Well I can not tell you how thrilled I am to tell you who the winner is......
When her name was pulled by my husband, I felt like it's a sign. This is your year, after your treatments are finished everything is going to be A-OK...... I can feel it. And now you have some FANTABULOUS books to get you thru...... JoAnna it's your lucky day & yearssssss.....xxoo
I never heard from the winner of Allison Brennan's trilogy, SPAV. Please contact me at mjdownfam@comcast.net. I will give it a week before I redo.... THANKS......
THANKS AGAIN TO EVERYONE!!!!!! Stay tuned and hopefully you will keep on stopping by. I love the idea of a book club. And I am toying with some other ideas..... The most important thing is to chat about books.. I LOVE to read and helping others find a new author for them.....
Today we have a Guest Blogger.... She is witty, warm and "bitch can write a book"..... I ADORE her cozy mysteries. Her series is so much fun.
Safely outside the New York City limits, St. Thomas College was supposed to promise peace and quiet. Unfortunately, English professor Alison Bergeron has found it to be anything but. She recently divorced a fellow faculty member and, more recently, her car was stolen. Then one evening, she gets a visit from two homicide detectives from the NYPD. The good news is that they found Alison's beat-up Volvo; the bad news is that the body of one of the students in her Shakespeare seminar was in the trunk.
Now, not only must Alison continue to hoof it to campus (a fate almost worse than death), she's become a prime suspect for a murder she did not commit--and her efforts to clear her name have landed her in hot water with an even hotter Detective Bobby Crawford, who happens to be a former altar boy, and the sinfully suspicious nuns of St. Thomas. All hell's about to break loose if Alison can't find the real killer…before it's too late.
You’d think, now that she’s off the hook for murder, that Alison, an English professor at a cushy college campus just north of chaotic New York City, would be able to relax. But how can she, with a wedding in the works? A Ph.D can only go so far…
The recently-divorced Alison couldn’t be happier for her best friend, the bride Max. The problem is with the groom. Namely, his best man: the stunningly handsome yet technically married NYPD homicide detective Bobby Crawford. Alison just can’t stop day-dreaming about him—until a new nightmare unfolds.
Alison’s ex-husband has just turned up dead. And now that’s she’s being dragged into another murder investigation—his time, involving the Mob-boss parent of a student—Bobby might be the only man she can trust with her life. But will he ever make Alison his wife? With a killer on the loose, the pursuit of happiness may just have to wait…
College English professor Alison Bergeron thought that dating a cute NYPD detective like Bobby Crawford would be exciting and involve a lot of riding around in cruisers and putting away sleazy crooks, but he has yet to invite her on any stakeouts. . . .
Then when a friend asks her to help him find his nephew, she goes to Bobby for advice only to find out that he already knows about the case. He pulled the boy out of the Hudson River a few days earlier. The boy’s employer calls it an accident, but Alison and Bobby aren’t convinced.
With matchmaking and sleuthing to spare, staying out of trouble isn’t on the syllabus when Alison and Bobby team up in Quick Study, Maggie Barbieri’s most outrageous outing yet.
St. Thomas, the small college north of New York City where Professor Alison Bergeron teaches, has had its share of scandals involving both its students and its staff, not to mention Alison herself, so when a resident director goes missing the administration wants to keep a lid on it. With only five weeks left in the semester and no time to interview replacements, Alison is tapped for the job. An alumna of the college, Alison knows all about living in the dorms. Even a short stay is like doing hard time, and she will do anything to avoid reliving her college days any more than she has to.
Her only way out: Track down the reluctant RD and drag him back kicking and screaming if need be. Luckily, she doesn’t have to look further than the drugs he had hidden in his bathroom to get her boyfriend, Detective Bobby Crawford, on the case.
On her way to meet her boyfriend’s parents, college professor Alison Bergeron stops by a coffee shop to steel her resolve. It’s a big event. Not only is it the first time she’s met NYPD detective Bobby Crawford’s entire family, but it’s coming on the heels of a wedding proposal that she has left unanswered so far.
Then, as she steps into the shop, a brawl breaks out that ends in the death of Carter Wilmott, a merciless and loathed local blogger. The case couldn’t be any simpler, and Alison witnessed the whole thing, but when Wilmott’s car explodes in the aftermath, what looked to be a crime of passion becomes something far more complicated and maybe even premeditate.
With Alison and Bobby involved in the case and with each other, readers are in for a treat. Third Degree, the latest in Maggie Barbieri’s charming mystery series, is one heated mystery with plenty of steamy romance and cunning villains who are about to get burned.
College English professor and sometime amateur sleuth Alison Bergeron would’ve been thrilled to hear that her husband, NYPD Detective Bobby Crawford, was leaving Homicide if that were the whole story, but it turns out that Bobby’s next assignment is even worse---undercover. As if worrying about his involvement in a case he won’t talk about at all wasn’t bad enough, Alison is forced to take over the women’s basketball team at St. Thomas after the coach dies of a heart attack during a game. She may not know much about basketball, but she’s no stranger to sleuthing, and it isn’t long before she suspects that the coach’s death may be more than unexpected but premeditated as well.
With Bobby deep undercover and Alison always on her way to deep trouble, it’s only a matter of time before they run smack into each other in Physical Education, the latest in Maggie Barbieri’s charming Murder 101 mystery series.
So without further ado, please welcome Maggie.....
First, before going any further, I must say a) I love Maureen O’Neill Downey, a person with whom I have never had any face time, and b) I love the name of this blog. Maureen and I became fast friends on Facebook and seemed to have more in common than we really even know. Moms of college-bound seniors, we spend our days talking almost-adults off the ledge about this next, exciting chapter in their lives while making sure the “other ones” (the younger kids) are fed, housed, clothed, and don’t kill each other. Makes for some interesting Facebook posts and email exchanges, to say the least.
But back to this blog. Yes, I can write a book and I’m only a bitch sometimes (I’m looking at you, lady who cut in front of me at Shoprite). How well I write is up for debate if you read the various reviews that are scattered around the internet that either tout me as the second coming of Agatha Christie or someone who should never put pen to paper again. There really doesn’t seem to be any in-between here, any equivocation. It’s sort of like what I said to my husband, a neophyte, when we approached the inexplicably named “Christmas Tree Shoppe” yesterday while out trolling for stocking stuffers. I said to his handsome face, now devoid of color as he navigated the most poorly designed parking lot in the Western Hemisphere, “You’re going to walk in and either think ‘this is the greatest store I’ve ever seen!’ or ‘get me out of here; I’m going into cardiac arrest.’” He decided to go to the Kosher deli next door for a bowl of chicken matzoh ball soup and a sandwich, thereby avoiding any contact with the throngs in the store that sells just about everything.
I digress. I often think about the question “what makes a writer?” because up until recently, my sixth mystery hot off the press, when people would ask me what I did for a living (beside keeping the household in clean underwear?), I would respond “I’m a college textbook editor.” Because that’s what I do most of the day and what pays the rent, so to speak. My husband—the Christmas Tree Shoppe neophyte—finally said to me, “Why don’t you say ‘I’m a writer’?” to which I replied, “Oh, yeah...” like it was the first time this had occurred to me.
Painters who don’t have a piece hanging in the Louvre still consider themselves painters. Teachers who have graduated with an education degree or even aren’t in the classroom anymore still self-identify as teachers. Doctors who don’t see patients on a daily basis still say that they are doctors. But writers? We are an interesting lot. Some of us think that if we’re not published, we’re not writers. Others, even if they are published, don’t think they are truly writers unless they are doing it full time and devoting their entire cache of waking hours to the “craft.” Still others think that you need to write every single day and produce pages and pages of a work to be considered a writer.
Here’s what I think. You’re a writer if:
1. You feel a burning desire to tell a story and will let nothing get in your way to get it down on paper (and it doesn’t matter how long that takes);
2. You carry around little scraps of paper with doodles, be they snippets of conversation, a thought about plot or structure, or just a random thought;
3. You’re a voracious reader. Active readers make good writers. It’s true. Look it up;
4. You’re an inveterate people watcher. Nothing helps develop good characters more, for me anyway, than an hour in the common area in the mall. It’s character gold;
5. You dream about your characters;
6. You don’t think that anything you could possibly write about would be good enough to show anyone.
What do all of these points have in common? Lack of publication. See, I’m a firm believer that writers are born, not made, so if you identify with any of the above, well, I would consider you, like me, a writer.
So, in the new year, all of us writers out there, when someone asks us what we are or what we do, let’s say it loud and proud: “I’M A WRITER!” Feels good, huh?
Maggie Barbieri
LOVE HER......
XXOOXX
