Jennie Bentley's DIY series

I met Jennie Bentley at Killer Nashville a few years back and have been a fan ever since. Her DIY Mystery series is as delightful has she is. The series includes Fatal fixer-upper,  spackled and Spooked, plaster and Poison, and mortar and Murder, the titles done in an interesting manner.

Welcome, Jennie! Please tell us more about yourself.

Thanks, Susan. There’s not a lot to tell. I’m just not that interesting. Most of us writers aren’t. We live through our characters and spend our days playing with our imaginary friends and having conversations with the voices in our heads. Apart from that, I live in Nashville with a husband and two boys, a dog, a parakeet, a couple of frogs and a couple of goldfish. I’m allergic to cats, so I only have those vicariously. Writing used to be a hobby that’s now my profession, and I haven’t found another hobby to replace it yet. I do like to travel a lot, and I also spend a lot of time reading. I used to knit more than I do now, but maybe I’ll pick it up again.

When you decided to write, did you make a conscientious effort to write cozies or did it come naturally?

LOL! I never planned to write cozies. It’s not a genre where I’m particularly comfortable, to be honest, although I’ve been told I do it fairly well. I started out writing romance, and then ended up in a sort of romantic mystery hybrid that’s been compared to Janet Evanovich and Mary Kay Andrew’s Savannah Blues. The chance to write a cozy series came out of left field, I wasn’t going after it, but I didn’t think I ought to turn it down. I’m more comfortable with series than I am with standalone books – once I get to know charactesr, I like to keep playing with them! – but at the same time, the cozy subject matter is somewhat limiting, and I feel acutely the lack of sex and violence. Or more accurately, I feel limited by the fact that I can’t show my characters in bed together, when we all know they’re having sex, and there are certain subjects that aren’t considered ‘cozy’ enough, and those tend to be the subjects that excite me. I was able to push the envelope a little with Mortar and Murder, where I tackled human trafficking, but that’s as far as I’ve been allowed to go, and I had to tone it down considerably. It’s great that there are cozy mysteries out there for people who prefer their murders nice and clean, but for me personally, I like my mysteries a little grittier.  

Interesting, Jennie. I write gritty stuff in my Logan Hunter series and have been told by a few readers to tone it down a little. Ha! I love Evanovich and Andrews as well.

I'm intrigued by the way your cover fonts are designed. Why are the title fonts designed the way they are?

I have no earthly idea. I have fantastic designers, for the inside of the book as well as the outside, and I have a really great cover artist who creates the picture that goes on the front of the book, but all of that has nothing to do with me. The art department at the publishing house does it. They show it to me and say “This is the cover for the new book, what do you think?” and if I have any concerns, they do their best to address them, but that’s the limit of my involvement with the exterior of the book. I have no idea why the publisher decided to brand the books the way they did – although I’m thrilled about it! The books are gorgeous, and I’m very happy the publisher did them that way – I think I have some of the nicest covers around! – but I don’t have any say at all in what they look like.

I love them too!

Each of your books includes design tips in the back. Do you have a background in home-renovation?

I do, as a matter of fact. My husband and I bought our first house in 2000. Now we’re in our ninth, or maybe tenth. All of them have been renovation objects, some more needy of fix-up than others. We’ve owned everything from an 1899 transitional Victorian to the current one, which is a mid-century brick ranch, like the haunted house Derek and Avery renovated in Spackled and Spooked.

I really like Avery Baker, a young lady who seems to find many a mystery to solve even though her background is textiles. How did you develop her?

When my editor and I first started talking about the series, she had a few ideas in mind for what she wanted it to be like. One of them was the very popular trope of fish out of water: a character dropped into a location/situation she’s ill prepared for. A big-city girl at heart, Avery inherits her Aunt Inga’s house in a tiny town on the outer edge of the back-beyond: the coast of Maine. I used to live in New York City, and a few chapters of the book take place there, so I gave Avery that background, since I could write about it with some degree of authority. I knew I needed to build in conflict between Avery and her love interest, so I made Derek a traditionalist, a restorer rather than a renovator at heart; someone who prefers to keep the integrity of the old architecture whenever possible, rather than updating it. Avery, meanwhile, came to Waterfield with her heart set on stuffing as many modern amenities into Aunt Inga’s old house as she could. She needed a profession and a background where she could innovate, where she wasn’t bogged down with history or preservation. Textiles sounded interesting, and besides, it allowed her to show some personality in her mode of dress. She’s developing and changing as the series is going along: the Avery from Fatal Fixer-Upper is quite a different character from the Avery of Mortar and Murder or Flipped Out, the book that’s coming in October. Her personality is still the same – she’s impetuous, quick to jump to conclusions, inquisitive, a little neurotic, and not as careful as she should be – but her actions and reactions have changed a little as a result of her new life and the people in it.   

Tell us more about Derek Ellis, the hunky “Mr. Fix-it”. Hubba, hubba!

LOL! Glad you like him!

Derek is Avery’s boyfriend. In the first book she sort of suspects him of wanting to drive her out of Aunt Inga’s house, but not really seriously. After Fatal Fixer-Upper is over, the two of them go into business together, renovating houses, and they also become romantically involved.

Derek is 34 when the series starts, 35 now, a year later. He’s a native Waterfielder, who grew up in a small, green Folk Victorian cottage on Chandler Street. His father is Dr. Benjamin Ellis. The Ellises have been doctors for generations, and Derek went to medical school, too. While there, he met Melissa James, and married her. The two of them ended up back in Waterfield after Derek finished his residency. He was supposed to go to work with his father, but after a year or so, he decided he’d rather work on houses than people and left the practice, with his father’s blessing. Melissa wasn’t as understanding; she divorced him and took up with Avery’s cousin Ray instead. When Derek and Avery meet, it’s five years later, and Derek is finally getting to the point where he’s ready for a serious relationship again.

He’s just about six feet tall – quite a lot taller than Avery, who’s just 5’2”. He has blue eyes and hair that’s light brown in the winter and dark blond in the summer, when the sun bleaches it. He looks good in jeans and a T-shirt, and better without either. Avery is crazy about him, and I have to admit to having a bit of a soft spot myself. 

I’m sure folks would be interested in more information about each book. Please give us a brief synopsis of each one.

Book 1, Fatal Fixer-Upper, starts with Avery inheriting her Aunt Inga’s house in Waterfield and deciding to spend the summer in Maine renovating it. She hires Derek Ellis, a local handyman, to help her, and things develop. There’s a little bit of romance, a few dead bodies, and a history mystery that dates back to Marie Antoinette and the French revolution, while going into some of Aunt Inga’s past. At the end of Fatal Fixer-Upper, Avery decides to stay in Maine and go into business with Derek, renovating houses.

In book 2, Spackled and Spooked, Derek and Avery are renovating their first real project together – since Avery moved into Aunt Inga’s house and they couldn’t sell it. The house they’re working on is a mid-century ranch which is rumored to be haunted after a man killed his wife and inlaws there some seventeen or eighteen years ago. There are creepy footsteps in the hallway when no one’s around, and then Derek uncovers a skeleton buried in the crawlspace. When one of the neighbors end up dead, Avery realizes the murderer is very much alive and still keeping an eye on the house.

At the beginning of book 3, Plaster and Poison, Avery and Derek still haven’t sold the mid-century ranch, and they don’t have any money to take on a new project. Instead, they agree to renovate an old carriage house on their friend Kate McGillicutty’s property and turn it into a love nest for two in time for Kate’s wedding to Waterfield chief of police Wayne Rasmussen. But when a dead body turns up in the carriage house, and turns out to be someone from Kate’s past, someone Kate’s daughter Shannon has been spending a lot of time with, it’s questionable whether the wedding will take place at all. Add in Avery’s mom and stepfather, in town to check out Derek, plus a set of initials carved into the wall of the old carriage house that Avery is trying to trace, and it’s a complicated few weeks.

Book 4, Mortar and Murder, find Derek and Avery renovating a 1783 center-chimney Colonial on Rowanberry Island, off the coast of Maine. The island – and the house – has a past going back to the Revolutionary War, and it isn’t long before Avery suspects that smuggling is still going on on Rowanberry Island. Except this time, it isn’t tea and sugar being brought in; it’s young women. Women with a connection to Irina Rozhdestvensky, Avery and Derek’s realtor, a Ukrainian immigrant.  Between Irina and Gert Heyerdahl, a reclusive thriller writer who spends his summers on Rowanberry Island, and an island population that doesn’t take kindly to outsiders, Avery has her hands full figuring out what’s going on.

Book 5, Flipped Out, will be released in October. Avery and Derek are filming an episode of a TV program that’s also called Flipped Out, the premise of which is to renovate – flip – a house in a week. The house belongs to Tony ‘the Tiger’ Micelli, anchor for Portland’s Channel Eight News, and when the television crew arrives, it turns out several of them know Tony from before. When Tony ends up dead, and his new fiancée Melissa James, Derek’s ex-wife, is arrested for the murder, it’s up to Avery to delve into Tony’s past and figure out who the real murderer is. 

Congratulations on a unique and adorable series, Jennie. Please let me know when you have another book release.

Thanks so much, Susan! DIY-5 comes in October, DIY-6 sometime in 2012. Meanwhile, I’m self-publishing a series of Nashville-based real estate themed mysteries as e-books for Kindle and Nook under the pseudonym Jenna Bennett. A Cutthroat Business was released in May, Hot Property in June, and Contract Pending in July. Book 4, Close to Home, will be coming in September. Readers can find out more about those on my blog, www.jennabennett.com The website with more information about the DIY series is www.jenniebentley.com 

Hope to see you at Killer Nashville again this year!

I hope to be there!

Bente Gallagher: The DIY series

Bente Gallagher (Jennie Bentley) is my third guest author who contributed recipes for Killer Recipes. She's here today to discuss her DIY series and her contributions to the cookbook.


Bente, congratulations on the success of your adorable series.

Thank you, Susan! The Do It Yourself home renovation angle seems to have been a hit with the readers, just as my editor hoped, so we’re all happy! Last I heard, Fatal Fixer-Upper was into a fifth printing, which is just awesome!

Please tell readers what inspired you to write this series.

In a word, money.

LOL

Actually, it’s kind of a twisty road, seeing as I didn’t originally set out to write a cozy mystery series about a home renovator. What I wrote instead, was A Cutthroat Business, a sort of romantic Southern chick-lit mystery/suspense novel about a real estate agent who stumbles across a dead body in an empty house. (It was released in June, under my real name.) I used that manuscript to find an agent, and she started shopping it to publishing houses in New York. While we were waiting for someone to decide to pick it up, an editor at Berkley Prime Crime approached us with the idea of the DIY series. They wanted someone to write about home renovation, my background as a Realtor® and renovator (I’m living in my 9th house since 2000) gave them the idea that I’d be a good person for the job – coupled with, I guess, the fact that they liked A Cutthroat Business even if they decided against publishing it – and the rest is history. I was offered a three-book contract with Penguin, and that’s not something you turn down when you’re a rank nobody just starting out in the publishing business.

Could you give us a short synopsis of Fatal Fixer-Upper, Spackled and Spooked, and Plaster and Poison?

I don’t know about short, but sure:
Fatal Fixer-Upper is book 1 in the DIY series. When the book begins, the main character, Avery Baker, is a textile designer in New York City. She loves her life, has a great job, a great boyfriend – also her boss – and a great, rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, so when she inherits an old house (and two cats) on the coast of Maine from a relative she hasn’t seen in 26 years, she wants to get rid of it. But when she realizes that the perfect boyfriend isn’t so perfect after all, and she loses him and her job in one fell swoop, she decides to spend the summer in Maine renovating the house, to make some money. She hires local handyman Derek Ellis to help her, since she has no experience with renovating, and the two of them start butting heads immediately. Derek is a purist who wants to restore Aunt Inga’s Victorian house to its 1870s glory, while Avery wants to squeeze in every newfangled convenience she can think of. There’s a missing professor of history from a local college, a bunch of valuable antiques dating all the way back to Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution, and some unsavory relatives heating things up, as well as Derek himself, who’s one of those hot handymen with power tools.

At the end of the book, Avery decides to stay on in Maine and work with Derek instead of going back to Manhattan, and in Spackled and Spooked, the two of them purchase their first house together: a supposedly haunted mid-century ranch they’re planning to renovate and resell. The supposed haunting stems from a murder that took place seventeen years earlier, and Derek believes enough time has passed for them to be able to sell the house and make a profit. But when they find a skeleton buried in the crawlspace, and then a next-door neighbor turns up dead, it becomes questionable whether anyone will ever want to take the house off their hands.

When book 3, Plaster and Poison, opens, they’re still trying to get rid of the haunted ranch house, and there’s no money in the bank to take on another project. As a result, Derek and Avery agree to go to work for their friend Kate, a B&B owner, to turn an old carriage house at the back of her property into a romantic retreat for two in time for Kate’s wedding to chief of police Wayne Rasmussen. But when an old friend of Kate’s shows up, and then ends up dead in the carriage house, it’s anyone’s guess whether the wedding will ever take place. It’s a book about family: Avery’s mother and stepfather are in town from California to meet Derek, and Derek’s family, the Ellises, features prominently in the history-mystery aspect of the book, which deals with tracking down a set of initials carved in the wall in the carriage house. There’s also a really cool connection to a real person by the name of William Avery Ellis who died during World War One.

Is there a favorite character that runs through the series?

Probably Avery herself. I spend so much time in her head that I feel I know her pretty well. She can be annoying, sure – she’s insecure as well as slightly neurotic with a penchant for jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions – but I like her. The scenes with Avery and Melissa are an awful lot of fun to write, too. Melissa is Derek’s ex-wife, and the person we all love to hate. Pure perfection, she was married to Derek for five years, and never lets an opportunity go by to remind Avery that she knows him better than Avery does.

When will the next DIY book be released?

DIY-4 is called Mortar and Murder, and will be released January 4th, officially. Sometimes the books make their appearance early, though, so in some places, I suppose you might be able to get your hands on a copy a week or two early. It doesn’t hurt to look, anyway. It’s a not a Christmas book, though: #1 takes place in the summer, #2 in the fall – how could I not take advantage of Halloween for the haunted house book? – and #3 in November and December. By #4 we’re into spring; the book actually opens on April Fool’s Day. In it, Derek and Avery are renovating a 1783 center-chimney Colonial house on an island off the coast of Maine, and they run into smugglers both historical and current. It’s a little less cozy than the others, in that it deals with the very current subject of human trafficking, but it has all the other aspects people have come to know and love, including a new kitten for Avery.

Where can folks purchase them and in what formats?

Most big bookstores should have them in mass market paperback. Same goes for any specialized mystery bookstore. Independents; yes or no, depending on size, I guess. Around here they have them, but that may be because I’m local. If you can’t find them in your local store, any bookseller should be able to order them for you. Amazon has them on Kindle, and Barnes and Noble have them for the Nook. There’s really no excuse not to read one!

Bente, you submitted recipes for my cookbook, Killer Recipes, with all proceeds going to cancer research. I thank you for that. I hope to try your Whoopie Pies over the holidays. Is there a personal reason you got involved in the project?

My mother died of cancer, and I have a young relative who’s just come off four years of treatment for childhood leukemia. She’s holding her own, and doing very well, so we hope the worst is over, but you just never know, do you? Cancer is the kind of disease that’ll end up touching everyone’s family sooner or later, and although I’m honestly not sure we’ll ever be able to come up with a cure for it, we can’t stop trying, can we? Can’t win if you don’t try, right?

We send love and prayers.

Do you have upcoming events you can share with us?

I’ve got a few things going on for the release of Mortar and Murder, including a signing at Mysteries and More bookstore in Lenox Village, on the south side of Nashville, on January 8th, and the Coffee County Library’s annual author day in Manchester, Tennessee, the following Saturday, the 15th. On April 7th, I’ll be doing a mystery panel for the WNBA – that’s the Women’s National Book Association, not the basketball players – and a little later in April I’ll be going to Bowling Green, KY, for the Southern Kentucky Book Fest. And then it’s on to June and the release of Hot Property, the second book in the Savannah Martin series, after A Cutthroat Business.

Thanks for the interview, Bente. And folks, here's the recipe for Whoopie Pies. For the rest of the wonderful recipes, head over to Amazon where you can purchase Killer Recipes in print, ebook, and Kindle formats. They make great gifts and support cancer research.

Warped Whoopee Pies

Ingredients:
1/2 cup solid vegetable shortening
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup cocoa
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup milk


Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease baking sheets.


In a large bowl, cream together shortening, sugar, and egg. In another bowl, combine cocoa, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a small bowl, stir the vanilla extract into the milk. Add the dry ingredients to the shortening mixture, alternating with the milk mixture; beating until smooth. Drop batter by the 1/4 cup (to make 18 cakes) onto prepared baking sheets. With the back of a spoon spread batter into 4-inch circles, leaving approximately 2 inches between each cake. Bake 15 minutes or until they are firm to the touch. Remove from oven and let cool completely on a wire rack.

Filling:
1 cup solid vegetable shortening
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
2 cups Marshmallow Fluff
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract


In a medium bowl, beat together shortening, sugar, and Marshmallow fluff; stir in vanilla extract until well blended. When the cakes are completely cool, spread the flat side (bottom) of one chocolate cake with a generous amount of filling. Top with another cake, pressing down gently to distribute the filling evenly. Repeat with all cookies to make 9 pies. Wrap whoopee pies individually in plastic wrap, or place them in a single layer on a platter (do not stack them, as they tend to stick). You can freeze them the same way, by wrapping each pie in plastic wrap and putting them in a freezer proof container. Thaw them again in the fridge.