How many of you DUers read cozy mysteries?...

[LiberalEsto]

5. Beaton is British

She writes the Agatha Raisin series, set in the idyllic Cotswolds in England, and the Hamish MacBeth series, set on the northwestern tip of Scotland. The Agatha Raisins can be hilarious. Agatha is a 50-something retiree. Hamish is a lazy policeman in a tiny town in the Highlands with an uncanny skill at solving mysteries and solving problems affecting the people in his village. Both give good pictures of contemporary life in the UK - the slang, the crime, the massive unemployment, the junk food people subsist on, the soulless housing developments, the influx of people from other cultures.

I recently went to Beaton's web site and discovered that she writes other books under different pen names.

To answer your question, I don't know the answer. Some writers have only one or two books in them, or their first one is such a dud that publishers won't handle a second one. Others write not just one series, but two, three or more.

Margaret Maron is from North Carolina and writes about contemporary North Carolina in her Deborah Knott series. Knott is a judge. The books tackle issues like racism, sexism, poverty, alcoholism, development and much more, but are well written and fun to read. Maron also lived in NYC for some years and has a series set there with a woman police detective named Sigrid Harald. I have never been able to get into those.

Another write I love is Charlotte MacLeod, who died several years ago. She wrote a series set in Boston, the Sarah Kelling series. The other series revolves on Peter Shandy, an agriculture professor at an unusual ag college in northeastern Massachusetts. Both series are incredibly witty and very funny. She also wrote under the pen name Alisa Craig. Her Inspector Madoc Rhys series, set in Canada, is wonderful. The other one, about a Canadian garden club called the Grub-and-Stakers, always left me cold. It's too silly for my taste.

I found out about some of the women writers from other ones. There is a big group of them who are friends and plug each others' books. They slyly insert mentions of one another's books in their own. At one point some of them formed a band and performed a few country western songs at writer events. The group includes or included Phyllis Whitney, who died a few years ago; MacLeod; Barbara Michaels/Elixabeth Peters, who wrote the popular and funny Amelia Peabody series set in Egypt during the Victorian era; Joan Hess, who writes the hilarious Maggody series set in rural Arkansas and the Claire Malloy series set in a college town in Arkansas; Maron; Dorothy Cannell whose work I'm not much into, and some others whose names I don't recall. And lest I forget, Sharyn McCrumb,whose writing is brilliant, and who writes about contemporary and historic Appalachia. McCrumb also wrote a series featuring Elizabeth MacPherson, a forensic anthropologist, some years ago but stopped writing those after "The PMS Outlaws".

The group recently threw an 85th-birthday party for Barbara Michaels, who lives about 30 miles from me in Maryland (though I've never met her or the others). It was Egyptian-themed (Michaels, aka Barbara Mertz, has a PhD in Egyptology) and got a nice write-up in the Washington Post.