Embroidered Lies and Alibis (An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery) by Lois Winston
About Embroidered Lies and Alibis
A Stitch in Time Could Save a Life…
When Anastasia’s mother Flora is offered a free spa vacation from Jeremy Dugan, a man connected to her distant past, Anastasia and husband Zack suspect ulterior motives. After all, too-good-to-be-true often spells trouble. Their suspicions are confirmed when the FBI swoops in to apprehend Dugan. However, Dugan isn’t who he claimed to be, and his arrest raises more questions than answers.
The Feds link Dugan to a string of cons targeting elderly single women across the country, but his seemingly airtight alibi leaves investigators stumped. Then, shortly after his release on bail, he’s kidnapped. A certain segment of New Jersey’s population is known for delivering deadly messages, and the FBI believes Dugan received one of them.
Meanwhile, bodies begin showing up in the newly created public garden across the street from Anastasia and Zack’s home. With two baffling crimes, no clear suspects, scant evidence, and every possible motive unraveling, both the FBI and local law enforcement are once again picking Anastasia’s brain. This time, though, her involvement is far from reluctant. Will she stitch together enough clues before she or someone she loves becomes the killer’s next victim?
Craft project included.
About the Guest Post
by Lois Winston
“Write what you know.” This writerly advice is so common that even non-writers are familiar with it. That’s probably why so many readers often ask authors how much of their protagonist is really them. Are authors just saving the cost of a therapist by dabbling in literary self-analysis by writing about ourselves? I’ve been asked this question in just about every interview I’ve done since the release of my first book twenty years ago, no matter the genre or protagonist.
Although I had very little in common with the heroines of my early romances, I have drawn heavily on my own experiences in writing about Anastasia Pollack, the reluctant amateur sleuth of my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries. However, there are fundamental differences between the two of us.
Unlike Anastasia, I am not a sleuth, nor have I ever been a sleuth, reluctant or otherwise. I’ve also never worked in an occupation that would bring me in close proximity to any sleuths, amateurs or professionals.
I’ve never stumbled across a dead body and hope I never will. I prefer virtual dead bodies to real ones and solving crimes on my computer in the safety and comfort of my own home. Besides, I’ve read that dead bodies emit all sorts of unpleasant odors which would trigger my gag reflexes, causing me to contaminate the crime scene. Then there’s the gruesomeness of most real-life crimes. I’m sure being at an actual crime scene would induce ongoing nightmares. For all of those reasons, I prefer to leave the real crime-solving to the professionals.
Anastasia and I both went to art school, and both discovered early on that we weren’t born with the teaching gene. She works as a crafts editor at a women’s magazine. I worked as a designer in the consumer crafts industry, creating projects and kits for magazines, craft book publishers, and craft kit manufacturers.
Anastasia has two teenage sons. Although I once had two teenage sons, my own sons are no longer teenagers. However, everything I know about teenage boys, I’ve learned from my sons and grandsons. And no, as much as my sons believe I modeled Alex and Nick after them, Anastasia’s sons get along much better than my own sons ever got along growing up.
Anastasia also shares her home with nonhumans – a formerly ill-tempered French bulldog (Even pets can have character arcs in books), a Shakespeare-quoting parrot, and upon occasion, a corpulent Persian cat with attitude. If I had her menagerie living with me, I’d either have constant sinus headaches or would have expired from anaphylaxis years ago. I don’t even have a goldfish.
Anastasia is a widow whose deceased husband gambled away all their savings and left her in extreme debt. My husband has never stepped inside a casino, rarely even buys a lottery ticket, and is very much alive.
Anastasia has a nasty communist mother-in-law who has lived with her. I had a nasty communist mother-in-law, and unfortunately, we shared a home for six very long years. The main difference between the two women? My mother-in-law never owned a French bulldog named for a communist treatise. Anastasia is much saintlier and has more patience than I, but even she reaches her breaking point in Seams Like the Perfect Crime, the fourteenth book in the series. The aftermath of that opens Embroidered Lies and Alibis, the latest release in the series.
In Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun, the first book in the series, Anastasia rents out the apartment above her garage, which housed her home studio, to help whittle down her massive debt. Her new tenant is photojournalist Zachary Barnes who looks like his DNA swam around in the same primordial pool with Pierce Brosnan, George Clooney, and Antonio Banderas. Anastasia quickly comes to suspect Zack works as a spy for one of the alphabet agencies. My husband? Not a spy and not exactly cover model material, but he’s cute in his own way.
Finally, Anastasia doesn’t age in real time. When I first created her back in the early aughts, I was only a few years older than her. Over the course of the fifteen books and three novellas in the series, she’s only aged two years. The years have sped by much more quickly for me.
Many authors write a book a year. Do you prefer series characters to age in real time, or do you prefer reading series where the characters basically stay the same age across all the books? Post a comment. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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 unexpectedly 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 fifteen 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-four 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. To learn more about Lois and her books, visit her at www.loiswinston.com. Sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Mini-Mystery. She also blogs regularly at The Stiletto Gang and Booklover’s Bench.
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