A Basket Case (Maddie Sparks Mystery Series) by Lesley A Diehl

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Welcome to my stop on the Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour for A Basket Case (Maddie Sparks Mystery Series) by Lesley A Diehl. Stop by each blog on the tour for interviews, guest posts, spotlights, reviews and more!

A Basket Case (Maddie Sparks Mystery Series)
Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
Setting – Upstate New York
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Camel Press (November 12, 2024)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 250 pages

Maddie Sparks believes she has found the perfect balance in her life-Zack, the man she loves, a book she loves writing and volunteer work at a local museum with a granddaughter she adores. An old flame from Zack’s past arrives and drives a wedge into Maddie and Zack’s romance, her writing stalls and someone murders the museum’s director just as the museum is about to return a collection of Native American artifacts to the Onondaga and Oneida nations. Standing over the dead body of the museum director is an Indigenous man from neither group who insists one of the baskets in the collection belongs to his family. The authorities believe he is the killer, but Maddie does not. With her love life on hold, Maddie and her granddaughter set out to identify the killer, but their search reveals thefts at the museum and a two-hundred-year-old family secret that is the key to the motivation behind the killing. When Maddie uncovers the history behind the feud over the basket, she knows the identity of the killer, making Maddie his next target.

Author Guest Post

Writing a Senior Sleuth

A Basket Case

Book 2 in the Maddie Sparks Mysteries

By Lesley A. Diehl

When I finished my cozy mystery series, The Eve Appel Mysteries, I believed I had crossed the line from midlife protagonists to older crime fighting gals. I was far beyond middle age and what I knew of younger people’s lives was extraordinarily little. Where we spent our winters in Florida was an over fifty-five community and, we returned north to a neighborhood in a small village where most folks on our block were our age or just a bit younger. In addition, I suffered a disability that made it challenging to engage in the social activities that would bring me into contact with others, e.g., walking or sitting for extended periods of time. Let’s face it: I was getting older.

What I knew a lot about now was senior life. While I had physical constraints, my head was abuzz with ideas, and I knew I wanted to write another cozy mystery series. I wanted to write a protagonist who was my age. Why not, I thought. One of the most famous sleuths can be found in Agatha Christie’s work—Miss Marple. I was eager to create a senior protagonist, one who had a zest for living and an obsessive curiosity when she encountered murder. Like me, Maddie Sparks wrote cozy mysteries, but unlike me she was tired of them and wanted something else. So she settled on writing romances, finding love and chasing down murders.

Is Maddie someone my readers could relate to and like? She works out weekly at her local fitness center, decides she needs a new hairstyle and color, goes on a shopping spree to update her wardrobe, begins her new novel and then stumbles on a dead body, falls in love and adopts a rescue cat all within a few days. Maddie does not like to waste time. Most importantly, Maddie’s nosey nature dictates she will track down the killer. Of course, she does complain here and there about her back aching, so she gives up tending her vegetable garden and watches it grow into weeds. None of her aches and pains stop her from delving into the murder despite the concern of her family and her new romance. There is nothing in Maddie’s over seventy life and signals her to stop either physically or mentally. She’s an on-the-go woman and readers seem to love her. She projects an older woman we can all look forward to being…or becoming.

Best of all, Maddie is open to new adventures not simply in changing her writing, but in taking a chance again on love despite a failed marriage. Her new love, Zack, a retired county sheriff is younger than she is by a few years and that tickles her fancy. While we often do not find new friends in our later years, Maddie meets Jane and finds they have much in common especially since they share a penchant for asking questions and believing they are capable of ferreting out clues to murders. They are both impulsive, but Maddie is more driven by analyzing events and their connection to identifying the murder. While Zack as someone in law enforcement is invaluable to Maddie’s sleuthing, he does not rescue Maddie in times when she gets herself into trouble. Maddie does that with the help of her orange rescue cat, Spike, who I set up to play a role in capturing the murderer. Spike uses what his feline nature allows him to use—a sense of who is a good person and who is not and a willingness to take catlike action to help Maddie.

Maddie is an amateur sleuth who, although older than most protagonists, still has the fire in her nature to go after criminals. She’s a loving grandmother, mother of two sons and a woman with a lot of experiences and a lifetime of knowledge to use in solving murders. She’s a protagonist that arises organically from my life although she’s a bit snoopier, carries less weight around and is physically more adventurous than I am. Who wouldn’t want such a force on their side when solving a murder? She comes well prepared for the task and carries with her friends and family to help in the search and, of course, one brilliant cat.

Do you like to read cozy mysteries with cats in them? Do you expect the cats to be more than a backdrop but somehow significant to the search for the murderer? Is a senior sleuth relatable in your reading?

About Lesley A. Diehl

Cows, Lesley learned growing up on a farm, have a twisted sense of humor. They chased her when she herded them in for milking, and one ate the lovely red mitten her grandmother knitted for her. Determining that agriculture wasn’t a good career choice, instead, she uses her country roots and her training as a psychologist to concoct stories designed to make people laugh in the face of murder. Unusual protagonists appear in many of Lesley’s works including Desdemona the crime-fighting potbellied pig, a hobo turned county sheriff and Lesley’s zany back-home-on-the-farm relatives (The Killer Wore Cranberry, all six anthologies). She is the author of several cozy mystery series (The Eve Appel Mysteries, Laura Murphy Mysteries, The Big Lake Murder Mysteries, and her newest, Maddie Sparks Mysteries, featuring a senior sleuth and her rescue cat). Her cozy mysteries have won several Readers’ Favorite Awards and a short story Sleuthfest Award. Find out more at www.lesleyadiehl.com.

Author Links

Website www.lesleyadiehl.com

Blog www.lesleyadiehl.com/blog

Facebook www.facebook.com/lesley.diehl.1

GoodReads www.goodreads.com/3414925.Lesley_A_Diehl

Amazon www.amazon.com/author/lesleydiehl

GoodReads www.goodreads.com/3414925.Lesley_A_Diehl

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