Barbara's Blog

  It's being an exciting week! My publishers at Severn House just sent me this VERY nice review from Booklist for the new Ben January book, "Death and Hard Cider." It’s 1840, and William Henry Harrison is making his run for the American presidency. Professional pianist and amateur sleuth Benjamin January has been hired to play at festivities in New Orleans. When a woman is murdered, and Benjamin’s friend is accused of the crime, he discovers that the search for the truth will put him up against some of the most powerful people in the country. This is the nineteenth Benjamin January mystery, but it is in every way as fresh as the first in the series, 1997’s A Free Man of Color. January is a wonderful character: he was born to enslaved parents but was freed when he was a child, received his medical training in Paris (he’s a surgeon), and now makes his living as a musician. He’s not a professional sleuth, and in fact we get the impression he’d be perfectly content if he neve

A whole slew of my books on sale from Open Road - digital - on Friday, April 15, for $1.99 - US only, it looks like. Stranger At The Wedding - This was my stand-alone fantasy which came out of a challenge at a workshop: somebody wanted me to demonstrate how I put a story together. I said I started with characters, often using people I'd seen in movies. They said, "How would you put together a story whose hero & heroine were Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn?" I thought about it for a moment and came out with the complete plot to this book - no demonstration. Just, "Here's the story..." Didn't help them much, but it's a pretty entertaining book. Magicians of Night - This was Book 2 of the du-ology "Sun-Cross," about a wizard who comes to OUR universe only to find himself in Nazi Germany working for the Occult Bureau. Open Road may have had the first volume, "Rainbow Abyss," on sale a couple of weeks ago. I'm just starting