Interview with the Author
Where do you get your inspiration from?
The short answer is everywhere, but the long answer is...everywhere. You never know when inspiration is going to strike. For Murder in Paint it came as I was leaving a cemetary, and we were driving past some old gravestones and I thought about how sometimes con artists will use the names from old graves to create false identities, and from there it evolved into what if the dead person wanted to claim their name back.
Most of your characters share the same world. Was that deliberate?
Absolutely. I love the idea that someone from Silvermoon will turn up in Nicolette Briggs' world. In fact that's how Alice from the Silvermoon series got her start. She was written as a cameo in Murder in Paint, then became a regular minor charcter, before evolving into her own series.
You don't just write cozies. How do you decide what to work on?
I refer to my non cozies as palate cleansers. Something a bit different to make sure I don't get tired of writing the same genre all the time. Hoenstly though, it just depends which idea has proven strongest at that time. At the moment I'm writing a more traditional crime thriller because the idea doesn't suit a cozy mystery, but I find it too intriguing to ignore.