A small but lively audience came to the 58th St. Library August 9 to hear MWA-NY members read. And when scheduled author Lyndsay Faye failed to show up, there was plenty of time for post-reading discussion.
Katie Tietjen, an award-winning writer, teacher, and school librarian is an enthusiast for Frances Glessner Lee, one of the founders of forensic science. Katie has traveled thousands of miles to visit Lee’s homes, see her “nutshells” (miniature representations of crime scenes) and even attended the party for Lee’s 144th birthday.
Her first novel, Death in the Details, was nominated for an Edgar. Katie read from her next book in the Maple Bishop series, Murder in Miniature, which is due out in September.
Michael Northrop has sold more than a million copies of the 16 books he’s written for children and teens. Several have been on the New York Times bestseller list, including the classic YA survival novel Trapped (from Scholastic) and the hit graphic novel Dear Justice League (from DC Comics/PRH).
Now he has begun writing a mystery series for adults, called The Figman Files, and read from the first: A Brush with Death, which he called “a cozy mystery with a spy history.”
Joanna Margaret received her MFA from NYU, where Joyce Carol Oates served as her thesis advisor. Before turning to writing fiction, she was a historian, with a PhD from the University of St. Andrews. Her academic writing and scholarly work focused on Florentine aristocrats in sixteenth-century France.
She read from her novel, The Bequest, which follows a group of young scholars in Europe as they unravel a five hundred year-old mystery with eerie repercussions in the present. It was published in the US by Scarlet Suspense/Penzler Publishers, and in the UK by Aries/Head of Zeus in 2023. Her next novel, The Daughters will be published in the US in March 2026.
Hal Glatzer joined MWA in 1986 when his first novel, The Trapdoor, was published. He joined Sisters in Crime in 1999 when the first of his Katy Green mysteries came out. He’s best known for historicals, including Sherlock Holmes pastices.
But his latest mysteries are contemporary (before the pandemic, anyway). The Nest and The Office Wife are the first two books in his unique Friends With Benefits series; and he is currently more than 50,000 words into the third. He read the opening chapter of The Office Wife.
The main topic of discussion afterward was backups. Nobody wants to lose what they’ve written, but some writers—not those present, thankfully—rely exclusively on “the cloud,” aka “OneDrive,” to save their files.
The consensus was that, regardless of whether one saves to the cloud or not, the safest procedure is to use physical storage devices such as USB “thumb” drives and/or external hard disk drives (HDD). And to purchase only those with major name-brands: they may be slightly more expensive than no-name or third-party products, but they are likely to be more reliable, and retain files longer.
The bottom line: Any backup is better than no backup, and multiple backups are best.