Scooby Doo meets The Thin Man

This was lost in my blog drafts--it was actually written several months ago, then forgotten! It's interesting to me, because in it I speculate on a novel project I'd just started on--but in the real timeline, I just finished the first draft.

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Recently I had some free time and wasn't in a position to go through photos (and didn't feel like doing promotion work), so I jumped to the next project: and wrote a 1,400 word outline for a future humor/mystery book. I'm thinking series! But then, I usually am.

Most of my published novels so far have had something of a mystery element to them, but this one's a full mystery that I gave the working title of We Love Trouble.  It's about a wandering husband and wife team and their dog, because everything's better with dogs ... kind of a mix of The Thin Man and Scooby Doo.

And who is the bad guy?

Well, even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you. Sheesh.

Not that I haven't narrowed it down, but I'm thinking about doing the Agatha Christie thing: Write the whole story, then decide in the final chapter who the real killer is. 

I figure, hey: If it worked for her ....

(But apparently that's not the way she did it, at least not for every book. It's a mystery.)

The important thing is to have fun with it, of course. So, what do you think? Can these little grey cells handle shaping a comic mystery?

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

99 cents for no campfires, so don't be fussy

This may seem an odd time of the year for this, but I've been working on a novel set at a horse campground in late April, so to me it fits right in. In conjunction with it appearing Monday on the FussyLibrarian website, here's my periodic soap selling about one of my favorite books, The No-Campfire Girls.

Half the proceeds of this novel benefits Friends of Latonka, an organization made to support Emily's former Girl Scout camp in Wappapello, Missouri. That's the camp singer Cheryl Crow went to. No, I'm not making that up.

My fourteen regular readers, you know the story:

Fifteen year old Beth Hamlin is horrified to discover her beloved summer camp must go without campfires this year, due to the fire hazard from a drought. But Beth isn't one to just sit (or swim, or boat, or horseback) around. When her new cabin mate, Cassidy, claims a local Cherokee can do a rain dance, she jumps into action.

All they have to do is trick the Camp Director into letting Running Creek do the dance, avoid the local bully and a flying arrow or two, and keep from getting caught plotting with Cassidy’s firefighter father on a forbidden cell phone. With luck southern Indiana will get a nice, soaking rain, and Camp Inipi can have proper campfires again.

But when things go horribly wrong, the whole area is endangered by a double disaster. Now Beth and her unit may be the only people who can save not only their camp, but everyone in it.

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It was a lot of fun for me to write and seems to be fun to read, judging from the comments. Plus, hey--99 cents for an e-book and five bucks for a print copy is a pretty darned good buy these days. 

Like poison ivy, you can get it all over the place. But the most popular place to get it (the book, not poison ivy) is on our website, or on Amazon:

http://markrhunter.com/NoCampfireGirls.html

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00K3OS35C

 

Please consider it for you and/or a young adult you love, because a day without reading is like, well, a day without campfires. Or, best case scenario, reading around a campfire.

A Short Short Story Update

I wrote awhile back that one of my short stories, "Grocery Purgatory", was bought and would be published soon. Sadly, the publisher suffered a death in the family, and the story was put, shall we say, into purgatory for awhile. With smaller publications, it's not uncommon for something to knock the whole operation off the rails, and it takes some time to recover from that.

I waited until after the holidays to inquire on it, and was told that "Grocery Purgatory" is now coming out in March, in their print publication "The Fifth Di ...". So it's still going to be out there, just a bit later than anticipated.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Fire History and Fund Raising

It's incumbent upon me to notify people of this every now and then, because I'd like, occasionally, to present a check to the fire department for their training and emergency equipment fund. I should also look up the meaning of "incumbent", just in case.

“Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century or So With the Albion Fire Department

Local firefighting history, illustrated:

http://markrhunter.com/SmokyDays.html

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DQ5NCXS

Proceed from all sales go to the Albion Volunteer Fire Department, so spread the word!