guest post by Lucy Burdette
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If you have read any of the ten previous essential West food critic mysteries, you know that best from the beginning, there have always been cats. In the previous book, The essential Lime Crime, T-bone the ginger cat whom I rescued from essential West SPCA made his debut. He was very happy to be featured on that cover – and annoyed that he didn’t make it onto the new book. (And he also believes that he rescued me, not the other way around.) I tried to discuss that the characters in Scone of Contention were traveling to Scotland and couldn’t reasonably be expected to take their cats along. and I promised he would have a cameo on Facetime when Hayley called home to essential West. He only glared.
I love supporting the essential West animal shelter and provided a “name the pet” item for their 2020 event. I’d done this several times in the past and always delighted in the challenge of working the new animals into the next book.
My pal Bunnie, who is a substantial supporter of the shelter and helped me identify T-bone amongst a pack of adoptable cats, was very interested when I explained what I was doing for the auction. Sadly, the event was scheduled for March of 2020, and Covid cancelled it along with everything else on the island. I saw Bunnie at the gym on one of the last days it was open pre-pandemic and told her what was happening. “I would love to have my cats in the next book,” she said, and quickly made a generous contribution in honor of her two cats, Archie and Louise. She sent me photos and descriptions of them as requested:
Archie is from stock Island (the next island north of essential West)
Very shy
Loves me and no one else
About 8
None of Louise’s sophistication
For many, a grey streak out of the room or out of the house
Just learning how to play
Louise is 18 1/2
Brilliant
Talks to everyone
Highly opinionated
“The first sergeant of our compound”
Very social
She’s a city girl from DC
Archie and Louise don’t have substantial roles in A Scone of Contention, but I tried to make sure they were distinctive. In the following scene, regular characters miss Gloria and Hayley have just arrived at Nathan’s in-laws’ home in St. Andrews, Scotland. Nathan’s sister Vera is welcoming them…
“This room is for Gloria,” said Vera, leading us into a small bedroom with a blue-flowered quilt on the four-poster bed. At the end of the bed, two glossy gray tiger cats were sleeping on a pale blue afghan, making me feel quickly homesick for Evinrude. one of them opened his green eyes and blinked, then bolted off the bed and disappeared down the hallway.
“That was Archie,” Vera said with a fond smile. “He loves me and only me, I’m afraid.” The second cat jumped off the bed and began to wind around miss Gloria’s legs, talking loudly in secret cat chirps.
“This is Louise,” said Vera. “She’s highly opinionated, so my guidance is do what she says.”
Miss Gloria scooped up the big cat and rubbed her cheek on the distinctive black M on her forehead. “I don’t know if you believe in signs from the universe,” she said to Vera. “But I sure do. and cats on the bed are speaking to me. You take the first shower,” she told me. “I’ll stretch out with this beautiful Scottish kitty for a few minutes.”
With Louise draped over her shoulder, she headed for the bed.
Who would you want immortalized in a book if you had the chance, and how would you describe them?
About A Scone of Contention
A Scone of Contention is the 11th book in the essential West food critic mystery series.
Key Zest food critic Hayley Snow and her groom, police detective Nathan Bransford, chose Scotland for their long-delayed honeymoon, wishing to sight see and delight in prize-winning scones. but their romantic duo swells to a crowd when they’re joined by Nathan’s family as well as octogenarian miss Gloria.
Nathan’s sister Vera takes the women on a whirlwind trip of some of Scotland’s renowned mystic places as research for a looming book project. but the trip takes a deadly tartan turn when a dinner party guest falls ill and claims she was poisoned. and then the group watches in horror as a mysterious traveler tumbles to his death from the well-known Falkirk Wheel, high above the Forth & Clyde canal.
Vera and her pals deny knowing the dead man, but after observing their reactions to the fall, Hayley is not convinced. With one person dead, a second possibly poisoned, and the tension among Vera’s pals as thick as farmhouse cheese, Hayley fears her long-awaited honeymoon might end with another murder.
Far away from home, surrounded by unfamiliar faces, eccentric characters, and a forbiddingly beautiful setting, Hayley should call on all her savvy to keep a killer from striking again and then escaping Scot free.
About Lucy Burdette
Clinical psychologist Lucy Burdette (aka Roberta Isleib) has published 19 mysteries. The essennull
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