Mabel Goes to the Dogs Interview and Giveaway

About the Book

Book: Mabel Goes to the Dogs

Author: Susan Kimmel Wright

Genre: Cozy Mystery

Release date: June 5, 2022

When Mabel finds herself sharing a thicket with a dead body while volunteering with canine search-and-rescue, her life has clearly once again gone to the dogs!

After losing her job at age forty-nine, Mabel thought she’d turned things around. Now, she’s doing good by volunteering and, surely, she’ll soon be a successful author, writing about her experiences. After solving two notorious, decades-old cold cases while serving as a historical society volunteer, she’s already getting invitations to appear on TV.

Her new assignment couldn’t be simpler. All she has to do is hide in the woods and let Millie the search dog practice finding her. But to her horror, Millie finds more than Mabel–there’s a dead body hiding in the same patch of brush. To make matters worse, Mabel’s maybe-boyfriend, suspended PI John Bigelow, has a dark history with the victim.

While struggling with maid-of-honor duties for best friend Lisa, a string of disasters created by handyman Acey, and a disagreeable new neighbor, can Mabel solve another murder in time to save John’s detective license–if not his neck?

 

Click here to get your copy!

 

About the Author

Susan Kimmel Wright began her life of mystery in childhood, with reading. That led to writing kids’ mysteries and eventually to Medicine Spring with Mabel. A longtime member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, Susan’s also a prolific writer of personal experience stories, many for Chicken Soup for the Soul. She shares an 1875 farmhouse in southwestern PA with her husband, several dogs and cats, and an allegedly excessive stockpile of coffee and tea mugs.

 

 

 

More from Susan

I got stuck. When I was outlining my story for Mabel Goes to the Dogs, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. This isn’t unusual for me, or, I’m sure, many other authors. When it happens, I have to go search for inspiration—or at least, step away from my project for a bit and do something else till a fresh idea lands in my brain.

Luckily, I soon stumbled upon the Empty Frames podcast, which explored what was, at that time at least, the single largest property theft in the world—the 1990 art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Thieves impersonating police subdued the guards and over the course of the next eighty-one minutes methodically removed thirteen pieces of art then estimated at $200 million. That dollar valuation quickly escalated to between $500-600 million. The stolen artwork including paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet, was never recovered and remains the highest-value museum robbery in history.

The museum has offered a $10 million reward and never stopped trying to find its missing art. Thirty-four years later, empty picture frames still occupy the walls where the irreplaceable, stolen paintings once hung.

The story was engrossing, and I soon started down a rabbit hole, learning more about art theft and art-theft detectives, such as Charley Hill, the subject of the book The Rescue Artist. Sadly, it’s been estimated that nine out of ten stolen artworks will never be recovered. But Hill defied the odds in managing to retrieve Edvard Munch’s famous work, The Scream, brazenly stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway on the eve of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. The Rescue Artist tells the story of the theft, as well as Hill’s wild quest to locate and retrieve The Scream.

After I resurfaced from my own odyssey through Empty Frames and The Rescue Artist, I felt re-energized and ready to write again. Every time I write a book, I learn new things, which I like to share with my readers. I always hope they’ll find them as fascinating as I do!

Interview with the Author

1. What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?
I love literary pilgrimages and have been to many places, including: Wordsworth’s grave in
Grassmere, the ruined Whitby Abbey which inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Thoreau’s Walden
Pond, Hemingway’s house in Key West, Vachel Lindsay’s home in Springfield IL, two of Edgar
Allan Poe’s homes (Philadelphia and Baltimore) and grave (Baltimore), two Laura Ingalls Wilder
home sites in South Dakota, James Whitcomb Riley’s home, Hawthorne’s House of Seven
Gables, and perhaps my absolute favorite—Orchard House in Concord MA, where Louisa May
Alcott lived and wrote. I’m obsessed!

2. What is your favorite childhood book?
Very hard to pick a favorite, but I usually say Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. It’s a
lovely book from 1916, which follows a little orphan girl sent to live with distant cousins in
Vermont. On this remote farm, suddenly living with an elderly couple and their unmarried
daughter, Betsy learns much about herself, her own capabilities, and what it means to feel loved
and needed. I go back to it again and again.

3. If you had to do something differently as a child or teenager to become a better writer as an
adult, what would you do?
I’d work harder and more consistently, and not expect things to come easily—whether that
meant a stronger plot or eventual publication. I don’t believe I truly knew what hard work
meant in terms of sitting with something for a while, or really digging in and revising. I think
subconsciously I believed things flowed for really gifted writers, and if they didn’t flow for me, I
wasn’t a good writer.

4. What comes first, plot or characters?
Always the characters!

5. What do you like to do when you are not writing?
I love long walks, with or without my dogs, and part of that is that I’m deeply in love with
nature. I literally grew up in the woods, and it shows! I also enjoy family history research,
reading (naturally!), and all kinds of travel—whether to other countries or just local historic
sites. A current travel goal is to spend the night in one of the tiny, restored tourist cabins along
the old Lincoln Highway (Route 30) and dream that I’ve time-traveled back to 1940!

Blog Stops

Babbling Becky L’s Book Impressions, October 26

Book Reviews From an Avid Reader, October 27

Simple Harvest Reads, October 28 (Author Interview)

Texas Book-aholic, October 29

Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy, October 30

Artistic Nobody, October 31 (Author Interview)

Blogging With Carol, October 31

She Lives To Read, November 1

Debbie’s Dusty Deliberations, November 2

Guild Master, November 3 (Author Interview)

Happily Managing a Household of Boys, November 4

Holly’s Book Corner, November 5

Fiction Book Lover, November 6 (Author Interview)

For Him and My Family, November 6

Locks, Hooks and Books, November 7

Vicky Sluiter, November 8 (Author Interview)

Giveaway

To celebrate her tour, Susan is giving away the grand prize of a $50 Amazon card and a signed copy of the book!!

Be sure to comment on the blog stops for extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/00adcf5478/