When Culinary Traditions Become Literary Gold

Thank you for the opportunity to spend some time here on Booklover’s Bench! I’m here today to talk about what happened when I combined my love of Virgin Islands cuisine and my passion for writing mysteries. Trust me, we all have one—a culinary tradition that instantly comes to mind whenever the topic of home comes up. Maybe it’s a dish from the region where you were born. Maybe it’s an annual food-related festival centered in the town where you went to college, or where you lived and worked for a while. Maybe it’s a cooking technique or culinary habit that’s prevalent in the area where you live now. No matter what “home” means to you, chances are… […]

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Guest Author Bethany Maines

I started my career in traditional publishing when “chick lit” was the trend du jour. And my first novel, Bulletproof Mascara, got pitched as “chick lit mystery,” which came as a surprise to me since I had not realized I was writing either. In my head, mysteries involved a dead body and probably a lot of British people. (Try not to laugh at me too hard. I was in my twenties.) I thought I was writing an adventure-romance about what would happen if James Bond were a twenty-something girl… […]

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