[music] i'm anne boccock and welcome to between the covers summer series with the spotlight on south florida aileen cogdell is here she is the go-to person for mystery fiction her reviews appear in the sun sentinel and 300 publications around the world she's just returned from the edgar awards she's a past winner herself and this year the edgars were in person so eileen did it feel good to be back it felt great i think everyone was just so happy we didn't even care who what i mean everyone who's nominated is a winner but just being back in person was just wonderful and um we had to show our vaccination cards and they made these little masks that have empty pails for us to wear which is so cute um and it just it was it was great to be in person again to see the winners to dress up again and just have a great time so i'm looking forward to it next year you also wrote an essay in the award-nominated compilation how to write a mystery so congratulations on that thank you i was very very happy to do that the book has 71 other authors all of them much more famous than i will ever be the child talks about how he never plots jeffrey deever talks about how he writes a 200 page outline on his plots laurie king charlene harris people talking about mysteries how they write how they make characters it's just but it just won an agatha award that males domestic and this week it's been nominated for an anthony award which will be given at voucher con and this week it's also out in paperback and i'm just so honored to have been a part of this book congratulations on how to write a mystery truly congratulations i'm guessing you were probably the most popular girl at the ball there between the publishers and the authors but i'm curious did you see or are you seeing any new trends in the mystery realm oh absolutely and i'm hardly the most popular person there i feel i'm just a little little cog in the wheel lots of trends have shown up in the past five years and one is specifically in the last two years i've been seeing a lot of mysteries set around vacations and usually vacations set in very remote areas uh or people trying to rebuild their life in a very foreign area for a remote area a lot of these books are taking place on islands and i think it's kind of the authors have been so cooped up that they really want to take a vacation at least you know vicariously and that's why i'm seeing there must have been about oh seven or eight in the last year that have come out like this well we're all going to want to take a vacation and if we can't do it in person then we certainly have these books i you have the scoop on who's coming out with new books and what we should read first and let's kind of divide them up give me a few that we could read now okay um well there's some coming out in june and actually they're probably already right now um deep water by emma brad benford um again this takes place on a remote island it's about a a london couple they invest all their savings in this sailboat they're going to be gone for a year they hear about this idyllic island where there's nothing there they get there and there's already people there and um these these novels often end up with a lot of betrayal and jealousy and just um nothing is ever idyllic in this world um i also recommend hatchet island by paul durian now paul is one of two authors who writes about a game warden the other of course is cj box and um paul writes about a main game warden and he always includes a very evocative look at the environment things that we're doing to environment but also how people make a living off the land and this takes place um on a remote island off of maine and it's about uh lobstermen and they're the living they make off the length off the sea uh endangered whales uh birds and also just you know the corruption of man on um on the environment and another book coming out in june and about very quickly is the house across the lake by riley sager o'reilly writes standalone novels and they're very much plots that you can imagine you are a part of and this is pretty much like um a rear window a failed actress goes to her vermont house she sees a woman who's about who's drowning and she saves her and this woman's a supermodel a former supermodel and she becomes obsessed with her and she's watching her every day through her binoculars across across the lake and um he thinks her husband's trying to kill her very much like rear window and it's a really gripping um a gripping novel and i highly recommend it the house across the lake by riley sager the house across the lake okay that gives us three good ones to start with in june do you know what's coming out in july this is going to be a great summer i mean these books have been mystery genre has gotten better and better every year it used to be that they would only put out the big blockbuster in summer that's not true anymore the best books come out throughout the year and this summer is going to be just terrific in july we have we lie here by rachel housel hall and rachel's become one of those authors i i can't wait to get her books and this is about a young woman she's a screenwriter and she is gone to help her parents celebrate their wedding anniversary and it's not a very good homecoming she gets in that fight with her sister her her father's very moody her mother is very manipulative and then she has a second cousin that she barely knew existed shows up gives her a very cryptic message and then dies the next day so this young screenwriter kind of becomes um a sleuth investigating her own family and that's another trend that we see a lot now is the family thriller thrillers set around the family because we all have a family good bad indifferent perhaps missing but we have that family that's there um and rachel her book last year um these toxic things is just one of my favorites of last year it's about a woman who is a digital archivist and um she creates memory books for people and out of their their memories and the items that they that were important to them through the year she's just a terrific author and another one jennifer hillier h-i-l-l-i-e-r the things we do in the dark and again jennifer she specializes in these stand-alone psychological thrillers and she has two story lines in this book one is about a young woman arrested for the murder of her husband who was a comedian and was about ready to really launch his career and the other is about a woman who's been paroled after serving 25 years for killing her married lover and you don't really understand how these two story lines can be um interlock locking but they are and jennifer does this really well but the twists keep coming and then you realize oh my goodness okay i'm here eileen tho those are those are amazing i am going to switch gears for a minute so our audience can get to know you a little bit um so if we could do a really quick lightning round that would be great we want to know how many books do you actually read in a year oh there um last year it was about 170. okay you just took my breath away what is your favorite place to get away oh lord new york san francisco paris london and new orleans i'm a kid i can't what is something that always makes you laugh my husband he has the best sense of humor he keeps me laughing all the time on the on something else other people can enjoy the movie what what's up doc every time i see it i see something new in it that just it's one of my very favorite movies and if you could talk to your little girl self what would you tell her about her future stay on the course you know keep your dream it's going to be good it's going to have the life that you want and also exercise more eileen cogdill thank you so much i always love talking to you thank you i'll see you on the next between the covers [music]