Death Stalks Door County
Patricia Skalka’s very first novel is coming out in 2 weeks.
I’m planning to attend her reading/signing event on May 16th at Centuries and Sleuths in Forest Park. Carpool, anyone?
Patricia has another Chicago-area event on May 22nd at Women and Children First in Chicago. For a more complete list of her upcoming appearances, check out her events page.
I met Patricia at the Chicago Writers Conference last fall. She qualifies as one of their success stories. It was exciting to meet her and talk about what she went through to get her book published. I haven’t seen her in a few months, but she was still kind enough to write this guest post, called “A Box of Books”.
A box of books
My box of books arrived last week. Ten copies of Death Stalks Door County, a book that represented so much. Hundreds of hours of work; one draft after another, written, revised, discarded. Sometimes forgotten. More than once shoved aside and dismissed. And then finally resurrected and reread. I was about to chuck the whole project when I realized that I really liked the story and the characters and that I was the only one who could tell the tale because I was the only one who knew it. And it was this sense of obligation to both the story and the characters that prompted me to persist.
Fast forward almost another two full years and I have a box of books – my book — and the sweet joy of knowing the hard work was all worth it.
Death Stalks Door County is a literary mystery; there are deaths, of course, but equally important to the discovery of the killer’s identity and motive is the protagonist’s journey of self discovery and self redemption. Dave Cubiak is a tortured soul; he comes to Door County to escape a past drenched in grief and guilt and finds himself haunted by both.
Publishers Weekly calls the book a “tight, lyrical first novel” and Kirkus Reviews says it’s an “atmospheric debut with enough twists to tempt puzzle aficionados.”
I’m delighted by the response thus far and hope others get as much satisfaction from reading the book as I got from writing it. Death Stalks Door County introduces The Dave Cubiak Door County Mysteries.
Waiting for the box with copies of the first book, I wrote the draft of the second. And there’ll be more, as Dave Cubiak continues his journey.
Catherine published a novel and short story back in the 1990s. Life intervened, and she didn’t write for a while. But then she started writing again in 2010 for National Novel Writing Month, and has continued to write in November and throughout the year. She has stories in two Journey anthologies, Drops of Midnight and Other Worlds. She is currently either revising her latest NaNoWriMo novel from 2012, working on short fiction, or posting on her blog, CB’s Mojo.
