Maltipoos are MurderA Doggie Spa Mystery
Published by (Entangled Ignite)
Cozy Mystery – 320 Pages
Release Date: 5/27
Synopsis
Can a murder investigation keep these opposites from attracting?
Cara Rogers wants a fresh start after a slew of bad luck in Washington DC. Moving to Virginia to help her aunt run La Maison de Chien, a doggie spa, is just the peace of mind she needs. No stress. Just her aunt, the dogs, and wide-open country.
But when she finds Aunt Marian floating in the doggie swimming pool, the rest she so desperately needs flies out the window. The only witness to the death is Rex, an apricot maltipoo, and while he may not be able to talk, he’s communicating the only way he knows how—one paw at a time. And Rex’s clues lead to murder.Can Cara keep the doggie spa afloat, convince Middleburg homicide detective Cole Sampson that Aunt Marian’s death was no accident, and keep Rex from the killer’s clutches before they all end up as dead as dogs?
My Review:
If I could afford it, I would take my dogs to La Maison de Chien, even though there was a murder there. This seems like a very cool place for dogs. I really enjoyed this cozy. It was just the way I like a cozy to be, the killer is someone you don't suspect at all. I love when a writer does that with a cozy. I also liked the characters in this story. I was very well written and was very fast read. It flowed really well. Once I started it, I couldn't put it down. The only bad thing, it wasn't long enough, lol. Great job!
I received a complimentary copy of this book for my honest review.
About This Author
Jacqueline Corcoran and Lane Stone have teamed up to write about some of their favorite topics – dogs, mysteries, and Middleburg, Virginia, which is known as the nation’s horse and hunt capital. MALTIPOOS ARE MURDER is the first in their doggie day spa romantic suspense series.
Jacqueline Corcoran lives in Arlington, Virginia with her rescue animals, husband, and two children. She holds a Ph.D. in social work and is on faculty at the Virginia Commonwealth University. She has published numerous professional academic articles and fourteen books in her field. Her mysteries include Maiming of the Shrew (Cozy Cat Press), A Month of Sundays (Whimsical Publications), Backlit (Etopia Press), and Memoir of Death (Etopia Press). See her website athttp://www.jacquelinecorcoran.com/
Lane Stone and her husband, Larry Korb, divide their time between Sugar Hill, Georgia and Alexandria, Virginia. She’s the author of the Tiara Investigations Mystery series. When not writing, she’s usually playing golf. Her volunteer work includes raising money for women political candidates and conducting home visits for A Forever Home, a dog foster organization. She is on the Political Science Advisory Board for Georgia State University, and she serves on Sugar Hill’s 75th Anniversary Planning Committee. www.LaneStoneBooks.com
Author Website: http://jacquilanebooks.com/Author Twitter: http://twitter.com/JacquiCLaneS
Author Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JacquCorcoraniLaneStone
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Guest Post:
My Favorite Tips from
Writing Craft Books
Jacqueline Corcoran
Since I was a teenager, I’ve loved writing craft books, and I’ve
picked up many tips along the way. What
are some of the best tips I’ve learned? Here
is a list of the books and the “best of” from them.
Writing
the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass and the other Maass
books, Fire in Fiction and Writing Twenty-First Century Fiction. I like the Maass books because they offer
ways of writing that are non-linear. I
don't like books that have you outline each scene in a mechanistic way, because
I’m more on the pantsing side of the plotting equation. The Maass books rely a lot on reversal. Think of an idea, and then reverse it, have
the opposite happen, or have the opposite motivation for a character. I rely
regularly on reverse brainstorming for when I’m stuck on “what happens next?”
Another tip I use regularly from Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook is
to describe the quality of light in a scene. It’s unique writing advice and, if you think
about it, light is present in every moment we’re in, and it can set the mood
for your scene.
A dialogue tip I’ve gotten from Fire in Fiction is to limit lines of
dialogue to five words. No one wants to
read speeches, and this forces you to do the snappy dialogue thing. Another dialogue tip Maass gives is to only
have one character speaking and the other responding through body language
alone. This forces you to rely on
non-verbals for communication. When you
revise, you’ll put in more dialogue typically but it helps for me with first
draft writing to get down some interesting ways of portraying character
exchanges.
Elizabeth George’s Write Away. Elizabeth
George is one of my favorite mystery novelists, and I was delighted when she
came out with a writing craft book. The
tip I like best in Write Away comes
from how Elizabeth George describes her process. She writes in present tense, summarizing what
is going to happen in a scene, and then goes back and writes it as a scene
later. I’ve adopted this technique
because I find that figuring out what’s going to happen can really be
difficult, and at least this way, you know where you’re going and are not just
stumbling blindly around in the dark.
The
Art of the Book Proposal by Eric Maisel. I write non-fiction as
well as fiction and in the The Art of the
Book Proposal, he has a great technique where he takes the reader through
all the ways you can approach a non-fiction work from the secular to the
spiritual, from the formal to the more colloquial. It really gets you thinking about different
angles on how to structure a book, and I have used it for my fiction as well.
Word
Painting by Rebecca McClanahan. This is a wonderful book about crafting descriptions. Each chapter ends with a list of exercises
that have you try out the material that was discussed. One of my favorite exercises is switching the
lens. I can start with interior
monologue within a character, then have the character focus on something close
up, and then switch to looking at something faraway.
5.
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Dialogue-Tom-Chiarella/dp/1884910327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1401676686&sr=8-1&keywords=writing+dialogue
Writing
Dialogue by Tom Chiarella. I haven’t picked this one up in
awhile but it has given me some invaluable lessons on writing dialogue, such as
not having characters ask each other “why?” I write mysteries mostly and questioning and
determining motivation is a stock part of how to figure out who committed the
murder. But I learned that you don’t
have to rely on questioning all the time, and that making statements instead
can make the dialogue much more interesting, less obvious and linear. The author also poses an exercise in which
each character has his or her own direction and agenda for the dialogue that is
not necessarily linked to what the person before has said. I still do this exercise at times in order to
make a section of dialogue more snappy and interesting.
What are your favorite tips that you’ve incorporated in your
writing that you originally learned from writing craft books?
About the book: 
About the author: 
About the book:
About the author: 
About the book:
About the book: A new life and a new identity can't protect Becca from a past that refuses to go away.
About the author: Cynthia Ruchti has more than three decades of radio broadcast experience with "Heartbeat of the Home" radio and currently serves as Professional Relations Liaison for American Christian Fiction Writers.
and 
About the book: 
About the author: Shelley Shepard Gray is a two-time New York Times bestseller, a two-time USA Today bestseller, a finalist for the American Christian Fiction Writers prestigious Carol Award, and a two-time Holt Medallion winner. She lives in Southern Ohio, where she writes full-time, bakes too much, and can often be found walking her dachshunds on her town's bike trail.