Coffee and Crime

Mystery Lovers Bookshop on occasion hold Coffee and Crime Breakfasts with visiting authors. I love to attend these even though I have to get up early to make the hour (or hour and a half if there’s traffic) drive to Oakmont. Usually my Saturday mornings are pretty tied up, so I was thrilled to learn that Alafair Burke was coming on a weekend that I was free.


I had “met” Alafair online before, but not in person. I’m ashamed to say that I have not read any of her books, although they’ve been on my to-be-bought list for a very long time.


Now I own two of them, her first, JUDGMENT CALLS and her current release, ANGEL’S TIP.

And I can say I’ve met her in person. We both arrived early, so I had a chance to chat with her before the crowds moved in. We’re both going to Bouchercon (9 days and counting!), so perhaps we’ll bump into each other again there.

After breakfast, Alafair gave a wonderful talk about growing up in a community with a serial killer on the loose (the BTK strangler) and how it makes you think differently about what’s normal. It made me think about my own teenage years and the series of girls my age who were found murdered in our area. Listening to Alafair left me pondering once again if history helped to steer me toward crime fiction writing. One of my early “books” was based on those murdered girls. Before that, I’d written sci-fi and westerns. Since then, I’ve never been drawn to writing any genre but crime fiction. I guess knowing that you could be a potential murder victim leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.