LET'S GET COZY! A LITTLE NIGHT MURDER: AN AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PREVIEW, AND GIVEAWAY

GIVEAWAY ENDED
A LITTLE NIGHT MURDER

A Blackbird Sisters Mystery

BY NANCY MARTIN

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Murder under the stars...

Nora Blackbird—pregnant at last!—is spending summer afternoons wallowing in the Bucks County pool of her best friend, Lexie Paine, who has just been released from prison. At night, Nora is covering Philadelphia’s high-society events for the local newspaper. And this time she doesn’t have to look far for a good story.

Next door, a Broadway show is in rehearsal at the estate of Toodles Tuttle, the long-deceased but ever-legendary composer. Reigning over the estate is Toodles’s diva widow, Boom Boom. The demanding old broad still rules with an iron fist, and considering the chorus line of enemies she’s racked up over the years, her death has been a hotly anticipated event. So imagine everyone’s dismay when it’s her beloved daughter, Jenny, who drops dead—from a cause that is anything but natural—just as the lights are set to go on for the lucrative new Toodles musical.

Yet murder is only an overture to the drama to come....

Nora’s sister Libby, a soon-to-be-grandmother, has gotten herself into a sticky situation, wooed by both a lowly bug exterminator and a cheesecake-loving Broadway impresario. Edgy sister Emma has a dangerous new boyfriend who may jeopardize her show-jumping exploits. And the love of Nora’s life, Mick Abruzzo, has been desperate to prevent Nora from meeting the most notorious member of his mobbed-up family—his mother.

Now Nora has to deal with the bump-and-grind of her personal life, and also bring the curtain down on a daring killer—before he forces her to exit stage left, permanently.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Like her heroines the Blackbird Sisters, Nancy Martin comes from a distinguished Pennsylvania family whose ancestors include Betsy Ross and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. She has written numerous romance novels, directed a few Shakespearean plays, and raised two delightful daughters. To read more about Nancy Martin, check out her "Bio" on her website HERE.

AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR NANCY MARTIN:
1. Welcome, and thank you for agreeing to an interview for BOOKIN‘ WITH BINGO. Is there any personal information you would like to start out with today? 
Can I just say that my elderly aunt broke her hip and moved into a nursing home and spent the last nine months doing nothing, nothing at all, and we have been in agony about her, but just this week she started going to the bingo games? She is a PhD and kinda famous in her academic field, and bingo has never been her thing, but suddenly her competitive nature kicked in, and she LOVES it. Which is a hoot. Is that personal? I thought it fit the name of your blog. For every thing there is a season.

2.  Where did you get the inspiration or idea for this book? 
I love theater---there are a lot of authors who are former theater folk--and I follow what's happening on Broadway. Recently, a new Broadway show was gearing up, in rehearsal, the production humming along, and the financing suddenly collapsed. Turns out, the primary investor had been invented out of thin air!  So the show died long before opening night, and my imagination started cooking. What happens behind the scenes at big theatrical production companies? It's the kind of world Nora Blackbird might know in a peripheral way, so the story grew from that. It was really fun to write.

3. How did the title of your book come about?
Well, there's always a discussion in-house---that is, within the publishing house among editors and marketing  and sales people, but I knew we wanted a title that would make readers think of musical theater. The Blackbird stories are all a little bit sexy, though, and we like alliteration better than puns, so we think long and hard to come up with titles that suggest everything the books are. Stephen Sondheim lyrics are wonderful, so we tinkered with his titles and came up with A LITTLE NIGHT MURDER.

4. Do you see yourself in your characters? Which characters are easiest or more difficult to write?
Well, my aforementioned aunt, who was a Freudian psychoanalyst, says the three Blackbird sisters are actually my id, my ego and my superego, which is probably true. My super ego keeps the other two quiet in real life, just as Nora Blackbird tries to keep her sisters under wraps. I knew I wanted to write about sisters--who doesn't have a complicated with a sister?--so it was a blast to invent three sisters who are so different, yet so filled with love and loyalty for each other. The characters who are difficult for me to write are the ones I must kill.  I really don't like killing people, even in fiction. Wait--does that sound like I kill people in real life?

5. What books would you say have made the biggest impression on you, especially starting out? What are you currently reading?
Oh, I loved the romantic suspense novels of Mary Stewart!  She recently passed away, and I feel as if a beloved family member has left this earth. I grew up reading mysteries, but I wrote romances for nearly twenty years.  But I got weary of writing about sex (!!) and finally turned to writing mysteries, and it has been like coming home. As for what I'm reading---it's a little bit of everything.  A writer really has to read widely.  I am reading a Stephen King. I just finished an Anna Quindlen. I read a Jane Austen novel every summer. This year I think it will be Persuasion, one of my faves. I love writers who are wordsmiths.  I don't mind a story that meanders, but I want the prose to be solid and evocative.

6. What is the next or current book/project you are working on?
I'm afraid to talk about it!  I might jinx it. All I see are the problems with my pages, and it would be bad to talk smack about the book before it's finished. I am a firm believer in karma.

7. What is something about you that you would want people to know about you that we probably don’t know?
Do people really want to know about writers? Does it change the way the books are read? People know enough about me. I'm much more interested in hearing about other people, not myself.

8. Do you own an eReader of any kind and how do you feel about their impact on books, as well as you as an author?
I do own an eReader, and I love it.  I read books in paper, too, of course. But I don't think it's the machine that has affected the book business, if that's what you're asking.  I'm dismayed to see books devalued by the ways they're sold these days. So many readers get accustomed to acquiring books for free or just a dollar or two, and they believe all books should be cheap.  But if we want to continue to have well-written, wonderful books written by writers who really know how to grip a reader by the throat and not let go for 400 pages, we have to recognize that writers like those need to be fairly compensated. Otherwise, they'd all have to get jobs. I live in terror that I'll some day have to get a job at the Clinique counter. I'm terrible with makeup.

9. What is your advice to anyone, including young people, who want to be writers?
If you love it, do it.  Don't talk about it, dream about or pretend about it. Sit in the chair and write. Your love will show on the page.
BOOKIN' WITH BINGO wants to thank Nancy Martin for taking time from her busy schedule to do an interview with us. Now run out and buy A LITTLE NIGHT MURDER and below are a bunch of her other books you may also want to pick up! 

SOME OTHER BOOKS BY NANCY MARTIN:

                     

                     

                     

                     

                     

GIVEAWAY

THANKS TO KAYLEIGH AND THE GOOD FOLKS

AT OBSIDIAN AND PENGUIN BOOKS, I

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