Reading some of my new work at the Center for the Spiritual Journey, hosted by Neil Silberblatt as part of his Voices of Poetry series!

A really fun interview with Gina Hott of Hott Books!

Honored to have The Honeymoon Homicides showcased on Bookish Indulgences today!

Sometimes, in life, the worst thing that can happen to you is also the best thing.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course. And I certainly didn’t know that I would start solving murders and become Provincetown’s answer to Miss Marple—updated, of course, for the 21st century. But something was guiding me here when my husband Noah, a surgeon, decided he’d rather be with his emergency-room nurse than with me.

With the divorce grinding on, I felt I couldn’t breathe in the city anymore. Everything reminded me of Noah and our marriage: the hospital where he practiced, the shop where we went for ice cream in the summer, the park where he’d proposed. It was time to change my life. I bought a new (used) car; I accepted the cat that my co-worker had been urging me to adopt; and I found my way to Provincetown.

We like to see justice done, especially when we perceive that the real world isn’t playing fair with us. If the guilty party is caught and punished in the fiction we read, then perhaps we regain the sense of order that’s lost whenever we hear the news. Every day, we see situations that have us baffled, and our minds seek to cope with them: it often feels that everything is getting way too far out of control. Reading about Inspector Whatever arresting the culprit restores a little harmony, a little control, a little of a feeling of safety.

My favorite genre, whether reading or writing, is mystery. There’s something that’s intellectually and morally satisfying about seeing justice done—and having a go at figuring out how to get there.

Most murders originate long before they come to the reader’s—or the sleuth’s—attention. The body is both the ending of one story and the beginning of another. But unless there’s some sort of flashback in the prologue, the murder mystery proper begins with a body.

We’ve all probably read police procedurals that leave us exhausted, depleted, sad, feeling that the darkness has truly won, that the world is a bleak place. Certainly, it’s easy to feel that way if we keep our attention too much on the news. But cozy mysteries offer some respite from that darkness: they give us loveable, quirky characters in unlikely situations who bring humanity, humor, and humility to life’s most difficult moments, and allow us, at the end of the day, to see that the good can outweigh the bad in the world.

Kathy: What first drew you to cozy mysteries?

JDB: I have to go back in history to G.K. Chesterton. When crime novels were first finding their footing, they were all about clues and alibis and so on… but when Chesterton introduced Father Brown as detective, he made crime investigation human. Father Brown imagined how both the victim and the killer experienced life and what drove both to their fatal encounter. He understood people.