LeseLust & LeseLiebe

Thanks so much for inviting me, Shelley! I’m a huge foodie myself, although I can’t cook much more than frozen pizza or boxed mac and cheese (Hubs, however, is an amazing cook!). And while the human side of my story contains more drinking than eating (my human MC just turned 21 and is enjoying it), the mermaid side of the story is heavily driven by a lack of food. Over-fishing has my Mer characters leaving the safety of their deep-sea home and taking dangerous chances to find enough to eat. My mermaid protagonist, Erie, is caught on a desperate hunt when she pushes another Mer out of the way of the “landfolk” nets. Once she’s trapped at the marine park, she refuses to eat the dead fish that were trapped in a net like she was. One of the first air-words she learns is “breakfast.” The pivotal scene when she first speaks to her human trainer revolves around him trying to bribe her into eating a dead fish (Mer only eat live fish, so she’s really grossed out by this). There are several scen...

Ava Haines isn’t your typical college student. She has big goals and is laser focused to make sure nothing gets in the way of her internship at the local art gallery and her bigger goal of owning her own place one day. But a girl still has to eat, right? Especially when the esteemed and very handsome photographer Thomas Malloy offers to take her out to dinner while he’s in town for his show at the gallery. Perhaps Ava is not quite as focused as she thought she was. Even she’s entitled to a little fun once in while, and dinner with Thomas at Habanero’s, the chic and out-of-her budget Mexican restaurant, sure beats another bland meal at the college dining hall. They start off with Margaritas and tortilla chips. While the scene ends there, I’m certain Ava ordered the grilled Mahi-mahi tacos. As good as that meal was, it has unfortunate ending. No worries though as Ava has other delicious meals in her future with both Thomas and her charming statistics tutor Max Wallis. Max invites her out...

When Shelley asked me to write a blog about my books and food, my first thought was that I wouldn’t have enough material for a paragraph much less a blog. After all, my books are about Spencer Manning and the cases he works on, not food. But after some thought I realized food is an integral part of my books and Spencer’s life for several reasons. The first is, fictional characters need to eat too, albeit fictional food. The second is, food plays a major part in advancing the story, especially in a mystery novel. As the cases develop, Spencer needs to let the reader know what he is thinking so the reader can be involved in trying to figure out who did it. And what better way to do that than to have Spencer converse with other characters. He dines twice a week with Lieutenant Stanley “Stosh” Pawolski of the Chicago police and less often with his romantic interest, Detective Rosie Lonnigan. Gino’s East, one of Chicago’s favorite spots for deep dish pizza, is one of their favorites, as is ...

If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen Survival during wartime means doing without, but those who endure discover how to get what they need. For most of the characters in my dystopian novel The Kitchen Brigade , this revolves around food. Food is love. Food is culture. Food is community. For this group of women who have made cuisine their passion and their livelihoods, food is everything. When we first meet Valerie, a former culinary student, she’s cooking with whatever she can scrounge in the mess hall of a refugee camp. To bear the nightmare her life has become since a war-torn America was occupied by Russia, she draws on memories of learning to cook as a child. She recites the names of the French “mother” sauces like a mantra; she recalls the aromas of licorice and vanilla that keep her father alive in her mind. Again she calls upon her childhood comforts when she’s imprisoned and forced to cook for a Russian general. In his kitchen she’s thrown into a brigade responsib...

The Judas Goat: Guns and Sausage Gravy I am really good at arguing with myself.  And I lose arguments with myself.  All the time.  When I’m thinking about a problem, I am my own irresistible force and immovable object all at once. As an attorney, it has come in handy over the years.  I know the weaknesses in my case before I ever set foot in the courtroom.  I know what the other side is going to say, so I say it first.  I control the weakness.  I put it on display.  And because I’m prepared, I can explain with confidence exactly why that weakness simply does not matter. When I decided to write The Judas Goat , I had read many cases where one person used lethal force upon another and raised the issue of self-defense.  Some were successful, many were not.  So I thought about the “poster child” case, a term used in the profession for a case where the alleged events are so sympathetic it could affect the outcome of the case.  In a perf...