A Murder for Christmas by P.C. James

A Murder for Christmas is the third in the popular Miss Riddell Cozy Mysteries series.

Miss Riddell has returned to her parents’ home to nurse her sick mother. It’s Christmas 1962, northern England, and the worst winter for decades. If that isn’t bad enough, there’s a crime spree in the village, a forged will that will bring ruin to the neighborhood, and her first love, a roguish cousin, has just been murdered.

Can Miss Riddell solve the mysterious crime wave before she becomes one of its victims?

Targeted Age Group:: Young Adult and up
Heat/Violence Level: Heat Level 1 – G Rated Clean Read

What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
My love of cozy murder mysteries, especially Miss Marple stories, led me to start writing my own based on Miss Marple and borrowing heavily from my aunts when I was growing up who were Miss Marple personified. The setting for this story was a Galapagos cruise we took some years ago and loved. Unfortunately, South American politics is often violent and I saw the opportunity to bring together the cruise and the politics in a cozy mystery.

How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
My heroine, Miss Riddell, is growing into the 'Miss Marple' I know and love. Agatha Christie doesn't explain how Miss Marple got her start in life, I'm laying out Miss Riddell's start for my readers in this set of stories. One day, she'll solve mysteries without leaving her village, perhaps.
The old cynic, Chief Inspector Ramsay, is very much me.
Miss Riddell's parents, her brother, and the villagers are based on members of my own extended family living and growing up in northern England.

Book Sample
“You have to, Sis,” Alan said, “I said you would.”

“Why did you do that?” Pauline said angrily. Alan was the last word in obnoxious older brothers. Even as a kid, he was forever getting his younger siblings in trouble with one lunatic scheme after another. Weren’t the older kids supposed to be more mature than the younger ones? Pauline was sure there was a popular expression to that effect.

“It will be easy for you,” Alan said. “Look at how you’re always solving murders and such for the police. This is simple compared to that. Some small local disturbances are all we’re asking you to solve. It will take you a matter of hours. It won’t even disturb your holiday.”

Her holiday. Two weeks with Mum and Dad on the farm over a cold and increasingly snowy Christmas, with Mum ill and Dad laid up. Some holiday! Now this idiot, her blasted brother, had promised her time looking into silly pranks in his village five miles away. With the roads the way they were and the weather the way it was, how could she do that without moving in with Alan and his wife, Bessie?

“I’m not doing it, Alan. Mum and dad need me here, not over at Goathland, chasing naughty children.”

“Me and Jim will come to the farm every day to look after the beasts,” Alan said, “and you’ll have it all sorted out in a day, likely.”

This was ridiculous. She’d driven down to her family home only the night before, straight after work, taking this Saturday morning off work to be here earlier. It had been a frightening journey with snow on the roads here in the Dales. On the high ground, a wicked wind swirled the snow in the headlamps, blinding her view through the icy windscreen. And there’d been few other cars on the road after she’d left the main highway. Now, next morning, when she was barely recovered from her fright, Alan arrives at the farm demanding she leave and solve mysterious events in the village and farms around him.

“No,” Pauline said. “You people live there; it will be your children doing this. You local folk sort it out yourselves.”

“It’s not the children, Polly,” Alan said, lapsing into the family nickname Pauline hated. “We thought that too at first. But it isn’t. It’s something bigger than it seems.”

“In Goathland! What could be big in any way in Goathland?”

As she followed him back to his farm, however, she remembered what could be bigger. She couldn’t miss it, or to be precise, them. Stark opal white against low black clouds that threatened yet more snow, the giant ‘golf balls’ of the Fylingdales early warning station loomed menacingly over moor and dale. Placed there by the United States Air Force and operated by the Royal Air Force, they were supposed to give the West fifteen minutes warning should the Soviet Union launch its intercontinental nuclear ballistic missiles, or so it was said. No one knew for sure. They were too secret for real knowledge. Pauline frowned as she tried to keep her eyes on the road and away from the golf balls. Her first investigation (she never said ‘case’ it was too official-sounding) had been about spies, though she hadn’t realized that until the very end. Was this about spies too and should she be thinking about them from the very beginning?

After saying hello to Alan’s wife, Bessie, and the children, Alan said, “We’re going straight to the manor house.”

“Why?” Pauline asked, bewildered. The family at the manor hadn’t been mentioned in Alan’s earlier list of odd incidents.

“Because they have a story to tell I think you should hear.”

Leaving her own car in the yard of Alan’s farm, Pauline climbed into his Land Rover and they set off back up the farm road to the country lane that connected the farms along this dale with the outside world.

“What’s this all about, Alan?” Pauline asked, as she pulled her coat, scarf, and collar closer around her. The Land Rover’s heating was making no impression on the air temperature inside the cab, not that Alan seemed to notice. She wished she offered to drive in her own comfortable Wolseley, with its better seats and heating.

“Mr. Thornton will explain,” he said.

“What has it to do with the incidents you told me about?”

“Not sure. Maybe nothing. I think it does but you’ll have to decide for yourself.”

Pauline gritted her teeth and stared out of the window. The afternoon looked like it promised more snow by the time they were returning home. Maybe the Land Rover with its four-wheel drive was the better choice for this journey. As it bumped over the frozen, rutted farm road, however, jarring every bone in her body, she found that little comfort. And imagining the drive back to her parents’ farm through snow-covered roads in her own car gave her the shudders.

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Shared Madness by Rick Moskovitz

A psychiatrist treating a psychotic patient descends into madness and finds himself at the nexus of a deadly plot. Can he trust anyone in his struggle for survival and his quest to regain his sanity? Can you guess who murdered his patient and what drove him mad? Share his hallucinations and terror through his eyes and try to unravel the mystery.

Targeted Age Group:: YA and Adult audiences
Heat/Violence Level: Heat Level 3 – PG-13

What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
As a psychiatrist, I often struggled with competing ethical and legal responsibilities. In the course of providing treatment to relieve distress, I was expected to keep whatever my patients told me strictly confidential. At the same time, I was entrusted with preventing harm. Some patients posed the risk of harm to themselves, some of harm to others, and still others offered information about people around them who posed danger to them or to others. The responsibility to prevent harm was further complicated by my limited influence upon my patients’ fate.

Balancing the duty to maintain confidentiality with the duty to prevent harm and walking the often fine line between them caused me many a sleepless night. And the severity of the dilemma was directly related to the magnitude of potential harm that I envisioned.

The seeds of Shared Madness, originally titled Folie a Deux, arose out of this ever present burden and the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. What if, I imagined, a patient were to share with me information about a possible future terrorist attack? And what if this information was shrouded in sufficient doubt that the consequences of withholding it weren’t clear or compelling? Would the potential magnitude of an unlikely event be enough to breach the confidence of a patient and perhaps even put that patient in legal or physical jeopardy?

I framed my story against a backdrop of a psychotic patient who heard voices and experienced delusions of persecution that altered his perception of reality. What might a psychiatrist believe about a tale of treachery told by someone with such an unreliable and distorted view of his world? And it occurred to me that if the doctor was also hallucinating and delusional, assessing the validity of the threat would become even more daunting.

I wrote a half dozen chapters starting in 2005 along with some character backstories, got stuck and filed it away while I continued to practice psychiatry. After retirement from practice, I turned again to writing, veering into science fiction, and completed the Brink of Life Trilogy in fits and starts over much of the past decade. The blank canvas of the future fed my imagination and the stories began to flow with increasing ease.

In the fall of 2019, I stumbled upon the nearly forgotten file of Folie a Deux. Having drawn my trilogy to a close and honed my storytelling craft, I embraced the project with new confidence. And I brought to the task a new perspective, venturing into the first person, writing entirely through the eyes of my protagonist, and balancing the constraint of that limited perspective with the freedom of living in my character’s head and experiencing his world fully. The story grew organically, expanding beyond its original framework into a full blown thriller.

How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
My main character, a psychiatrist, is a reflection of my career experience, although he is only my alter-ego when explaining how the mind works. The ethnicity of my other characters was dictated by their roles in the story. And since OCD is one of my special areas of expertise, writing about a character with OCD was both natural and fun. I would also consider Maine, one of my favorite places, almost as a character. The chapters set in Maine that included the character Otis were written during a vacation there. Ayuh.

Book Sample
“Wake up, Zack.” My eyes flicked open. I’d been in a deep sleep. The voice must have been the tail end of a vivid dream. I tapped my phone to see the time: 2:35 AM. I closed my eyes, took some cleansing breaths, and drifted back to sleep.

“I told you to wake up.” A woman’s voice. Loud, insistent. This time, I got out of bed and turned on the lights. I’d have to awaken fully to purge the thread of this dream from my consciousness. It was still three hours before it was time to get up. I went into the kitchen and poured a cup of milk.

“You know she likes you.” The same woman’s voice. It had to be coming from my phone. A butt call or a video playing in the background. I looked at the screen. It was dark. I tapped the phone. Nothing was open. I turned it off.

“You think she’s hot, too.” Someone was playing a horrible prank. I valued my privacy and didn’t have any of the listening modules that people put in their homes to interact with their devices. The only other possibility was my computer. I shut it off, too.

“You can’t just turn me off. I’m part of you.” She laughed. “I’m under your skin…just like she is.”

“Shut up!” I screamed. “Get out. Whoever you are.” But there was nobody in sight. I went from room to room, turning on all the lights. I was alone.

“He’s right, you know. You and Jamilah. In your head, you’ve already screwed her.”

My hands were trembling. Sweat was dripping from my armpits down my sides and from my forehead into my eyes, clouding my vision. My legs began wobbling, which made my whole body shake. I struggled to catch my breath and felt pressure like someone was pressing a blunt object against the center of my chest. I felt like I was dying. No, not dying…a panic attack. I’d never had one, but I’d heard many patients describe the symptoms. That’s what it was. The voice was just an embellishment, fashioned by my conscience.

I began to count my breathing to slow it down, then focused on its rhythm. The trembling stilled. The pressure released. My vision cleared. The voice was gone. I finished drinking the milk and went back to bed. The next sound I heard was the rippling alarm sound on my phone, telling me it was time to get up.

I shook off sleep and got ready for the day. The disturbance in the night left me more fatigued than usual, but I was grateful that the voice was gone.

All I could think about during my rounds in the hospital was whether Joe would show up at my office that afternoon. When I got to the office, I checked his appointment time: Two o’clock. I finished seeing my first patient of the afternoon and looked in the waiting room. He wasn’t there. I went back to my office and watched the clock, waiting for my receptionist to signal his arrival. By 2:30 I began to despair that he’d ever show up.

“What did you think?” said a voice that seemed to come from across the room. “Why should he trust you? You want to screw his wife.” My breath stopped short. I felt as though I was being strangled.

“Another panic attack,” I thought. Then I heard laughter.

“Think what you want,” said the voice. “I’m not just part of your panic attack.”

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