That old adage write what you know works in terms of my mystery book project. As a child of academe (Dad was a professor, Mom a long-time college administrative assistant) I pretty much grew up on the campus grounds of their two institutions. No surprise that I ended up in that world as an educator and librarian at 8 different universities.
What I found is that there are wonderful people in academe and I value them to this day. But I also encountered people and situations not at all wonderful. I witnessed or experienced sexual assault and corruption, misogyny, racism, and administrative, scholarly, and educational incompetence at every level.
When I decided to write in the mystery genre, the college campus and world was a logical, familiar setting, but I decided to forswear the cozy or sentimental versions of academia often found in mystery novels. I do, however, take a utopian approach, one that assumes that the indignities, trauma, and setbacks of sexual malfeasance, discrimination, sexism, and incapability can be confronted and, in time, healed.
Utopian but not perfect. There are murders and the solving of same but people get hurt, they have problems, they struggle. They also laugh, love, and live. They are, in short, human. My stories are character-driven. A core ensemble comes together: an alliance of varied expertise, personalities, genders, sexualities, and ethnicities; a found family in a way. My intent is to tell stories that normalize them and normalize what is often a marginalized experience.
The Osley College Mysteries
The Osley College Mysteries series (in progress) is character-driven collection of literary mystery tales that take place on a college campus located in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin. It is a planned series of five books.
Book 1: After the college carillonneur is found dead on his office steps and the body of an undergraduate pulled from the college lake, the Dean of Libraries commits suicide. An eclectic group of campus worthies finds themselves unexpectedly in league and uncertain whom to trust when it becomes likely that one of them is a killer.
Book 2: When the body of a student with alchemy symbols drawn on their face and hands is discovered in the college underground tunnel system, the graduate student cosplay group comes under suspicion.
Book 3: With a gruesome murder at the college ice rink followed by the disappearance of the new star recruit, suspicion falls on the women’s ice hockey coach, a gold medal Olympian and partner of the new Dean of Libraries.
Book 4: The keynote speaker of the annual Historical Osley conference is found dead the evening after his new biography on the college foundress has been publicly dismantled by an up-and-coming scholar with a book of his own.
Book 5: A child has gone missing. The body of a dead man has been found in the college woods. And a one-time hobo, now English professor and noted literary figure, finds his past has come to haunt him.
