An Interview with author Michael Embry

Michael's favorite quote:
"The art of writing is the art
of discovering what you believe."
-- Gustave Flaubert

Author's website
Author's Blog
Author on FaceBook
Twitter: @MichaelEmbry


When did you start fiction writing and what genre(s) do you like to write?

I participated in a creative writing conference in 1974 but it took me another 25 years to write my first novel, "The Touch." I've since written eight more novels, falling under contemporary mainstream, murder mystery, young adult, and boomer lit genres. I like variety in reading and writing.

Why this/these genre(s)? What attracts you to them?

These genres resonate with me. I enjoy probing the thoughts and actions of characters as they unfold in my stories. My last three novels have been in the boomer lit genre, which I plan to continue because it allows me to examine my amazing generation.

Generally speaking, what is the driving force behind your characters?

The driving force is confronting unforeseen problems and trying to make sense out of everything that is happening around them. Life isn't easy as we all deal with numerous pitfalls, disappointments, and heartbreaks.

Have any of your characters changed in a dramatic way from what you imagined
at the start during the writing process?

I would say most of the characters have grown and gained courage along the way. I want my characters to come across as real and have strengths and weaknesses that are relatable to readers.

What do you find the most difficult in finishing a story and approximately how long does it take for you to write a story?

It would be wrapping up loose ends, and in writing a series, leaving a few things that will bring readers back for the next book. It generally takes me from six to twelve weeks to write the first draft, then I go through about ten rewrites before I'm ninety-nine percent satisfied with the story (are authors ever totally satisfied?). I then rely on my editor for advice on improving the novel.

 

Are there other types of writing you do such as non-fiction, or short
fiction?

I've written three non-fiction sports books (I was a sportswriter years ago) and one short-story collection. Although I've been approached, I doubt if I write any more non-fiction. However, I do plan to write another collection of short stories.

Has your writing affected you in any way and what would you recommend to
someone wanting to start writing fiction?

I believe writing helps me gain a better understanding of myself and others as I explore different areas of life. As for advice about writing fiction, I would recommend that the person read fiction, especially in the genre(s) they intend to write, and to read primers on fiction writing such as Jack M. Bickham's "The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)." I'd also suggest joining local writing groups, attending writing events, and getting to know other authors. Writing is a lifelong learning experience but it's necessary to learn the basics.

Read an excerpt of Michael Embry's latest release "New Horizons" (Release date: May 1, 2019)

You Owe Me Five Farthings

Jeremy Swanson Mysteries -- Book 2

Mike Swanson finds a mysterious book at the Christmas Fayre, setting in motion a train of events that will put his life in danger and force his parents to reconsider their future, while Rose, trapped in a failing marriage, longs for love of her life Simon, in this sequel to St Martin’s Summer.

About the Author:
Jane Anstey began writing before she left junior school, and had her first story published in the school magazine when she was eleven. She took a degree in Modern History from Oxford University then taught in high school for four years before her first child was born in 1982. After that she took up copy-editing, indexing and educational writing. She now lives in Cornwall, UK, overlooking the moors, with her husband and younger daughter, aged 17, along with a dog and four guinea pigs.

Reviews:
“Jane Anstey’s refreshing breeze fills both romance and mystery, while solid reflections on clergy family life draw the reader into the heart of the rectory. Pilcher and Howatch rolled together make this a truly ‘unputdownable’ story which left me wanting more.” —Rev. Ken Wakefield, Cornwall

~*~

Fans of St Martin's Summer will welcome back the well-drawn characters of Rose, Clive, Simon and the Swanson family. Together with some new acquaintances, they and the author take us on another carefully-plotted intrigue in this sequel which, after some surprising twists and turns, points the way to a future full of possibilities.” —Sue Brownlow, Governor and Deputy Chair, Marjohn University, Plymouth

 ~*~

“Utterly absorbing.” —Dr. Jane Santo, retired psychologist

Steel Town

Without warning, Detective Andy Blake’s personal life seems to be spinning out of control. She already has enough on her plate dealing with the opioid crisis that has crippled her hometown of Sault Ste. Marie. Adding to that are her efforts to balance it all with an admitted infatuation with the charming Dr. Campbell who is on special assignment advising the health responders dealing with a new threat: a pure form of the drug fentanyl that has added to the crisis.

Meanwhile, a young boy with special needs and a young couple become integral to the intriguing outcome of Andy’s investigation.

About the Author:
Mystery and Historical Fiction Author Richard Whitten Barnes
is a native Chicagoan, who graduated as a chemist from Michigan State University. He retired from a long career in international chemical sales and marketing, which took him all over the world. Barnes is a veteran of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division and an avid sailor. He, his wife Marg, and their dog Sparty live in Charlotte, NC, but spend summers at their cottage on St. Joseph Island, Ontario, on the shores of Lake Huron. Steel Town is his eleventh book.

Reviews:
I have never read any of Richard Whitten Barnes novels before. Steel Town, an Andy Blake mystery is a real cracker. You know a good book when you can’t put it down until the end. This is a novel where the reader definitely doesn’t hit pain barrier at page three.

Like all good detective novels the ending has a real twist in the tail but I’m not telling. That would spoil the surprise.

The main character Andria (Andy) Blake is very real, three-dimension character. It’s also good to see a female character given centre stage.

Urban the principal bad guy, Joey, his autistic son and Maryland Eddie also are also believable characters. Dealt a bad deal in life they both helped one another to climb out a pit of despair, helped by Joey’s sudden appearance in their lives.This is a nice sub-plot.  
Good read 5 Stars. - Review by Andrew R Williams, Author of Arcadia’s Children: Samantha’s Revenge & Arcadia’s Children 2: The Fyfield Plantation

~*~

An engaging story line with plenty of unexpected twists and one final surprise I never saw coming. The characters were well drawn and compelling, and while it took me awhile to get into the story at the beginning, as it unfolded, I found myself turning pages long into the night, needing to know what happened next. An intriguing plot and a satisfying ending. I enjoyed the detectives, Andy Blake and her partner Arnold Terry and hope to see more of their adventures in the future. 
Skye Taylor, Award winning author of the Camerons of Tide's Way series and The Candidate. 

All the Pretty Little Collies

Now Available!

Twenty-seventh story in The Foxglove Corners Series 

Spring brings danger to the collies of Foxglove Corners when poisoned meat begins to appear in their yards. Another collie is threatened with dire consequences unless her owner withdraws her from all future shows. In the meantime, a ghost moves into the wildflower field planted at the site of the burned down Victorian house on Huron Court.

Dorothy Bodoin lives in Royal Oak, Michigan, with her blue merle collie, Layla. Dorothy worked as a secretary for Chrysler Missile Corporation for six years, two of which were spent in Italy. On returning to the states, she attended Oakland University, earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English literature.  For several years she taught English in a Michigan high school before leaving education to write full-time. She is the author of the Foxglove Corners Cozy Mystery series, six novels of romantic suspense, and one Gothic romance.

What They Are Saying About All the Pretty Little Collies:

All the Pretty Little Collies is the twenty-seventh installment in Dorothy Bodoin’s Foxglove Corners Mystery Series. Filled with surprises, twists, and turns, it is another winner that will keep you riveted until the last page.

The book begins with Jennet Ferguson, an amateur sleuth/teacher, visiting a friend’s horse ranch to take her turn caring for her friend’s collies. The dogs discover a slab of raw meat tossed into the grass. Alarmed, Jennet manages to grab the meat before the dogs touch it. Worried, she has it tested by her deputy sheriff husband and discovers that it’s been poisoned. Who could be trying to kill dogs in Foxglove Corners?

Heightening the suspense, Jennet learns that her friend, Annica, has seen a ghost, a young girl picking wild flowers on the site where a pink Victorian house once stood. Intrigued, she investigates the phenomenon.

As if that isn’t enough to keep Jennet busy, she learns that Minta Maynard, owner of a prize-winning blue-merle show dog named Sparkle, is receiving threatening messages in her mailbox. If Minta continues to show Sparkle, the collie will be harmed.

Readers will be perched on the edge of their chairs wondering how these storylines will be resolved. I highly recommend this new addition to the Foxglove Corners Mystery Series.
It is exciting to note that the collie on the cover of this new book is the author’s own blue merle collie, Fantasy’s Bell Bottom Blue—Layla.  —Suzanne M. Hurley, Author of The Christmas Rose, The Dream Smasher and many others.

In The Lake

By Joel Jurrens

Mystery/Crime, 297 Page

Cover Art by Richard Stroud

Playboy billionaire Dyslin Coakler and his porn star girlfriend are famous for their Friday night sex parties at their mansion on the north end of Burgess Lake. When a wealthy regular partygoer is found floating in the lake with a single stab wound, the suspects start popping up like cards from a gambler’s sleeve. Is the woman a victim of sex games that went too far? Or did a jealous girlfriend of one of the woman’s local boy toys seek revenge?

Excerpt:

The storm came out of nowhere. One minute the sky sparkled with stars and a moment later a dark curtain of clouds crept across it and blotted them out. On the far side of the lake a streak of lightning flashed, snaking down at the water in a crooked white streak. A few seconds later, thunder shook the air. As if the cage restraining it had been smashed, an enraged wind stormed across the lake. In an instant the lake’s walleye chop became a fury of whitecaps with foaming waves engulfing each other.

Caught by the sudden wind, the boat swung sharply to starboard, and waves splashed over its side. The boat’s automatic bilge pump kicked in with a low hum for a few seconds before shutting off again.

Straightening the boat with an expert hand on the motor’s tiller, he thought he heard the tornado sirens go off in the town of Burgess. He listened for a moment, but didn’t hear them again. It wouldn’t have made any difference. He couldn’t stop now.

The cold wind mixed with the smell of impending rain made him shiver. The waves were scary-high. The boat came off the top of one and banged down in the trough between the waves, the propeller growling between crashes as it lost contact with the water and flailed in the air. With each bounce of the boat, water sprayed him. In a moment his soaked shirt dripped water onto his pants, soaking them, too. Rain gear lay snug and dry in the center storage compartment, but he didn’t have time to dig it out. He turned his shoulder to the waves and adjusted the motor’s trim to try to smooth out the ride. It didn’t help. The lake tossed the boat around like a gorilla swatting at a tennis ball.

This is trouble, he thought. The weather report had said a chance of thunderstorms when he checked it in the afternoon. Normally he would have looked at the weather radar before coming out, but he didn’t have the luxury of time. If he could have seen the lake clearly, he knew he would have been scared to death. But he couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction, except occasionally the lights on shore peeking at him from the darkness as he crested a wave, and disappearing as he came down off of it. Running without lights, he could actually see better not having to fight their glare than if they had been on, but still he couldn’t see. He navigated by watching the lighted screen on his GPS/fish finder.

The contour lines on his fish finder showed Lone Goose Bar fast approaching. He changed his course and headed out over deeper water. With these waves he’d rip out the motor’s lower unit if he tried to cross the shallow bar.

When the boat had passed the bar, he angled back toward Five-mile Bar. The thick clouds overhead abruptly shut down his GPS as it lost contact with the satellites. Running just by the map of the lake he had in his head and the small compass beside his seat, he watched the depth line on his fish finder as it fell away.

The Most Toys

By Matthew Malekos with Dennis Nilsen
Mystery/Crime, 250 pages
Cover art by Richard Stroud

In The Most Toys, acclaimed crime-fiction author & former psychiatric nurse, Matthew Malekos joins forces with the British serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, to produce the third novel in the Dr Karen Laos series, which tells the ongoing story of the fictional forensic pathologist first seen in Peroxide Homicide and thereafter in Snow Wasted.

The Most Toys finds Dr Laos attending a conference on missing people in the heart of central London when she is contacted by private investigator and ex-cop, Sean Hilt, who is seeking her expertise and assistance to help solve a large number of cases of missing young adults. The more involved in the investigation she becomes, the more apparent it is that the missing people she is trying to help locate all share a common history of petty crime and involvement with prison and social services. Dr Laos soon identifies a disturbing trade in human body parts and shortly after her suspicions are raised that a necrophiliac serial killer is on the loose, she too finds herself subject to the potentially disastrous actions of one the novel's key antagonists.

Excerpt:

Desmond Nickleton had spent the last hour prising open the wooden floorboards that comprised the surface of a corner of a dining room area on the lower ground floor of his large family house. The room itself measured an impressive forty-nine by fory-five feet; a rare commodity in modern day London, all the more so when Nickleton reminded himself that he lived alone and, rather than grow and adapt to the space of his living area, he had somehow managed to make the house adapt to him. There had been times during his work over the past couple of years that he had not been able to make his mind up about whether or not to keep the corpses of those he had murdered. On such rare occasions where he found himself unable to make up his mind, he had decided to simply place the bodies into what he called his "storage area."

Although not as special as the small audience of reanimated corpses he kept in the theatre upstairs, these were victims of which he had felt unable to completely let go. The agreement he had come to with Benjamin Turnbull was such that a brown A5 sized envelope would frequently drop onto his doormat; in it would be the names, descriptions, and a photograph of those Turnbull wanted disposed.

Nickleton would sit for several hours studying the photographs of those that had to be killed.
He would look carefully at their facial features and body shape, and judge his physiological reaction to what he saw. If he felt excited when he looked at the photographs, he would place them aside on a small pile that told him these were his to do with as he pleased. If, however, he felt no physiological reaction from a photograph, he would place it into another pile, and later that day outsource the work to anonymous others.

Other than a few items of antiquated furniture, Nickleton's dining room was relatively sparse-on the surface at least-and he was therefore able to remove several floorboards in the southern corner of the room easily. He reached his hands into the gaping space and pulled out several well-sealed bags. In them he had placed various remains of more than half a dozen bodies he had been unsure about what to do with. He hated this stage of his work; disposing permanently the remains he knew he could have enjoyed and preserved had his workload not been so demanding.

In order to make sure the bodies fitted neatly underneath the floorboards into the two foot deep foundations, he had dismembered them, usually separating the torso from the lower half of the victims' bodies, but sometimes had dismembered them into three sections, depending on need. He found keeping two or three whole sections intact easier to store. The last time he had conducted such a clear-out was exactly a year previously.

On this occasion, Desmond Nickleton wanted to try his hand at a new "fad" he had read about in a national newspaper. He needn't tell his paymaster about this; it would be an additional self-bonus for the enterprising nature of the work he was completing. He would dispose of the majority of body parts that took up a great deal of space beneath his floorboards. On this occasion, however, he would keep one bag of mixed body parts for himself.