October ’23 News

How is your autumn going so far? Except for a few days of torrential rain (you should have seen me arriving at the doctor’s office in sopping wet pants!), the weather in the northeast has been pretty nice this fall, and I’m happy to report that I’ve been productive on the writing front. I’m not only already eight chapters deep into my 2025 suspense novel, but I’ve also been working on a Bailey Weggins novella. I’m loving spending time with the irreverent, gutsy Bailey again. A special thanks to all of you who have written and asked where the heck she is.

While in Berlin, we ate fantastic schnitzel and admired the magnificent view at the Kaefer restaurant on top of the Reichstag.

My husband and I traveled to Amsterdam and Berlin in September, and the entire trip was fantastic–walking the streets, seeing great art, sampling amazing local dishes, and learning even more about the extraordinary history of those cities. No surprise but visiting the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

Something very unexpected happened to us in Berlin. We were standing with our guide near the famous Brandenburg Gate, and as I happened to glance directly at the gate, the columns seemed to turn yellow and orange. My first thought was that I was witnessing a light show, but we soon realized that, holy cow, the columns had been sprayed with paint by climate-change activists. I’m a news junkie, one who reads a couple of newspapers online each day, and I also use germs from news stories to generate ideas for my novels, but this was one of the rare times when a front-page story unfolded in front of my very own eyes. Has that ever happened to you?

Perhaps there’s travel on your schedule this autumn. Whatever your plans, I wish you a lovely (and healthy!) season. As Jordan Baker says in The Great Gatsby: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

Book News

Though I’ll soon be promoting my 2024 novel (the title and cover will be coming to this space within a month or two!), I want to take a minute to thank you again for all your support of my 2023 thriller, BETWEEN TWO STRANGERS, an Apple Best Book of the Month and a Goodreads Best Book of Summer. If you haven’t read BETWEEN TWO STRANGERS, it’s a breeze to order from one of these links.

What I’m Reading

Bright Young Women
By Jessica Knoll

If you saw my July newsletter, you might recall I finally read The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule’s gripping memoir/true crime saga about her friendship with Ted Bundy, who she met while working on a crisis hotline long before he was suspected of being a savage serial killer. So, it’s been interesting to now dig into Jessica Knoll’s new novel that imagines what it would be like to be one of the survivors of his years-long reign of terror. I was lucky enough to have Jessica work for me when I was running Cosmopolitan, and she’s such a gifted writer.

Tom Lake
By Ann Patchett

Not a mystery, not a thriller, but a totally engrossing, gorgeously written, magnificent literary novel about mysteries of the heart. And just like in a thriller, there are fascinating twists you won’t see coming.

What I’m Cooking/Making

Have you been reading lately about the concept of “girl dinners,” which are all over TikTok these days? These are the little-bit-of-this, little-bit-of-that meals busy young women fix for themselves when they don’t have a lot of time and/or their cupboards are nearly bare. An example might be some pickles, olives, cherry tomatoes, and a few chunks of cheese.

I love the no-thinking, little-effort part of this concept, and more and more when I’m home alone I eat this way. But as a baby boomer and a woman who loves great-tasting food, I need my dinners to be a bit more appetizing (more tapas-like, I guess you could say), even if a little extra effort is involved.

Here’s a meal I served myself lately: sauteed mushrooms (took 4 minutes); tomatoes with basil, shaved parmesan, olive oil and vinegar (3 minutes); and two deviled eggs (4 minutes because I already had the hard-boiled eggs in the fridge).

So satisfying.

Do you sometimes go the tapas route for a meal? I’d love to hear.

Until next month, all the best,