Maddy Hunter

I found it interesting that Maddy doesn’t create an outline for her books and she never knows exactly what’s going to happen or how everything will turn out.  How she manages to pull all the pieces together at the end is the real mystery—to her and to her audience.  When Maddy travels, instead of vying for the best view of the latest tourist site, she finds herself looking for a good place to kill somebody.  Peggy and I can relate to that—we did it in Door County and years ago on Mackinac Island, long before we ever decided to write a mystery.  Maddy encouraged the audience to buy and read two other local mystery writers—Kathleen Ernst and Jerry Peterson. Perhaps as a sign of the volatile nature of the publishing industry right now, Maddy reported that Simon and Schuster had dropped her series in 2007 (a reason it’s taken so long for a new installment to appear), but fortunately for her fans, Midnight Ink agreed to publish both Dutch Me Deadly and another based in Scotland, with an appearance of the Loch Ness monster.

Mary Joy

Finally, I won the door prize! (Really I need to start attending more book signings as this is the second time in a row that I’ve walked away with one of the prizes.  Maybe I should buy a mega-lottery ticket.)  Unfortunately, I was one of the last to be selected so all the Belgian chocolate was gone.