“The tidy kitchen reeked of death.”

And so begins the mystery of who killed the woman lying on Mrs. Pearcy’s kitchen floor.
Join Detective Inspector Charles A. Dupin as he steps across the threshold of a dosshouse in Shoreditch, England and makes a promise to a little boy to find his mother’s killer.

My story, “The First Problem” is available in this fiery anthology, Hold Your Fire: Stories Celebrating the Creative Spark from WordFire Press (in support of the Don Hodges Memorial Scholarship). Edited by Lisa Mangum. (February 2021)

WordFire Press link HERE.
Available in paper and kindle on Amazon HERE.

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From the publisher’s website:

Creativity comes from many places, but often the initial spark of inspiration can be traced to something or someone who challenged us to first put pen to paper or brush to canvas, to pick up a camera, to look at the world with new eyes. Maybe it was the lyrics of a favorite album. Maybe it was the encouragement from a beloved teacher. Maybe it was seeing a wonder of the natural world.

Maybe it was just a feeling deep down inside that demanded to be set free, a voice ready to be heard, a story begging to be told.

Hold Your Fire is a collection of nineteen short stories celebrating the power and influence of inspiration in all its forms—art, literature, music, astronomy, science, inventions, epiphanies.

Here you will find stories of people being inspired as well as stories of people inspiring someone else. Stories not only of artistic inspiration but of scientific discoveries. The “Eureka!” moments that change the whole world and the small moments when someone dares to fight one more day.

From a romance about a teenager’s attempts to win over his first crush with poetry, to musicians and artists harnessing the inspiration of unexpected muses, to a fairy tale princess seeking happiness, every story in this anthology shines brightly. And since every fire casts a shadow, there are also a few horror stories that thrive in the dark.

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Review by Publishers Weekly:

“Mangum (Dragon Writers: An Anthology, ed.) brings together 19 solid short stories for an anthology exploring the eureka moment of artistic and scientific inspiration.
“The Door” by Kristen Bickerstaff extols the magic of a child’s imagination, while Alicia Cay reimagines Sherlock Holmes’s boyhood in “The First Problem” to show how patience and observation ignite a passion for investigation. With “White Sails and Rough Seas,” M. Elizabeth Ticknor and Rebecca E. Treasure emphasize the need to listen with one’s heart as well as one’s head when problem solving. But Kitty Sarkozy shows the flip side of this in “Dream Girl,” in which living too completely in imagination causes deadly harm. And “The Last Waking Princess” by Kat Kellermeyer asserts that love is a kind of magic. Though none of the stories are standouts, there are no flops either. The subjects run the gamut from music and literature to space exploration, but all highlight the human desire to grow and create. Readers looking for short bursts of inspiration will be pleased. (Feb. 2021)”

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~xo