SHORT BUT NOT NECESSARILY SWEET...

When Boomers Go Bad Smoke Screen showed up in When Boomers Go Bad (RendezVous 2005) Buddy was pretty happy about his marijuana crop coming in until he noticed something funny in the corn field. Will he be able to concentrate on anything long enough to save his former teacher, Mrs. Wilkins?

Cocktails With The Corpse Death Dines In (Berkley Prime Crime - 2004) is an anthology with a culinary slant, edited by Claudia Bishop and Dean James. It offered a chance to bring back two of my two favourite female con artists with all of their very bad attitudes. A recipe was included with every story in this anthology, although that can be considered out of character for either one of my gals. Luckily I knew one for martinis. Hardcover 0-425-19262-8. The paperback version is scheduled for Spring 2005.

Wake Up Little Suzie appeared in Bone Dance, (the fifth Ladies' Killing Circle Anthology (RendezVous Press - 2003). Some kids have a tough time dealing with too much responsibility. Suze was all right until Mom's boyfriend Arvie started getting out of line.

Stroke of Luck - the Osprey summer mystery series, Summer 2004Harry and Neville had a good thing going in that retirement home. It was a hell of a set-up for a pair of frisky old bank robbers until the wrong cop decided to retire. In this one case, let's hope the bad guys win.

Blind Alley appeared in the November 2001 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I think of it as a form of mystery best described as "Little Girl Noir". Growing up in the fifties was not nearly as innocent as it seemed. Blind Alley was selected for World's Finest Crime & Mystery III edited by Edward Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. It was short listed for a Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis award for best short story.

Death Before Doughnuts introduced the Grim Reaper as a working guy who can also meddle in a crime when he has no choice. This story won The Ottawa Citizen Write Now! Contest 1994. It can be read on the author's office wall.

Naked Truths appeared in Cold Blood Five, (1995) and The Best of Cold Blood ISBN 0-88962-628-6 (1998), both edited by Peter Sellers and John North, and published by Mosaic Press. This story has the distinguishing element of having been first sold in a bar in Omaha, well before it had actually been written. I write fiction but I never lie. It marks the first appearance of the con artist Verona and her unnamed accomplice and narrator. This time they're trying their blackmailing skills in a nudist colony when a murder occurs. Naturally, they are faced with the tricky problem of figuring out where the villain hid that weapon.

Cotton Armour in The Ladies Killing Circle: A Crime and Mystery Collection, edited by Victoria Cameron and Audrey Jessup, General Store Publishing House, Out of Print (1995), won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story of 1995. It proves for once and for all, you just can't trust old ladies. Cotton Armour was reprinted in The Arthur Ellis Awards: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Crime and Mystery Fiction, edited by Peter Sellers, Quarry Press, ISBN 1-55082-265-9, (1999).

Dark Day in Distribution is also in The Ladies Killing Circle. It just goes to show you, when you got a big operation with a lot of throughput, things can go wrong. But what happens when the wrong guy gets to spend eternity lounging on a cloud, while a solid citizen is stuck in the seventh level of hell? Sometimes it's good to have the Grim Reaper take an interest in your case. Dark Day in Distribution has been reprinted by Storyteller in their Winter 2001 issue. (Dec. 2001)

Full Moon, Blue Lake was published in Cottage Country Killers: A Crime and Mystery Collection, edited by Vicki Cameron and Linda Wiken, General Store Publishing House, ISBN 1-896182-53-4 (1997). Maybe those two old gals were as drunk as lords the night they rammed their speedboat into Judge Greely's fancy new dock and roared off laughing across Blue Lake, backlit by the full moon. But any resemblance between them and my relatives is purely in my husband's imagination. Plus there is no such place as Earl Maddore's General Store and, in retrospect, that's probably a good thing.

Good-Bye Arabella (Chatelaine, September 1997) . What had Arabella done now, silly old girl? Shoplifting? Catnapping? Or worse? After fifty years, Beryl can hardly cope with her friend's foibles. And then it gets much worse.

You can find Kicking the Habit in Menopause is Murder: A Crime and Mystery Collection edited by Victoria Cameron and Mary Jane Maffini, General Store Publishing House, 1-894263-05-7 (1999). There was definitely something peculiar about those two nuns traveling on the first-class train from Montreal to Toronto. And it wasn't just the way they were looking at that banker. Astute readers were quick to spot the elegant con artist Verona and her nameless confederate under those wimples. Of course, it was too late for the banker. Kicking the Habit was shortlisted for the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story of 1999.

But The Corpse Can't Laugh appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (April 1999) and made the Readers' Choice top ten list in EQMM that year. The story was reissued in Over the Edge: The Crime Writers of Canada Anthology edited by Peter Sellers and Robert J. Sawyer, Pottersfield Press, ISBN 1-895900-29-8 ( 2000), which just proves it takes more than a can of paint, a smouldering toupée and a wheelchair to keep a good woman from losing her mind.

Pleasure in a Job Well Done in On SPEC Fall 1999 aptly demonstrated the danger of getting too emotional over the state of your laundry. It was a lesson some of us needed.

Downsized to Death made the cover of Storyteller (Canada's Short Story Magazine) Winter 1999 issue. It's a great shot of the Grim Reaper and a cautionary tale of what might happen if HQ let consultants re-engineer the time-honoured work processes of the United Brotherhood of Reapers (Loc. 66666).

After Due Reflection appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (July 2000) and should appear again in Iced to be edited by Peter Sellers and Kerry J. Schooley (Insomniac 2001. It will make you think twice before you fail to acknowledge the presence of a harmless, middle-aged woman.

Look for Lucky Day in a coming issue of Over My Dead Body.

Sign of the Times made the new Ladies Killing Circle anthology Fit to Die, edited by Joan Boswell and Sue Pike (RendezVous Crime, Fall 2001) Don't claim you haven't been warned about little old ladies, especially the nice ones.

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