This post appeared on the Bouchercon Blog on Sept. 25, 2015

I’ve been a mystery lover since I was a kid reading Nancy Drew.  I still love reading mysteries, have taken to writing them, and have always wanted to go to Bouchercon, which I picture as a long weekend party for mystery lovers. This year I am finally attending Bouchercon.  Here are ten reasons I have been longing to attend this fabulous conference:

This morning, at the ripe old age of 65, I am giving birth. No, this isn’t a medical miracle, but it feels a little like a miracle to me. Today is the official publication date of my first book to be published.

When I ordered “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed, carrying Oprah’s badge of approval stuck to the cover, a book about a young woman’s hike across the Pacific Crest Trail, I thought I was just going for another walk in the woods, like I had with Bill Bryson. Strayed was racked with paralyzing grief after the death of her mother, which led her first onto a trail of self-destruction before her rather random, ill-considered and impulsive foray into the wild.

In this sun-soaked mystery set in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Sabrina Salter traded a high-pressure job as a Boston meteorologist for life as an innkeeper on St. John. But storm clouds roll in when Sabrina finds Carter Johnson, her most attractive guest, tucked up in a hammock way past check-out time… and he’s not just dead to the world, he’s just plain dead, with a bullet hole in his chest.