Now that A Scandal in Stresa is published, both in paperback and Kindle format, and A Murder in Malta has been revised, my editor and I are busily working on A Secret in Singapore, the third in the Elspeth Duff mystery series. The murder of Elspeth Duff’s fiancé, Malcolm Buchanan, at the University of Cambridge in nineteen…

Many of my readers have commented on the typographical errors in A Murder in Malta. I never was keen on my old copy editor nor trusted my final review of the text, and therefore I asked the editor of my new book, Rachel Marsh, to review A Murder in Malta. Her eagle eyes found the mistakes,…

For the last ten days, while my editor is doing a final review of A Scandal in Stresa (the second Elspeth Duff mystery), I have taken a complete break and gone to the seashore. I purposely chose a location that would never appear in my mysteries. (Too many  of my vacations are really working trips to…

Recently I have been given some constructive criticism of A Murder in Malta, which I plan to use in my upcoming books. (Hopefully A Scandal in Stresa will be out by September.) I also have received some amusing comments. My favorite one was from a woman who absolutely insisted that anyone who went to Blair School…

As I talk to more and more people who have read A Murder in Malta, I am amazed at the different take they have on my characters. When I first was in the process of developing Elspeth Duff and Richard Munro, a fellow author advised me to find photographs of a real person whom I thought…

As a mystery writer, I am always faced with the predicament of using existing places. This morning I was working on proof reading A Scandal in Stresa (a task I hate, by the way) before sending it along to my editor. I got to a passage where I had Elspeth Duff and Lord Kennington having…

I try to travel in May and October, before and after the summer school holidays. Once you start reading my series, you will see that they are often set at these two times of year. The weather is usually good and the scenery gorgeous, particularly when I am in the countryside. But increasingly this has…