As a guest writer on LeAnna Shields’s podcast,The Cozy Sleuth, to talk about the second book in my Leah Contarini Mysteries (If Two of Them Are Dead). My books aren’t cozies, but still, LeAnna and I got into such an interesting conversation, we had no time to address all of the interview questions. So today – and in some future blogs – I’ll catch up.

Is any of your writing inspired by actual life?

I think all of my writing is inspired by actual life. I don’t mean I’ve been involved in any way with murders! I mean that it is aspects of my actual life that compel ideas for the mysteries.

The idea of Bitter Maremma, first book in the Leah Contarini series, came to mind after hours of walking the isolated and at times eerie Etruscan trails of lower Tuscany. I was inspired by the character of the landscape itself.

If Two of Them Are Dead was inspired by hearing about religious artworks lost during the Second World War and by thinking about what it means to be in a community. An imagined murder (or two!) may compell the plot of my mysteries, but I like to set the deaths in a matrix of community, friendships (current and past), love relationships (current and past), foods we eat, work people do, and animals, illness: all the vicissitudes people go through by just living their actual lives. — And the more news I watch, the more I understand that this is exactly the matrix of murder.

I was compelled to write the third book in the series (The Spaces Between the Threads, 2024), after listening to the story of a Tuscan friend who hid from the Germans in the caves of lower Tuscany during the occupation of WWII. Stories.

We are homo narrans. We’re a troubled, loving, wise, foolish, erratic, confused, happy, goofy, dangerous bunch who move through the valleys or mountains or plains where we live, wandering around our community, all telling stories in one way or another. Sometimes our stories come in the form of gossip, sometimes in the form of jokes, sometimes in books. And by the unique combination of events/stories in each life, each of us becomes a matrix of stories, like matryoshka, the Russian nesting dolls.