But, What If…

What if your small hometown had always seemed placid, peaceful, filled with honest and hard-working people, but you suddenly found that beneath this calm exterior, a deadly secret threatened your life? What would you do? Ned McNeil is faced with this decision in each of her four cozy mysteries, in Moonlight Can Be Murder when […]

The Shape on the Stairs

The Shape on the Stairs

Thunder growled, ever closer. Those empty rooms of the house must surely be too dark for a proper photographing session, which was a relief, because I didn’t relish the idea of being inside them.             The Saunders Place hadn’t been lived in, since, who knew when. With no heirs, and no living person to lay […]

A Little of Old, a Little of New

Do you know how scary it is to take responsibility for publishing your own book? Well, let me tell you, for a first-timer, it’s pretty scary. I’m determined, though. So, one day soon, maybe Ned McNeil’s brand-new fourth mystery will be on Amazon. I hope. As I’m feeling sort of antsy, I’ve turned this morning […]

About Those Words

Words! We speak them, write them, sing them. I’ve read a theory that words we say remain in the air forever and could be picked up on the correct frequency by the correct electrical receptors. That sounds a bit far-fetched, but be that as it may, sometimes words lodge in our hearts and mind and […]

The Tornado That Destroyed a Town, Part 2

The Tornado That Destroyed a Town, Part 2

  This is the second and final installment of my May 5, 1985 Daily Press article about the tornado which destroyed Peggs, Oklahoma on May 2, 1920. In 1920, Walter Neel lived with his parents, brothers and sisters on the Gid Morgan farm, two and a fourth miles southeast of Peggs. The storm went a […]

The Genius of Shakespeare

For goodness sake, it is not a foregone conclusion that all is doom and gloom. I refuse to budge an inch from my belief that all will be well.  All the phrases in italics are attributed to William Shakespeare, that great master of words, who was born on this day in 1564 and died on this day in […]