Deadly Row to Hoe Cover

Cricket McRae

Here’s the official cover for my sixth Home Crafting Mystery, Deadly Row to Hoe. I’m really excited about this revamp! The book will release this November.

Looks pretty different from the previous covers in the series, doesn’t it? This is the direction all the covers will be going from now on, and the earlier books will likely change over to this illustrated style in subsequent printings.

Now don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love the wonderful photographed covers put together by Midnight Ink’s Lisa Novak. She captured the clean, spa feel I wanted for a series featuring a woman who makes her living making soap and bath products.

However, the home craft featured in in Deadly Row to Hoe is vegetable gardening, specifically a community supported agriculture farm. Another photographed cover would have probably involved vegetables, and a few people have already commented that the books look a bit like cookbooks – despite the fact that one has soap and bath oil on the cover and another is all about fiber and yarn. Granted, though, a lot of traditional colonial crafts involve food. ; )

So this illustration captures the whole farm (and even includes a mountain that looks a lot like Mt. Rainier in the background – how cool is that?).

Many thanks to Midnight Ink for making this change, and to Lisa for spearheading the mockup and finding the illustrator!

Change is good.

Wined and Died Cover

Cricket McRae

Something Borrowed, Something Bleu, my fourth Home Crafting Mystery, hit the shelves last July. I recently noticed that the fifth in the series, Wined and Died, is already available for pre-order on Amazon. But there wasn’t an image up until this week.

Here’s the final cover:

I have our own Keith Raffel to thank for his off-the-cuff title suggestion. Once I began using Wined and Died as a working title, it stuck. Before, I’d been calling the book A Drink Before Dying.

Meh.

So thanks, Keith! And expect another thank you in the acknowledgements come publication.

The “died” in the title is pretty self-explanatory, but the “wine” isn’t your usual stomped grape variety. It’s honey wine, commonly known as mead. The blue bottle is from a meadery in Boulder, Colorado. I had to do a bit of research, right? And so did Lisa Novak, my fabulous cover designer. So I had them send her a bottle. Full, of course.

I love the logo she created for the fictional Grendel Meadery in the book. The rough-hewn stone monster is perfect. So is the pewter skull wine charm. Subtle and, well, charming.

This book doesn’t start with a death – it starts with a death threat. Newlyweds Sophie Mae and Barr Ambrose are acting as surrogate parents to eleven-year-old Erin while her mother is away. When Erin stumbles into a dead psychologist’s notes regarding a homicidal client, Sophie Mae races to discover the identity of the potential killer. Clues lead her to the Grendel Meadery, a traditional honey winery operated by the tight-knit Swenson clan. Everyone has a secret, and soon Sophie Mae is up to her neck in deadly herbs and drug dealers while trying to juggle a handsome lothario, her responsibilities as a temporary parent, a major contract for her soap making business, and a strangely distant husband.

Despite the pre-order status of Wined and Died, it won’t be released until July 11, 2011. That’s eight months away, for Pete’s sake. So I’ll hush up about it for a while. Promise.

In the meantime, though, early orders usually show up in your mailbox a few weeks before the official release date. I’m just sayin’. ;)

Say Cheese!

Cricket McRae

This is the new cover for my fourth Sophie Mae Reynolds Home Crafting Mystery. It will be released in the spring of 2010. My cover designer, Lisa Novak, has done it again. Simple, sensuous, appealing yet with a hint of danger. A knife. Broken glass. Spots of vivid red.

This time around I got to kill someone by bashing them over the head with a bottle of heavy cream. Thank you, Raconteurs, for the song Carolina Drama. Inspiration comes in all forms.

As you can see from the cover, Something Borrowed, Something Bleu features cheese making as the backdrop to the mystery. I started making cheese about fifteen years ago, mostly jack and cheddar. It took months to properly age, and I had to keep an eye on humidity and temperature during that process. When I started writing this book I dove into it again, this time focusing on fresh cheeses like mozzarella, paneer, queso fresco, ricotta and fromage blanc.

I love cheese. Lots of people love cheese, it turns out. And lo and behold, there is a very good reason for this. Sure there are the awesome, often intense, flavors. The textures. The melty goodness. The way it accents pasta, eggs and fruit. But there's also the PEA.

Phenylethylamine, or PEA, is the love drug. The one that makes us feel giddy and goofy, clouds our judgment and in many ways makes us downright stoopid. Some studies have concluded PEA affects the human brain like cocaine. Brain scans of people in the head-over-heels stage of falling in love resemble those of psychotics. It's strong stuff.

Chocolate contains PEA. That's one of the (many) reasons chocolate makes us happy. But get a load of this: Cheese contains more PEA than chocolate. One study I ran across said ten times more.

Yea, baby. That's what I'm talking about.

Oh, oh, catch that buzz.
Cheese is the drug I'm thinkin' of.

And PEA isn't the only drug cheese contains, either. I grew up thinking penicillin came from bread mold. Not so, I eventually learned. Those charcoal blue streaks in bleu cheeses? Yep. Penicillin.

Now, I doubt eating a hunk of bleu cheese would cure an infection, but I'd sure be willing to give it a try.

But wait! There's more!

Cheese made from organic raw milk from grass fed cows contains high amounts of CLAs, or conjugated linoleic acids. These are omega 6 fatty acids vital to health. They're potent anticarginogens, may prevent atherosclerosis, ease inflammation, and even adjust metabolism to increase weight loss. And CLA from animal sources is the easiest for human digestion to access.

That's right. Cheese can be good for your heart and help you lose weight. How crazy is THAT? Plus, it makes you happy, happy, happy..

No wonder we love it!

Lucky Me

Cricket McRae

The third Sophie Mae Reynolds Home Crafting Mystery, Spin a Wicked Web, came out this month. I feel both thrilled and extraordinarily lucky.

First off, look at that cover. Once again Lisa Novak in the Midnight Ink art department outdid herself. Oh, I know I’m a proud mama and bound to be biased, but so many people comment on all the MI covers that I know I’m not making this stuff up. Other MI authors know what I mean: There’s something almost tactile about the designs, inviting folks to pick them up, handle them.

Then there are the mystery authors who provided cover blurbs. I’m grateful to them for taking the time and for saying such nice things. Just another reminder of what a generous group writers are.

Early reviews are good. Nope, still nothing starred from Kirkus, but they continue to review my books. That’s something! And Booklist and Library Journal continue to recommend the series, which I hope will result in even more library sales.

Reader feedback has been good, too. More email is hitting my inbox than ever, and more people are picking up the first two books, too.

So, of course it’s vital to promote the heck out of Spin. It doesn’t matter that I’m up against a tight deadline on the next Sophie Mae mystery. I mean, what a problem to have, eh?

I’ve scheduled the first dozen signings and more are in the works. My uber-targeted mailing list is receiving postcards. Spinning guilds and book clubs are showing interest. Book trailers populate the web. The list of promotional activities is long, but I’m glad to have it. Much of that list is due to the combined marketing prowess of the authors here on Inkspot. I’ve learned so much from this crew about creative -- and efficient -- book promotion.

Thank you. Seriously, knowledge = sanity. If it weren’t for you, I’d be in a constant state of semi-panic.

I’m really looking forward to Spin a Wicked Web’s virgin reading and signing. It’ll be at The Readers Cove in Fort Collins, Colorado tomorrow, Thursday the 26th, at 6:30 p.m. No booze, but a great deli and terrific coffee shop. Those people at The Readers Cove know what they’re doing.

My full signing schedule, including the Seattle venues, is here.

And this is the book trailer. As predicted, I found animoto to be totally addictive!