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The injured Vince returns home by air, while Meg and Cass continue on, only to be abducted by a teenage boy and an unstable Vietnam veteran. Publishers Weekly reviewer Sybil Steinberg cited the novel's "nice details on small town life and police work, the generation gap, and the passions that animated the peace movement.
Grandmother's House finds Charlotte Birdsong, a Port Silva piano teacher and mother of Petey, being pressured by developers to sell Petey's inheritance from his grandmother, a little house on an historic street. The characters include environmental activists, a greedy lawyer, hippies, and policeman Val Kuisma, Charlotte's boarder and possible love interest, who is trying to solve the case of another missing developer. Klett found Grandmother's House "a mite overlong, but a good treatment of the subject.
Lauren's photographer husband is away in Alaska, so Meg and Katy stay with Lauren, her children, and an elderly aunt. A town meeting about grazing rights sets the stage for fights, missing persons, and murder.
However, a Publishers Weekly reviewer took a more favorable view, calling Old Enemies "a satisfying blend of domestic and wild life. In Baby Mine, Meg and Vince have married, and Meg's beating by a gang of teens is in keeping with the increasing violence in their small town. A young Hispanic fertility clinic worker is murdered and her teenage friend disappears; later, a fire at the clinic kills an elderly doctor who had been a mentor to Vince.
A Publishers Weekly questioned the novel's large cast of characters and said that figuring them out "can be daunting. LaPierre once told CA: When I began trying to be a writer perhaps twenty years ago, it seemed logical, natural, to start by writing mystery novels.
So I did, and have done: But every now and then I'm startled by this image of myself as a person with a good education, a pleasant home, and a satisfying family life who spends her time writing about people killing people. Or I play with the notion that the mystery novel is really a hyperbolic version of serious fiction in which the usual elements of the straight novel—people in conflict with one another, loving and hating, using or abusing, abandoning or suffocating—are exaggerated for effect.
The mystery novel uses the same emotions, but carries them to the ultimate: Probably the mystery novelist is simply a writer who chooses an easier—lazier?
I should add that in a good mystery, or the kind I most enjoy, the point of all this is to reveal and perhaps make understandable the qualities of the people involved. As a writer, I am free to invent people who interest me, and set them in landscapes I love. Murder mysteries, crime novels, or simply novels, the making of them gives me great satisfaction. Library Journal, November 1, , Rex E.
They seem to be doing a great deal of that. The Golden Age of mystery writing refers to the two decades between the world wars, with a flowering of classic mysteries on both sides of the Atlantic Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh, as well as Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, Gardner, et al. Many people think that in the last two decades of the twentieth century we have entered a new Golden Age for the mystery.
The number of books in this genre has skyrocketed, along with their quality. Many mysteries occupy the bestseller lists, although they aren't always categorized as such. Even more enjoy steady sales to fans and libraries, and mysteries are now the most popular type of genre fiction. Too often, so-called midlist writers are squeezed out by the publishing establishment's hunt for the next bestseller. Essentially, their characters are murdered by their publishers' blockbuster mentality!
Some of these writers, with devoted fan followings, have found a home for their series at Perseverance Press. And some have been inspired to create stand-alone books or new series. Perseverance publishes mysteries in the mainstream tradition of the Golden Age, when explicit violence and gore were not part of the canon. We will not publish what some call "slice-and-dice" books, with graphic mutilation, horrific torture, violence against children, and so on.
Nor will we dwell on the sordid or show only the worst face of humanity.
We want our mysteries to provide an escape for the reader, not a duplication of what increasingly fills newscasts as well as movies and television. Our books range from softboiled to semi-hardboiled, but they won't give readers nightmares. Violence is an inescapable part of crime fiction, but our books don't portray it in excruciating detail. The traditional mystery imagines an essentially benign universe and a community in which the disruption of murder or any crime is seen as contrary to the norm of stability, and must be put right.
In this setting, the average citizen or amateur sleuth is often of help to the police and other investigators in solving the mystery and restoring order. Award nominations Edgar, Agatha, Ellis, Anthony, Macavity, all in and critical praise have rewarded our publishing efforts. With two or three books per year so far, we plan to expand our list and double the number of books we publish. Readers' and writers' satisfaction is our goal, with affordable and high-quality trade paperback editions of new mysteries for the New Golden Age. The two small presses will collaborate in publishing at least two new mysteries per year.
They plan to produce literary mystery novels with an emphasis on excellent writing, suspenseful plots, and meaningful characters and situations. Perseverance Press, critically acclaimed and nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards in the s and early '90s, published "a new line of old-fashioned mysteries. More recently, editor-publisher Meredith Phillips has devoted herself to freelance editing, specializing in mystery fiction for several New York houses.
However, she missed the excitement and many challenges of publishing, and decided to re-enter the fray to bring out new works by favorite mystery writers. Boyle, Wallace Stegner, and John Sayles. What they're saying, and what they said, about the publishers: About Perseverance Press "Phillips is committed to old-fashioned mysteries, and her attitude suggests not only personal attention to detail, but a strong sense of caring in the crafting of the finished work.
The typical small press problems of limited funds and small working staff are off-set by her dedication to the genre itself and to the satisfaction of discovering and promoting both new and seasoned talents. The statement of policy does not mean that the books are of the sterile, goody two-shoes variety.
There is some violence when necessary, moderate sex, and blood is spilled, but never out of context and never dragged in for the sake of exploitation. The role of the small publisher is to keep the love of the profession. John and Susan choose to stay in because of their love and respect for books. There's not one cynical moment between them. I would rank them in the top ten in the country.