Sometimes we encounter a mystery that seemingly has no solution, but wait! If you sharpen those bloodhound skills, could you find some clues that would lead you to the inevitable outcome? In cozy mysteries, a great deal of the fun and intrigue is in the foreshadowing or planting of subtle, shadowy clues and hints that will point to the great denouement and the aha! moment when the mystery is all tied up in a neat little bundle and solved.
Good ideas! Good critique group! As Jane and Peg and I discussed my current mystery in progress (mip) Peg suggested a foreshadowing or clue involving a boxwood maze and a fabulous mansion with a feisty old lady who meets an untimely end. And, of course, all this happens under a lot of mysterious moonlight, in fact, it happens under a blue moon, the second full moon in March.
Peg is reading Murder in a Locked Library by Ellery Adams. This book grabbed her attention from the very first page. The main character is likable and she enjoys reading about the people she has met in previous books by Ms. Adams.
Jane and Mark have just returned from a short trip to Kansas. They visited the Museum on the River in Wichita and the Cosmosphere Space Museum in Hutchinson.
Jane enlivened our discussion by reading parts of a newspaper story that reviewed several children’s books. Jane is also in the middle of writing a marvelous children’s poem, Rocky the Rooster and Ginger the Hen. She inspired me to take another crack at writing a rhymed children’s story. Several of mine sold to various children’s magazines years ago. Actual print children’s magazines, though, are an endangered species, sad to say. There’s something really comforting and exciting about holding a children’s book or magazine, feeling the pages and the bright, colorful pictures and smelling that inimitable new paper smell.
Wednesday was a warm, bright day made even happier by the chatter of good friends and the energizing we always feel at being together and sharing ideas. Chocolate chip cookies and good, hot Folgers added to the flavor of the day. Of course, that night and Thursday, storms moved in, but that’s all right too. There was a hint of the coming change in the weather in the air–a foreshadowing or a clue that we might be in for some atmospheric turbulence. Come to think of it, sometimes life itself is a mystery but we wouldn’t want it not to be, would we?
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