Guilty as Framed (An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery) by Lois Winston
About Guilty as Framed
Cozy Mystery
11th in Series
Setting - New Jersey
Independently Published (September 6, 2022)
Print length : 263 pages
Digital ASIN : B0B1XHPLBC
When an elderly man shows up at the home of reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack, she’s drawn into the unsolved mystery of the greatest art heist in history.
Boston mob boss Cormac Murphy has recently been released from prison. He refuses to believe Anastasia’s assertion that the man he’s looking for doesn’t live at her address and attempts to muscle his way into her home. His efforts are thwarted by Anastasia’s fiancé Zack Barnes.
A week later, a stolen SUV containing a dead body appears in Anastasia’s driveway. Anastasia believes Murphy is sending her a message. It’s only the first in a series of alarming incidents, including a mugging, a break-in, another murder, and the discovery of a cache of jewelry and an etching from the largest museum burglary in history.
But will Anastasia solve the mystery behind these shocking events before she falls victim to a couple of desperate thugs who will stop at nothing to get what they want?
Crafts projects included.
About the Character Guest Post
And to Think, I Could Have Been a Romance Heroine
By Anastasia Pollack
They say that timing is everything. I’m here to tell you that my protagonist clock was obviously on the fritz the day my path crossed with that of author Lois Winston. Lois used to write romance and romantic suspense until one fateful day when her agent had a conversation with an editor who was looking for a crafting mystery series. “Know anyone who could write one for me?” asked the editor.
“As a matter of fact,” said the agent, “I do.”
Enter Lois Winston, who worked as a crafts designer in her day job. Lois had never thought about writing a mystery prior to that fateful day. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d read one. But there’s something you should know about my author: she’s always up for a creative challenge (more on that later.) The next thing you know, she’s dragged me out of my comfortable middle-class existence and started dropping dead bodies at my feet.
Lois has had so much fun wreaking havoc in my life that she’s never gone back to writing romance. I think I would have made a great romantic heroine. We butted heads over this but finally reached a compromise. Since Lois wrote my husband out of the picture before the opening scene of Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun, the first book in the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries, she promised me she’d tweak one of the characters into a romantic interest. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get her to agree to stop with all the dead bodies. She said she can’t write a murder mystery without a murder. I hate when she goes all rational on me.
Lois has now embroiled me in murder and mayhem in eleven novels and three novellas. As for creative challenges, in Guilty as Framed, the newest book in the series, Lois gave herself — and by extension, me — a doozy of a challenge this time. She’s always looked to real-life crimes and human-interest stories for inspiration when developing her plots. This time, though, she’s incorporated an actual unsolved crime into the book — the 1990 burglary of the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston. This was quite a challenge, not only since I live in New Jersey, not Boston, but because most of the persons of interest and witnesses to what is still considered the greatest art heist in history, are now dead.
I have to admit, although quite harrowing for this reluctant amateur sleuth, Lois pulled it off, and I, of course, live to endure more dead bodies in whatever plot she concocts for the next book.
About Lois Winston
USA Today and Amazon bestselling author Lois Winston began her award-winning writing career with Talk Gertie to Me, a humorous fish-out-of-water novel about a small-town girl going off to the big city and the mother who had other ideas. That was followed by the romantic suspense Love, Lies and a Double Shot of Deception.
Then Lois’s writing segued unexpectantly into the world of humorous amateur sleuth mysteries, thanks to a conversation her agent had with an editor looking for craft-themed mysteries. In her day job Lois was an award-winning craft and needlework designer, and although she’d never written a mystery — or had even thought about writing a mystery — her agent decided she was the perfect person to pen a series for this editor. Thus, was born the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries, which Kirkus Reviews dubbed “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” The series now includes eleven novels and three novellas. Lois also writes the Empty Nest Mysteries, currently at two novels, and one book so far in her Mom Squad Capers series.
To date, Lois has published twenty novels, five novellas, several short stories, one children’s chapter book, and one nonfiction book on writing, inspired by her twelve years working as an associate at a literary agency.
