Lora Roberts

It started with the petits-fours. I saw them in the catalog of a certain Maven of Style (note initials). Cute little cakes in different shapes, beautifully decorated with fine-lined frosting curlicues. I wanted them. I was turning 50, and thought it would assuage my pain to have fifty little cakes for my birthday (not to [...]

The first Liz Sullivan mystery, Murder in a Nice Neighborhood, featured a vagabond amateur sleuth who lived in her VW bus for reasons of economy and expeditiousness—it was cheap and easy to get away quick if you needed to. It never occurred to me that Liz Sullivan should have a dog. She had enough to [...]

…or how to do a who-done-it Mysteries require a sharpening of the elements found in any good traditional novel. There must be conflict on many levels—personal, situational and systemic. Something important must be at stake for the viewpoint character, something the reader wants that character to have. Unlike other forms of fiction, mysteries require a [...]

Those who love crime fiction divide it into many sub-genres—espionage, private investigator, police procedural, cozy. Those of us who are often slotted into the cozy arena prefer the term Amateur Sleuth, because it more accurately describes what happens in the book. My books, for instance, feature a viewpoint character who follows the trail but is [...]