Murder Most Foul!

I was excited to go to a book signing at Murder By The Book on Saturday afternoon. I always love seeing the staff, including Johnnie (who really is John, but he’ll always be Johnnie to me), and my friend Dean James was signing his new Cat in the Stacks mystery, The Silence of the Library, written under his pseudonym Miranda James. Plus there was a new-to-me author signing with him. I’ll share more about her later.

When Dean was talking about the series, he wanted to avoid any spoilers, so he asked if any of us had not read Out of Circulation. That’s when I got confused, because the title didn’t seem familiar, but I was sure I must have read it, so after tentatively raising my hand, I lowered it. Only to get home and pull out my books and realize that somehow, I missed going to a signing and buying the fourth book in the series! Now I’ll have to go back to Murder By The Book–how tragic! =)

Annie Knox was signing with Dean/Miranda tonight–the first book in her new Pet Boutique Mystery series, Paws for Murder.

From her web site:

Meet Izzy McHale, owner of Trendy Tails Pet Boutique in cozy Merryville, Minnesota. She and her pets, Packer and Jinx, have a passion for fashion. While her best friend Rena Hamilton makes organic pet treats for the business’s “barkery,” Izzy is designing canine couture and feline fashions for Merryville’s booming tourist trade. Trouble has a knack for finding Izzy and her friends and family. Fortunately, Izzy and her gang have a knack for tackling trouble head on, solving mysteries and keeping Trendy Tails’s doors open.

You know how I feel about dogs and cats and fashion, so I’m looking forward to starting this series.

But that’s not all. I also purchased the three books of her earlier Mysteries à la Mode series written as Wendy Lyn Watson. After all, a writer who sets a series in a small town somewhere in the vicinity of Dallas, Texas, already has something in common with me–even though no corpses ever turned up in my Coventry romances.

Yet.

Finally, I’m so dense that when I asked Johnnie to remind me which author it is that he’s been Tweeting so favorably about, and he pointed out Bitten, the first book of Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld Series, I didn’t remember it’s just been adapted for television. I do not need a new TV show to watch! But I’m delighted to learn there are thirteen in the book series, so if werewolves can cast a spell over me, I’ll be reading for a while.