You Can Write a Mystery (You Can Write It!)

Description

Have you ever thought about writing a mystery, and gave up the idea because you weren't sure how to start it? Well now is your chance to go out and write that mystery you have always dreamed of. You Can Write a Mystery, written by Gillian Roberts, author of the Anthony Award-winning Amanda Pepper Series, will help you start your mystery and guide you through to the end.

"The 'rules' that govern the mystery are the rules that govern all fiction. Every novel needs suspense and drama," says Roberts. With this book you'll learn how to build your story from the grave up. Roberts focuses on what she calls the "Seven C's", why you need them and how they help your story. She offers examples and exercises that will help you complete your story filled with cliffhangers, intriguing characters and hooks. This book also offers practical suggestions for handling problems likely to arise during the writing process. Along the way, Robert's will teach you:

• The 15 commandments for mystery
  
  
• How to design your sleuth
  
  
• The Seven Cs your book can't do without - characters, conflict, causality, complications, change, crisis and closure
  
  
• How to hide clue, and exploit red-herrings
  
  
• Research techniques
  
  
• How to develop a style, find a tone and construct a killer plot

You Can Write a Mystery, offers practical guidance for the first-time writer. Its easy-to-understand format will help the most amateur to become a mystery writer. In addition to the practical writing advice supplied, Roberts also offers expert advice for editing, revising and submitting a top-notch manuscript.

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Helen Hath No Fury

Description

In the stately nineteenth-century homes on Philadelphia’s Delancey Street, the wilder passions scarcely ruffle the peace. Murder is unthinkable, particularly a murder involving an upscale book discussion group, of which schoolteacher Amanda Pepper is a devoted member. Nevertheless, on the day after a heated discussion of a fictional heroine’s suicide, book group member Helen Coulter falls to her death from her roof garden. Helen’s death is declared a suicide but Amanda is convinced otherwise. Why is this admirable woman dead? And if she was killed, who performed the heinous act? Amanda’s investigations will draw her into a zone of great danger, where Helen Coulter’s ice-hearted killer is once more ready to strike. . . .

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Helen Hath No Fury, the latest outing in Gillian Roberts's Amanda Pepper series (which also includes, most recently, The Bluest Blood and Adam and Evil), finds the Philly Prep English teacher in familiar territory, negotiating the strong egos and stronger opinions of the members of her book club. When, after reading The Awakening, Helen Coulter vehemently denounces heroine Edna Pontellier's suicide as the ultimate cop-out, no one is surprised by her assertiveness (Helen makes sandpaper seem soft). But her plunge from the roof of her house the very next day comes as an awakening of the rudest sort. Although her death is ruled a suicide, the book-club members aren't buying it. When Amanda heads up an unofficial team of sleuths, she quickly realizes that her fellow booklovers have a great deal to hide--from Helen's business partner's bizarre financial dealings to a politician's wife's unsavory past. But are their secrets worth killing to keep?

People simply aren't what they seem, and that's enough to make Amanda long for order and precision: "I envision us like billiard balls--one gets poked and the rest of us are pushed into new and unexpected positions. My version of chaos theory. But now, I renounced happenstance. I became a devout cause-and-effect believer. I needed to." As always, she enlists cop and live-in amour C.K. Mackenzie (attention to devoted fans: the mystery of those darned initials will be solved at last!) to help her ferret out the truth.

What is usually a winning combination for Roberts--breezy humor and a lighthearted writing style--falls a little flat in this latest effort. Amanda reminds one of Lucille Ball--sardonic, goodhearted, a trifle insecure, and completely incapable of standing peacefully by when an opportunity to leap in and meddle presents itself. She has a finely honed sense of irony and an equally sharp appreciation of the absurd. This time around, her appeal is oddly muted; she seems less interested and less interesting, content to repeat ad nauseam her fervent desire for matters to improve and to dither about whether her newly kindled interest in marriage means that she is (gasp!) becoming her mother. With any luck, this stint in the narrative doldrums will be temporary, and the old Amanda will soon return with all sails flying. --Kelly Flynn

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All's Well That Ends: An Amanda Pepper Mystery (Amanda Pepper Mysteries)

Description

Barring the usual teenage pranks, all seems peaceful at Philly Prep, the private school in Philadelphia where Amanda Pepper teaches English. No doubt the money that appears to be missing from funds collected to aid victims of a catastrophic hurricane Down South will turn up. Probably the rumor that some of Amanda’s students have discovered the thrills of gambling is totally unfounded.

In any case, Amanda has other things to think about. Her husband, private investigator C. K. MacKenzie, is struggling to help his Louisiana kinfolk reconstruct their post-hurricane lives. Her friend Sasha’s stepmother has just committed suicide–although, according to Sasha, Phoebe Ennis would never have killed herself, especially not while having a drink and wearing a red silk blouse and red sandals with four-inch heels.

Amanda isn’t persuaded but reluctantly agrees to help investigate the woman’s demise, though the evidence for foul play is slim. True, the middle-aged compulsive collector of knickknacks wasn’t universally loved. Phoebe’s own son hated her and she bored her friends to death with hints of her “royal” lineage. And with four marriages behind her, she was already preparing to announce her renewed availability on the Net. But when another woman is found dead in Phoebe’s house, it becomes clear that something is indeed murderously amiss, and much closer to home than Amanda or anyone else could have imagined.

All’s Well That Ends is the final novel in Gillian Roberts’s acclaimed Amanda Pepper series. It’s also the best, irresistibly intelligent, and richly entertaining. Amanda’s farewell adventure brings the genius of “the Dorothy Parker of mystery writers” (Nancy Pickard) into full flower, and the bloom is sweet and a wonder to behold.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Mummers' Curse (Amanda Pepper Mysteries)

Description

"ANOTHER FUNNY PHILLY PUZZLER . . . Notable for how comfortably it occupies the space between cozy and city-grit crime fiction."
--Publishers Weekly

When a reveling Pierrot is shot dead at the Mummers' Parade in Philadelphia, schoolteacher Amanda Pepper is first just a horrified spectator. But then the prime suspect--her friend and fellow teacher at Philly Prep--falsely claims to have been with her at the time of the murder. Amanda can no longer stay on the sidelines, as she plunges into the Mummers' tight-knit world, where no one seems willing to help her find a dangerous killer. . . .

"Entertaining . . . A fun read."
--West Coast Review of Books

"Delightful."
--San Diego Union-Tribune  

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Caught Dead in Philadelphia

Description

Anthony Award winner for Best First Mystery Novel -- the debut of the Philadelphia-set Amanda Pepper
series.
Amanda Pepper, English teacher at Philly Prep, does not hate her life. But when a fellow teacher who's engaged to a senate candidate, begs for rest on Amanda's couch, then dies, things could be better. Then the police suspect her of murder, she begins her own investigation, and ends by teaching a certain blue-eyed cop a thing or two....
"Gillian Roberts is a mystery reader's dream come true."
Lia Matera

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation (An Amanda Pepper mystery)

Description

"DELIGHTFUL...COLORFUL...Roberts plunks her mystery amid the glitter and grime of casino life."
--L.A. Daily News
After a tough year of teaching at Philly Prep, Amanda Pepper decides to go to Atlantic City with her friend, Sasha Berg. Yet a beach vacation turns deadly when a bludgeoned corpse shows up in their hotel room--and Sasha is the prime suspect.
So Amanda hits the boardwalk to track down the real killer, chasing down clues around the surf and in the casinos, and discovering along the way that appearances are more than deceiving: they can be criminal and, sometimes, downright murderous....
"Roberts combines appealing characters, a good puzzle and some serious messages in an entertaining whole."
--Publishers Weekly
"The Dorothy Parker of mystery writers."
--Nancy Pickard
"Gillian Roberts is a mystery reader's dream come true."
--Lia Matera

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