The Teetotaler’s Bar follows a woman who inherits her aunt’s fortune, her New City apartment, complete with a puppy, and the bar on the first floor, which also happens to be a murder scene. What inspired the setup of your story?

It just came to me one day out of the blue. I like to create stories using situations that don’t add up. So I was thinking, what could be more out of balance than a young girl who lives healthy and doesn’t drink but suddenly inherits a bar? She inherited plenty more besides, from a relative she hardly knew, and I was off and running with another mystery!

Jazz is a fascinating character that has an overwhelming amount of things happen all at once. What scene was the most interesting to write for that character?

I liked writing the scenes in the beginning that started to establish who Jazz is, and the ones that gave her an idea of who the estranged relative who got murdered was, too. The aunt who left her the bar is her mother’s half-sister, and she was one of those know-it-alls who runs around telling everybody else what to think, how to feel, and who to be. Ha, I based that on the worst co-worker I ever had! It raises the question, did the woman’s big mouth cause her to be murdered, or was it, perhaps, something else? And if it was something else, what?

There is a lot of time and care spent with descriptions and building the setting and tone of the story. Was this out of necessity to develop the depth of the story, or was it something that happened naturally while you were writing?

It was a little of both. I wanted to make the bar that Jazz initially is reluctant to inherit to be a whole lot nicer than she feared it would be. There’s an unsolved murder hanging over it like a cloud, but she slowly starts to like the idea of owning the place. She’s also immediately enchanted with owning the Art Deco apartment building where the bar occupies the first floor, but when she enters the stairwell, finds it’s neglected and rather grungy, so that gives something of a shadowy atmosphere to it. Yes, it’s gorgeous on the outside, but it’s certainly not perfect all the way around, and neither is the whole situation.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I’ve got two more mysteries in the works at the moment! One deals with bumbling animal traffickers. The other one is set during the American homefront in World War II, where two young brothers find an abandoned baby. I think they should be available around the holidays. I’m having a wonderful time working on them both!

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