A Different Kind of Week

News Flash: The winners are Barb Nickelsen, Polina, Karen, Chefcondie, and HoldenJ. Congratulations!

Edith here, writing from an appropriately winter-cold day north of Boston.

This week feels like a bit of a mish-mash. Christmas is over, for those who celebrated it – or mostly over. Schools are on break, K though PhD. The roads are mostly quiet, at least if you didn’t hit the malls the day after Christmas (for me, that is the stuff of nightmares – I am SO not a shopper).

In my house, we won’t see my older son and his wife until Thursday, because they were with her family for the holiday. I’m leaving up the decorations, most of which my mom made with her talent with fabrics.

I’m giving myself until next year (that is, next week) to ignore my work-in-progress. I’m going to work on a short story, read a lot, clean out my bedroom closet (ugh, not done since we moved in here in 2012, and which will probably make me sneeze my head off), go for walks, see friends, and try to get caught up – but also refill the well.

I love quiet weeks. That said, I do have a new book coming out in a short two months. I did a cover reveal of my next release, Batter Off Dead, here back in September. Now I realize my next mystery releases on 2-22-22! How felicitous can that be? And it’s the tenth book in the Country Store Mysteries. Stay tuned for a big tenth-birthday celebration.

Plus, I have a stack of advance copies to give away. As Barb said years ago, we never want to get to release day with ARCs still in hand.

In Batter Off Dead, Robbie Jordan and her new husband Abe O’Neill are enjoying a summer evening in the park with fellow townsfolk excited for some Friday night fireworks. But when the lightshow ends, one of the knitters who sat with Lieutenant Bird’ s father Roy is found dead, a puncture wound in her neck. The poor woman’s death echoes that of Buck’s mother— Roy’s wife—as an unsolved homicide. To help find the killer, Robbie’s going to have to untangle knotty relationships deep in the victim’s past as well as those in the present.

Readers: Who wants an ARC to read in this mishmash week, and where will you review it?