Here are my answers:

What is the title of your next book? The next book is an anthology called HOOSIER HOOPS & HIJINKS which I’m co-editing with Brenda Stewart. The book is a collection of short mystery stories about Hoosier basketball. I’m also contributing a story, “Snowplowed,” which feature Charlotte and Francine, the two heroines from a story in an earlier anthology, RACING CAN BE MURDER. HOOSIER HOOPS & HIJINKS comes out in October, 2013. I’m also working on a full length novel about the two women, MURDER ON THE BUCKET LIST.

Where did the idea come from for the book? The inspiration for HOOSIER HOOPS came from Indiana’s obsession with basketball. If you’ve never heard of Hoosier Hysteria, it is a very real thing that occurs at the end of high school basketball season. As for Francine and Charlotte, I can’t reveal the continued source of inspriration about these two women and their friends, who have a wide variety of edgy bucket list items. Otherwise, I might not get fed more story ideas

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? HOOSIER HOOPS & HIJINKS is being published by Blue River Publishing. I’m hoping MURDER ON THE BUCKET LIST will also be traditionally published.

What genre does your book fall under? ”Snowplowed” is definitely a cozy. Most of the other stories in HOOSIER HOOPS are also on the lighter side of the mystery spectrum. MURDER ON THE BUCKET LIST is most definitely a cozy.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Since Betty White is being overused, I’m thinking Carol Burnett for Charlotte and either Jane Fonda or Lily Tomlin for Francine.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? For MURDER ON THE BUCKET LIST: After a dead body falls out of a pool shed during the night a group of older ladies are trying to have a secret, bucket list-related skinny-dipping party, the ladies find they must uncover the identity of the murderer while at the same time dealing with sudden national attention celebrating their bucket list adventure.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? I have a real interest in stories that are life-affirming. My goal with the Charlotte and Francine stories are to celebrate life. I hope that readers will enjoy these stories of women who may be getting older but whose lives are getting no less richer.

What about your Nick Bertetto series? I love Nick and hope to write more stories about him and his family. The earlier books fit into my  theme of life-affirmation, and the new ones I have planned will continue in that same way. Right now I’m outlining a new trilogy of Nick books. I hope to be able to have two series going if the Francine and Charlotte book takes off.

Whenever someone finds out my latest book, the thriller THE FINAL MAYAN PROPHECY, is about December 21, 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar on that date, they ask if it really means the end of the world.

I don’t want to talk too much about the book and give away the end because I hope you’ll read it :)  –so let me answer it in a completely different way. Let’s take a look at some of the more popular ways people are predicting the earth will be destroyed in 2012, some in conjunction with this Mayan end date:

1)      Asteroid hits earth: According to recent reports from NASA, the odds of a really big asteroid hitting the earth in the next 28 years are 1:625. That’s .0016 or .16%, or way less than a 1% chance, and that’s within 28 years.

2)      Nuclear war: The Doomsday Clock sits right now at 5 minutes to midnight. The closer the clock is to midnight, the closer the world is estimated to be to global nuclear disaster. (All of this is according to Wikipedia, not always reliable but as best as I can tell, is accurate in this case.) The latest adjustment, made on January 10, advanced the clock one minute to its present position. To me, that means nuclear war is a little more possible (1.67% more; one minute more out of 60) than it was last year, when we successfully escaped global disaster, so, rounding up, I’d go with maybe 2% as the odds for global nuclear destruction. Keep in mind, I’m no statistician.

3)      Solar flare sends us back to the Stone Age: According to a report in last month’s Christian Science Monitor, which gets this information from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, “When aimed at Earth, strong solar flares and CMEs [Coronal Mass Ejections] …  can pose a danger to astronauts and satellites in space, as well as power grids, navigation and communications systems on Earth.” Reporter Amina Khan, writing in the Los Angeles Times, quoted space weather scientist Mike Hapgood at the Rutherford  Appleton Observatory near Oxford, England about the odds of this happening,. “A recent paper (published in February in the journal Space Weather) tried to estimate the chance … and came up with a value of a 12 percent chance of it happening in the next 10 years.” It’s probably not technically correct for me to average this over ten years, but if I did, it’d be a 1.2% chance each year.

So, after looking at these scenarios, I think the odds are small that December 21, 2012 will be the end of time.

Did the Mayans think that way? My personal philosophy is always one of great hope, that even out of the worst situations, good emerges. To find out if and how I carry this through the plot of THE FINAL MAYAN PROPHECY, you’ll need to read it. I thank you if you do.

Premise: The ancient Mayan calendar, accurate for more than 5,000 years, comes to an end on December 21, 2012. (It’s almost here!) What did the Mayans know that we don’t?

Among the Maya, some believe the birth of the god-king Kukulcan will occur at the end of this age. When a rebel group awaiting that birth kidnaps a pregnant woman and her husband to force the prophecy, the event triggers a string of happenings that may cause it to come true.

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The novel was co-written with television producer Paul Skorich and is based on a screenplay we also co-authored.

I shut the freezer door on Judy and contemplated what to do next – why we ever thought kinkysex.com was a good idea. We were demo’ing for our website how blood chokes – sleeper holds for you pro wrestling fans – could turn the old love lights on. But I held it for a second too long and her lights went out altogether. And since we had the camera turned on, I now had to dispose of both the body and the evidence.

I tried to think what Judy would have done if the situation had been reversed. Judy had the better business head between the two of us. There wasn’t a thing that went wrong she hadn’t found a way to capitalize on. Like the time the police caught us doing the demo on “unusual places to handcuff your lover” when the alarm we thought we’d disarmed at the Crate and Barrel went off at 3 a.m. Judy threw some edible boxers around my waist and while her explanation for why I was strapped to a picnic table featuring gourmet hotdog condiments didn’t impress the police, it did impress Jerry Springer’s producers. Shortly after our appearance we added a line of our own special gourmet condiments to our website and they were a big moneymaker for us.

Yeah, that Judy, she had the magic. Me, not so much. At least, that what she said. Come to think of it, she never liked any of my ideas. But suddenly one of them came back to me. It might just work. The idea for a new website, cannibalismtoday.com. I opened the freezer door.

Yeah, she looked real good for having been dead 12 hours.

Here’s the last of them:

• AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SECRET NOTEBOOKS by John Curran – This is definitely for intellectual types who love Christie and want to know more about her world and how she thought. It also contains two unpublished Poirot stories. The book won the Edgar Award last year for Best Critical/Biographical, and while I’m sure it was worthy, I found it a bit dry. It was interesting in a historical way, but I didn’t find it compelling. I have to conclude I must not be:  a) be intellectual enough or b) love Christie enough.
• DEAD EX by Harley Jane Kozak – This is book #3 in Wollie Shelley series that began with DATING DEAD MEN. Wollie (pronounced Wally), the main character, creates greeting cards and often condenses her situations into greeting card sentiments, which is endearing and quite funny. Even  better, in this book Wollie is the dating correspondent for the reality show “SoapDirt.” Of course, there’s a murder, and her friend Joey is the prime suspect, but the best thing of all is that these books are breezy, funny romps. Harley Jane is an excellent writer—be sure to check out her short story in the MWA anthology THE RICH AND THE DEAD—and I’m really sorry her publisher decided not to extend the series. Here’s hoping she gets a new series going soon.
• NICKEL AND DIMED by Barbara Ehrenreich – I read this book for a leadership class I was taking, and it really opened my eyes to the plight of the working poor. Ehrenreich is a freelance writer who accepts an assignment to see what it’s like to try to survive on a minimum wage job in three cities in America. Even giving herself a bit of an advantage over those who are the working poor—she starts herself out with a little seed money—she proves over and over again that it can’t be done.  Even trying to manage two jobs just to make ends meet proves impossible, with managers who won’t work schedules around second jobs and unreliable public transportation. The people she works with give you a sense of how resilient the human spirit is—even those poorer than her, who don’t know she’s not one of them—start bringing her food when she can’t make ends meet and is trying to survive by eating less. It’s a heartbreaking book, and it reminds us that unions get a bad name when they’re greedy (and we’ve seen that happen), but they still have a purpose when they fight for those who don’t have the power to do so. Wal-Mart comes off as one of those employers whose executives rake in millions and millions of dollars but can’t share it with their minimum wage employees.

• THE NINTH DAY by Jamie Freveletti—Book 3 in the Emma Caldridge series. This is my favorite so far in the series. Freveletti  does a great job of setting up a horror that’s easy to imagine—a wasting disease that infects a prized marijuana crop and within nine days will kill anyone who inhales it or even touches it. When the crazed drug lord who can’t find a way to stop the disease from contaminating the plants decides to deliver massive quantities of the marijuana to the United States and start an epidemic, it’s up to the intrepid Emma to find a cure for the disease and stop the shipments from reaching their drop points. When Emma discovers that she has disease herself, it’s truly a race against the clock to find the antidote. Brilliant work from a terrific thriller writer who’s only getting better.
• DEAD UNTIL DARK by Charlaine Harris—I’ll admit that I’ve never watched TRUE BLOOD on HBO, nor had I been much of a fan of this type of genre since DARK SHADOWS in my teenage years (which were, regrettably, a very long time ago).  But after having had breakfast with Charlaine at Bouchercon 2011 (a perk that came with being Midwest Chapter President of Mystery Writers of America), I bought a copy of the novel that started it all and asked Charlaine to sign it. Well, I couldn’t put it down. It had a narrative drive and a mystery that kept me going until the end. Loved the premise that vampires could become an accepted part of the world and go mainstream once a synthetic blood was developed. I’m still not a big fan of the vampire genre, but there’s no question in my mind why Charlaine has and deserves a legion of fans.
•  GRACE INTERRUPTED by Julie Hyzy—Book 2 in the Manor House mystery series by the author of the White House chef series. When a group of Civil War re-enactors comes to Marshfield Manor, it’s murder on the staff—even more so when one of the most hated of the re-enactors is murdered. Grace must wade through a myriad of people who may have wanted the man dead, including relatives of the man she’s just started dating, to figure it out. Delightful stuff from a hardworking cozy writer whose latest book (AFFAIRS OF STEAK) just hit #22 on the NYT extended bestseller list.
• WILD AT HEART by John Eldredge—I came to Eldredge’s book after completing Henry Blackaby’s excellent workbook, EXPERIENCING GOD. I was searching for another study to bring me closer to God and closer to the man he wants me to be. While I disagree with Eldredge on a few points (from his stories, I think he was an angry young man and some of that still colors his perception of the world), I feel his call for us to return to our masculine roots, not to strive to be ‘nice guys,’ but rather warriors who seek to right the wrongs of the world. He points out that when we were kids, did we dream of being nice? No, we dreamt of being Luke Skywalkers and (more recently) Harry Potters. It dovetails with the biggest thing I took away from Blackaby—to see where God is at work and seek to be a part of what he is doing in the world. I recommend WILD AT HEART to all Christian men.

You can see from the photo that I really fell down on the job, because I like to review books that I read, and there are quite a few here that just never got reviewed because I let myself feel overwhelmed last year. Going to try not to let that happen in 2012.

In the meantime, here are quick reviews from half the books you see pictured. Next week I’ll do the other half:

KNEE HIGH BY THE FOURTH OF JULY by Jess Lourey
–Jess is hilarious! I know her from being on the MWA Board together, but this was the first of her books that I’ve read. When a giant Indian statue goes missing from Battle Lake, Minnesota, Mira James’s fascination with the big guy gets her into trouble that can only be solved by finding out who did the dirty deed. Great fun.

BURIED SECRETS by Joseph Finder — I met Joe at the February meeting of the Midwest Chapter of Mystery Writers of America where
he was our guest speaker, and I won this advanced copy, which others had to wait until summer to read. Even then I didn’t get around to writing the review. Guilt aside, it was incredibly suspenseful, made all the more horrifying because of the teenager girl who was buried alive. Joe really made me feel the claustrophobia of the young girl.

OTHER EYES by Barbara D’Amato–any book by Barb D’Amato is a treat, but I loved the premise of this book: researchers discover that it’s possible an early, one-time experience with a certain hallucinogen may inoculate users from ever getting hooked on drugs. Needless to say, a lot of very powerful, mean people would love to stop this kind of research. Even starts out suspenseful with a baby crawling across an interstate in the middle of the day. Great read!

RUNNING DARK by Jamie Frevelleti–Book 2 in Jamie’s series about biochemist/ultra-marathoner Emma Caldridge proves the first, RUNNING FROM THE DEVIL, was no fluke. Though I found the first book more interesting from a setting perspective, this second was just as riveting as Caldridge and her love interest Cameron Sumner attempt to stop Somali pirates from getting hold of a dangerous chemical no one knows is on board.  Non-stop suspense.

GETTING SASSY by D. C. Brod–Every once in a while I love a good caper with a preposterous plot, and in the hands of a terrific writer like Deb Brod, this one sings. Sassy is a goat, and she just happens to be the one thing that a valuable race horse, owned by a scummy businessman who’s screwed main character Robyn Guthrie’s mother out of her money, has fallen in love with. Robyn falls into a kidnapping scheme using the goat as bait. Funny with a satisfying ending. Looking forward to the second book, GETTING LUCKY.

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS by Agatha Christie–I read this book in preparing to write the next Nick Bertetto mystery (for reasons I won’t elaborate here), and I was pleased to see how well Christie’s book has held up. Though you couldn’t start a mystery as slow today as Christie did back then, it still has an elaborate puzzle and her enigmatic sleuth Hercule Poirot to keep you reading. Even though I knew the ending, it was still amazing to see how Christie sets it all up. I can’t forget the magnificent 1974 movie version of this mystery, which was one of the things that got me hooked on reading, and subsequently writing, in the genre. Christie was a master plotter.

More next week.

This great photo of galettes is taken from the batch made by my daughter Liz and her husband Tim

I love the fact that cookies that have been in families for years are getting called ‘heirloom’ cookies. What a riot!

Anyway, I’m teaching a course in The Basics of Mystery Writing this Saturday, October 29th, at the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library (40 E. St. Clair Street), starting at 3 pm and going for an hour and a half. The workship is FREE. We’ll touch on everything from setting to plot and in between, and for those who maybe a little more advanced and have a manuscript in hand, we’ll talk about query letters, synopses, and agents. I’ll also be signing copies of SAINTLY REMAINS during the noontime author fair. For more information, check the IMCPL website by following this link: http://tinyurl.com/3qbr2jn. My part in the fair is sponsored by the Writers Center of Indiana.

Desjarlais keeps you guessing as the action accelerates faster than De La Cruz’s souped-up vehicles.  When Selena becomes the last woman standing, she must either figure out who is behind the killings or fall victim to La Serpiente. VIPER strikes fast and sinks its teeth in you. You won’t be able to put it down.