BookSpeak Network

Milford House Mysteries Show

Mystery authors Sherry Knowlton and Joan West talk about an aspect of the art of writing mysteries in this episode called Grounding Fiction in Fact.

Sherry Knowlton is the author of the Alexa Williams series of murder mysteries including Dead of Autumn, Dead of Summer, and Dead of Spring. Joan West is the author of the Carlisle Crime Cases series including Dying for Vengeance, Courting Doubt and Darkness, Darkness at First Light, and Had a Dying Fall. 

Readers may not always appreciate the amount of research that mystery novelists often have to do for their books.  After all, it’s fiction, right?

In reality, a lot of fiction must be grounded in fact. Many mystery novels require a significant amount of research to make the story as accurate as possible and credible to readers.  This type of research can span a gamut of sources from books, newspaper articles, and internet sources to interviews with experts in various fields to hands-on author experience.

 In this episode of the Milford House Mystery Show, Sherry and Joan discuss their own research techniques and how they’ve tackled accuracy in topics as varied as police crime scene procedures, sex trafficking, Revolutionary War battles, Woodstock, and fracking.

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Milford House Mysteries Show

Mystery authors Sherry Knowlton and Joan West kick interview mystery author Robert Walton.

Sherry Knowlton is the author of the Alexa Williams series of murder mysteries including Dead of Autumn, Dead of Summer, and Dead of Spring. Joan West is the author of the Carlisle Crime Cases series including Dying for Vengeance, Courting Doubt and Darkness, Darkness at First Light, and Had a Dying Fall. 

Their guest, Robert Walton, grew up in the small multi-cultural village of Narberth in the Main Line region of Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Armed with a degree in Archaeology from Penn State University, Bob has worked tirelessly over the years to live up to his father’s expectations. Having failed at that, he has traveled the world in search of the true meaning of life. Still, this has not stopped him from pursuing a career in writing that began in 2007 when he joined Pennwriters and The International Thriller Writers.

Robert's first novel, Fatal Snow, initiated his Harry Thursday archaeological detective series. His second novel The Mask of Minos /Bruno's Inferno, extends the story of Harry Thursday in a quest to solve the riddle of the Mask of Minos. Still more Harry Thursday stories are forthcoming. He is also working on a science fiction novel that more directly questions the meaning of life.

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Brown Posey Press Show

Host Tory Gates interviews author Sharon Marchisello, the author of the novel "Going Home."

Michelle DePalma expected to jet into Two Wells, Texas, check on her elderly mother, and hurry back to her orderly life in Atlanta, where she has a happy marriage and satisfying career. Instead, she finds her mother, Lola Hanson, hovered over the bludgeoned body of her caregiver, Brittany Landers.

Since the events of 9/11, one month earlier, Lola's memory loss has amplified, and the family suspects Alzheimer's. Now Lola can’t tell anyone what happened to Brittany.

The agency that provides home care for Lola promptly withdraws its services. Michelle is stuck in her home town longer than planned as she cares for a mother with whom she has never been close and tries to prove her innocence. The police officers who investigate the crime are old antagonists from grade school. A secret thought to be long buried—that Michelle bore a son out of wedlock and gave him up for adoption—surfaces when a surprise daughter-in-law and granddaughter show up, distracting Michelle from her quest to solve the murder. And then she stumbles upon a motive which makes Lola look even more guilty.

Going Home was inspired by the author's mother's battle with Alzheimer's and explores the challenge of solving a murder mystery when a potential witness cannot rely on her memory. Written from the perspective of a baby boomer forced to reverse roles with her parents, it crosses into the mainstream genre of women's fiction and touches increasingly common issues such as elder abuse and end-of-life decisions.

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Sunbury Press Books Show

Lawrence Knorr hosts author Mike Campbell about his book Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last. 

About the Book:

Nearly everything the American public has seen, read and heard in the media for nearly eighty years about the so-called Amelia Earhart mystery is intentionally false or inadvertently misleading. The widely accepted myth that the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan during their ill-fated world-flight attempt in July 1937 is among the greatest aviation mysteries of the 20th century is an abject lie, the result of decades of government propaganda that continues unabated to this day.

The Second Edition of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last adds two chapters, a new foreword, rarely seen photos, and the most recent discoveries and analysis to the mountain of overwhelming witness testimony and documentation presented in the first edition of Truth at Last. The result is the most compelling, comprehensive presentation of the indisputable facts that reveal the stark truth about the Marshall Islands and Saipan presence and deaths of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan – a tragic story that American’s ruling class still doesn’t want the public to know, for reasons revealed in Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last.

Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last dismantles and debunks the popular theories that Amelia Earhart's Electra crashed and sank off Howland Island on July 2, 1937, or landed at Gardner Island, now Nikumaroro, where the suddenly helpless fliers died of starvation on an island teeming with food sources.

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Sunbury Press Books Show

Lawrence Knorr hosts JIm Remsen author of the Civil War-era history Embattled Freedom. 

About the Book:

Chronicle of a Fugitive-Slave Haven in the Wary North

Rural Northeastern Pennsylvania was a bucolic farming region in the 1800s—but political tensions churned below the surface. When a group of fugitive slaves dared to settle in the Underground Railroad village of Waverly, near Scranton, before the Civil War, they encountered a mix of support from abolitionists and animosity from white supremacists. Once the war came, 13 of Waverly’s black fathers and sons returned south, into the bowels of slavery, to fight for the Union. Their valor under fire helped to change many minds about blacks. Embattled Freedom lifts these 13 remarkable lives out of the shadows, while also shedding light on the racial politics and social codes they and their people endured in the divided North. The men had found a safe haven in Waverly, but like other people of color in the 1800s and early 1900s, their freedom was uneasy, their battle for respect never-ending.

Please visit the author’s website, www.jimremsen.com.

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Sunbury Press Books Show

Lawrence Knorr hosts author and Vietnam veteran Van Carter whose memoir R.E.M.F. has been released. 

About the Book:

Nine out of ten of all US military personnel who served the Vietnam War did not fight.  Instead, they served in support of those who did. They were postal workers, military police, guards, office clerks, mechanics, cooks, and drivers.  Very few of their stories have ever been told. Van Carter was an Iowa boy who was sent to Vietnam as an infantry lieutenant, but who instead served as one of these rear echelon personnel. He discovered the other side of Vietnam, the side where all these people lived who worked in support of the soldiers in the field. He saw rampant drug use, prostitution and a huge racial divide between black and white American soldiers. He saw the absurdity of poor leadership, bad planning and even worse implementation of America’s war effort. He saw how everything and everyone became corrupted in Vietnam. And he, himself, succumbed to this all-pervasive corruption. He smoked dope, visited an authentic opium den, enabled some of the prostitution, openly defied authority, and made new rules he still hopes saved many from life-long addictions to heroin. And he fell in love. These are his recollections.

BookSpeak Network

Sunbury Press Books Show

Lawrence Knorr hosts author and Vietnam veteran Charles Kniffen whoseFifty Years in a Foxhole has been released. 

About the Book:

Fifty Years in a Foxhole is an episodic account of the author's seven months in combat in Vietnam. He and his platoon were in several major engagements including the Battle of the Hills and Operation Utah. The main focus of these operations are the lives of the marines and attrition through action and "friendly fire" as they endure these pointless dangers. 

Each chapter contains two parts, and the second part is about the author's fifty years of living with undiagnosed PTSD. He struggled to find a way to live in the thrall of the existential elan he developed in combat while insisting that this edgy verve could be enjoyed without the constant threat of fear, violence, and death. It explores PTSD from a new perspective, more as a shared betrayal with many other people in our society.

Charles Kniffen is a combat wounded veteran of the Vietnam war.

BookSpeak Network

Milford House Mysteries Show

Mystery authors Sherry Knowlton and Joan West kick interview mystery author Alma Bond.

Sherry Knowlton is the author of the Alexa Williams series of murder mysteries including Dead of Autumn, Dead of Summer, and Dead of Spring. Joan West is the author of the Carlisle Crime Cases series including Dying for Vengeance, Courting Doubt and Darkness, Darkness at First Light, and Had a Dying Fall. 

Their guest, Dr. Alma H. Bond is the author of twenty-one published books, including, most recently, Marilyn Monroe: On the Couch, Jackie: On the Couch,  Lady Macbeth: On the Couch; Michelle Obama: A Biography; The Autobiography of Maria Callas; Margaret Mahler: A Biography of the Psychoanalyst; Camille Claude: A Novel; America’s First Woman Warrior: The Story of Deborah Sampson; and Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography. With Milford House Press, she has published Three Mary Wells Psychiatrist Mysteries: The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle, Murder on the Streetcar, and Who Killed Marcia Maynard? 

A longtime resident of New York City, she lived for nearly a dozen years in south Florida, and now resides in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Kyle Alexander Romines is a teller of tales from the hills of Kentucky. Kyle discovered a passion for writing after graduating high school, which resulted in the completion of three novel length manuscripts before The Keeper of the Crows. These fledgling attempts at writing taught him a great deal, and since writing Keeper he has worked to continue honing his skills. He hopes to continue writing as long as he has stories to tell. His titles include:

The Keeper of the Crows

The Whispers of the Crows (coming soon)

The Vengeance of the Crows (coming soon)

Salvation

The Chrononaut

A Sound in the Dark

Bride

BookSpeak Network

Milford House Mysteries Show

Mystery authors Sherry Knowlton and Joan West kick off their show with an interview of publisher Lawrence Knorr. 

Sherry Knowlton is the author of the Alexa Williams series of murder mysteries including Dead of Autumn, Dead of Summer, and Dead of Spring. Joan West is the author of the Carlisle Crime Cases series including Dying for Vengeance, Courting Doubt and Darkness, Darkness at First Light, and Had a Dying Fall. 

Their guest, Lawrence Knorr, is the owner of Sunbury Press, Inc. which publishes under six imprints including Milford House Press.