Top 5 Things to Love about Murder Mysteries by K.C. Wells – Guest Blog

Long and Short Reviews welcomes K.C. Wells who is visiting with us to celebrate the recent release of Roots of Evil, the second book in her Merrychurch Mysteries.

Top 5 Things to Love about Murder Mysteries

I’ve been rereading a lot of Agatha Christies lately, and watching a lot of detective dramas on TV. It helps when you’re writing a cozy mystery, trust me. But I’d be doing this even if they weren’t for research purposes, and here’s why…

1. The settings. I LOVE the quaint little English villages of Miss Marple and Midsomer Murders! Everyone knows everybody else, and yet there are a ton of secrets just waiting to be discovered. I love the leafy lanes, the village green, the charming thatched cottages, the olde tea shop, the nosy post mistress, the old church…. It all goes to set the scene, and it’s something quintessentially English.

2. The detectives. They are all so different. Miss Marple has her method, which usually involves relating people and situations to what goes on in her own village. Poirot has his ‘little grey cells’. The police in Midsomer Murders are usually very lucky when information just falls into their laps…

3. The plots. Because it’s never a straightforward murder. Oh come on. Once there was a man who was staked out on his front lawn, then the killer catapulted his prized bottles of vintage wine, using a trebuchet – which of course killed him outright when they hit him on the head. Death by red wine. Now, that’s novel! And it’s always a convoluted trail to discover the killer

4. The characters. Because if it was just the detectives and the killer, it would be boring. I love how you have some characters that are clearly there to be disliked. This was a lesson I learned well in my present WIP – my beta readers had forgotten who the victim was, but they were all praying it was this one unpleasant writer. (BTW it was LOL)

It’s vitally important to have an open mind when dealing http://deeprootsmag.org/2013/10/28/elbert-hubbards-mozart/ sildenafil without prescription with erectile dysfunction. Taking them together cialis on line is amazingly unsafe to wellbeing. Propecia is only meant for use by men and if it is used by children or any person below the age of 18 years, then contacting poison control room for viagra generic cialis emergency treatment would be required. The digestive system is thrown into a mess with the effects side effects of viagra of such oral solutions. 5. Discovering the truth. There’s a series called Endeavour here in the UK, and I know that it will get to the last ten minutes, and suddenly the detective will pull all the clues together – clues I didn’t see. That’s what makes writing a murder mystery so difficult – and so much fun. You have to give away just enough information so that at the end, readers can say, ‘Ohhhhh. I forgot about that! Of course it was him/her.’

Writing a murder mystery is a challenge. Building a world is delightful. Weaving a plot is… tricky.
But damn, it’s fun!

Many consider Naomi Teedle the village witch. Most people avoid her except when they have need of her herbs and potions. She lives alone on the outskirts of Merrychurch, and that’s fine by everyone—old Mrs. Teedle is not the most pleasant of people. But when she is found murdered, her mouth bulging with her own herbs and roots, suddenly no one has a bad word to say about her. Jonathon de Mountford is adjusting to life up at the manor house, but it’s not a solitary life: pub landlord Mike Tattersall sees to that. Jonathon is both horrified to learn of the recent murder and confused by the sudden reversal of public opinion. Surely someone in the village had reason to want her dead? He and Mike decide it’s time for them to step in and “help” the local police with their investigation. Only problem is, their sleuthing uncovers more than one suspect—and the list is getting longer…

About the Author: .C. Wells started writing in 2012, although the idea of writing a novel had been in her head since she was a child. But after reading that first gay romance in 2009, she was hooked.

She now writes full time, and the line of men in her head, clamouring to tell their story, is getting longer and longer. If the frequent visits by plot bunnies are anything to go by, that’s not about to change anytime soon.

K.C. loves to hear from readers.

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