Scones and Bones - Laura Childs

Scones & Bones
by Laura Childs
Scones & Bones, the newest Tea Shop Mystery, offers a heady brew of pirates and plunder.

Scones & Bones is the 12th in the New York Times bestselling Tea Shop Mystery series that readers continue to crave. In this tasty offering, Indigo Tea Shop owner Theodosia Browning is lured into attending the Heritage Society’s Pirates and Plunder show. Amidst jolly roger flags and sparkling doubloons, an antique skull cup set with a huge diamond steals the show and then gets plundered by someone who murders a history intern in the process. As Theodosia unlocks secrets about the dastardly pirate Blackbeard, she unravels mysterious ciphers, rambles through an ancient cemetery, and contends with a bizarre gallery owner. As if she isn’t busy enough, Theodosia and her tea shop gang kick off Charleston’s Food and Wine Festival and introduce the hottest new culinary trend, tea and cheese. But with a raft of suspects and a bungled investigation, something smells funny. And it’s not just the Gorgonzola!

Combining the genteel art of tea with a breakneck-paced mystery, Scones & Bones delivers big time! There are lovingly crafted characters, soothing descriptions of tea parties and settings in historic Charleston. And when the action concludes with murderers brought to justice, there are always plenty of tea tips and recipes.

Literary pick of the week: Laura Childs
St. Paul Pioneer Press

High body count . . . uniquely warm characters.
Booklist

Magnificent . . . Laura Childs is a master chef at writing culinary mysteries.Night Owl Romance

A roller coaster ride of adventure.
Chattooga Press (TN)

Thrilling excitement . . . characters who are familiar and endearing as beloved family members.Wichita Falls Times Record News (TX)

BIOGRAPHY
Laura Childs is the author of the Tea Shop Mysteries, Scrapbook Mysteries, and Cackleberry Club Mysteries. Her books have been named to the USA Today and New York Times Bestseller Lists, and have been featured selections in the Literary Guild’s Mystery Book Club. She is a former Cleo Award-winning advertising writer and CEO of Mission Critical Marketing. She is currently co-executive producer of two reality television shows.

OTHER BOOKS PUBLISHED
Tea Shop Mysteries
Death by Darjeeling
Gunpowder Green
Shades of Earl Grey
English Breakfast Club Murder
Jasmine Moon Murder
Chamomile Mourning
Blood Orange Brewing
Dragonwell Dead
The Silver Needle Murder
Oolong Dead
The Teaberry Strangler
Scones & Bones
Agony of the Leaves

Scrapbook Mysteries
Keepsake Crimes
Photo Finished
Bound for Murder
Motif for Murder
Frill Kill
Death Swatch
Tragic Magic
Fiber & BrimstoneSkeleton Letters
Postcards from the Dead

Cackleberry Club Mysteries
Eggs in Purgatory
Eggs Benedict Arnold
Bedeviled Eggs
Stake & Eggs (December 2012)

WEBSITEwww.laurachilds.com

BOOK SIGNINGS
Once Upon a Crime - Saturday, March 5, 2011
Laura Childs publication party featuring tea, scones, and tea sandwiches from noon to 2:00.
The bookstore is located at 604 West 26th St., Mpls., MN 55405

Avalon Tea Room - Saturday, March 12, 2011
Scones & Bones mystery tea and book signing at the Avalon Tea Room.
Three-course teas beginning at 11:00 and 1:30, reservations required.
Located at 2179 4th St., White Bear Lake, MN 55110

Once Upon a Crime
Write of Spring
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Laura Childs will participate in this annual Minnesota mystery author’s festival of books from noon to 4:00 at Once Upon a Crime Mystery Bookstore.
The store is located at 604 West 26th St., Mpls., MN 55405

Lady Elegant’s Tea Room - Saturday, April 9, 2011
Scones & Bones mystery tea and book signing at Lady Elegant’s. Formal teas at 11:00 and 2:30, reservations required. Tea room located at 2230 Carter Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108

Blameless Mouth - Jessica Fox-Wilson

Blameless Mouth

by Jessica Fox-Wilson

Can we teeter together, on the knife’s edge of having and wanting? In Blameless Mouth, Jessica Fox-Wilson asks this question, by exploring the cycle of hunger, consumption and satiety. The collection traces the poet’s relationship with hunger from childhood to womanhood, uncovering what it means to feel forever wanting. Her work also considers the cultural legacy of hunger, through stories of starving children and hungry women, like Hansel and Gretel, Persephone, Eve, and others. Blameless Mouth illuminates the struggle of living daily with the contradictory pressures to want less but take more and searches for satiety in a culture that encourages insatiability.


Praise for Jessica Fox-Wilson and Blameless Mouth

Using retellings of the familiar stories – Grimm’s fairy tales, Adam and Eve – Fox-Wilson investigates the female body, its appetites and injuries, the relations between fathers and daughters and between a woman and her own image. Obsessed with violence and its repercussions, these poems imagine an alternate creation myth in which a woman struggles to take control of her own destiny. –Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess

Jessica Fox-Wilson’s poetry casts seasons of light on what it means to be human. She elevates plain spoken story to elegance, seamlessly weaving narratives to create a lovely kaleidoscopic image. – Darci Schummer, whose fiction has appeared in Conclave: A Journal of Character, Paper Darts, and Volume One

Jessica Fox-Wilson has written a ferocious, elegant, tough-minded collection of poems. Her exploration of what it means to be hungry, of what the culture asks of its girls and women, compels the reader’s attention and a kind of allegiance with the fierce voice of the narrator. Braiding myths, tales, and sacred texts with her own compelling present-time narratives, we travel with a poet unafraid to speak truth to power, wherever that power resides, however evident or hidden. In the poem where she explores the definition of the word, lacuna, the poet gives us this definition: an empty space, a missing portion, in something which is otherwise continuous. I think of the deep and continuous traditions of poetry, and I think Jessica Fox-Wilson has filled an empty space, a missing portion, with her exceptional, beautifully crafted poems. Buy this book. Consider it food, a full portion which will leave you satisfied and inspired by her gifts as poet. – Deborah Keenan, author, most recently, of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems, Milkweed Edition

BIOGRAPHY
Jessica Fox-Wilson is a part-time poet and a full-time educator. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and Middle-Secondary Education at Beloit College in Beloit, WI and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing at Hamline University, in St. Paul, MN. Throughout her career, she has pursued her twin vocations of unraveling poems and serving college students, with varying degrees of balance, luck and success. She writes about this balancing act at her blog, Everything Feeds Process (http://everythingfeedsprocess.com). Some of her poems have appeared in several journals, including Gin Bender, Blind Man’s Rainbow and qarrtsiluni and her articles about poetry and literature have appeared in Read Write Poem and the Uptown Neighborhood News. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband.

WEBSITE
http://everythingfeedsprocess.com

FACEBOOK
http://www.facebook.com/BlamelessMouth

PURCHASE
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/fox_jessica

Dress Up by Joel Skelton

Dress Up

by Joel Skelton

Broadway director Wyatt Stark's smash hit, Dress Up, a free-spirited, spaghetti strap of a tale set during New York’s legendary fashion week, has played at full capacity for almost two years. Wyatt is taking his wildly successful musical to Hollywood with the help of his business partner, Murphy. But Wyatt is on the edge, overworked by the industry and overwrought by a terrible breakup, and so he agrees to spend the summer before production starts recuperating at Murphy’s secluded beach house in Maine.

It's there that Wyatt meets and falls for Ryan Taylor—but Ryan isn’t who he portrays himself to be. Distressed and desperately in love, Ryan weaves a web of lies in an effort to secure Wyatt's heart, hoping and praying that their romance can survive the deception. When Wyatt discovers the truth, will their love be there to stay, or will it be, like a worn-out fashion trend, yesterday’s news?

BIOGRAPHY
Joel Skelton is the son of a big-band pianist. Consequently, the arts have always played a prominent role in Joel’s life. Much to Dad’s dismay, piano lessons gave way to the saxophone which was eventually retired when the stage called out loud and clear. Writing is the latest destination in the author’s tour of the arts.

Born and raised in central Minnesota, Joel, along with his partner, Patrick currently live in the thriving Minnesota arts community commonly referred to as the Twin Cities. In addition to writing, Joel loves the theater, The Current, gardening, biking, limitless wine tasting and he leaps at every opportunity to travel.

WEBSITE
www.joelskelton.com

PUBLISHER
Dreamspinner Press
www.dreamspinnerpress.com

TASTE ME - Tammy Hogan

TASTE ME

by Tamara Hogan

CSI meets True Blood in a new urban fantasy romance series with a supernatural crimes unit.

Winner of a 2009 Daphne du Maurier Award for Mystery and Suspense, and a 2009 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart® finalist, Taste Me is the first book in a gritty, fast-paced, sexy urban fantasy romance series set in a world where incubi, sirens, valkyries, vampires, werewolves and faeries live undetected alongside humankind. In Taste Me, incubus security guru Lukas Sebastiani is suckered into playing bodyguard for his former lover, siren rock star Scarlett Fontaine – and neither of them are happy about it.

BIOGRAPHY
Tamara Hogan loathes cold and snow, but nonetheless lives in the Minneapolis exurbs with her partner Mark and two naughty cats. When she’s not telecommuting as a quality and process engineer for a global networking company, she enjoys writing edgy urban fantasy romance with an SF twist. A voracious reader with an unapologetic television addiction, Tammy is forever on the lookout for the perfect black boots.

A lifelong Minnesotan, Tammy grew up on the Iron Range. She earned a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from Hamline University. Taste Me is her first manuscript.

SPEAKING ENGAGEMENT
Tammy will talk about Taste Me’s road to publication at the March 12, 2011 meeting of Midwest Fiction Writers, the Twin Cities chapter of the Romance Writers of America. Learn about her experiences querying agents and editors, seeing the positive in ‘negative’ contest feedback, how the book title and cover evolved through the publication cycle over time, and her perhaps non-traditional approach to promotion.

Guests (and new members!) are welcome. Taste Me can be purchased and autographed at the meeting. For more information about Midwest Fiction Writers, go to http://www.midwestfiction.com/home.html.

WEBSITE
www.tamarahogan.com


BLOG
www.rubyslipperedsisterhood.com

www.casablancaauthors.blogspot.com


RELEASE DATE
March 1, 2011.

Taste Me is available in paperback and digital formats at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other book retailers near you.

PUBLISHER
Sourcebooks, Inc.
www.sourcebooks.com