Spotlight Maya Corrigan: My Brush with a Real Crime #Giveaway

 

For today’s Spotlight I hark back to the past, describing a real crime that connects with my writing. That crime taught me that I was no Nancy Drew. 

In the 1980s, when my son was a preschooler and my daughter a first-grader, I had a job teaching evening classes in writing at the community college. I dropped off my son with a babysitter three mornings a week, giving me a chance to prepare classes, grade papers, and, if time allowed, work on my mystery novel.

On one of those mornings there was light snow on the ground. As I bundled the children into our station wagon, I noticed a young man getting out of a car across the street. I'd never before seen either the car or the man in our neighborhood. When I returned home fifteen minutes later, I spotted footprints in the snow outside the sliding door in our living room. 

A car like the one I saw. Image courtesy of Pexels

Image from Pexels by Eva Bronzini

The door was still locked. Someone must have tried to break in, but the locks on our slider had foiled the would-be burglar. Yay! But there were a few oddities inside the house.  The books on our built-in shelves had been pushed toward the back instead of being even with the shelf front. My husband and our two children shelved books any which way, so I often had to neaten our book collection. I didn’t bother that morning. When I went into the bedroom, I discovered that my jewelry box wasn’t on the dresser where it usually rested. I wondered which of the kids had moved it and I didn’t search for it. 

You’re probably wondering how a woman who wants to write mysteries couldn’t figure out what was going on from four solid clues. Alas, I didn’t. 

As I headed to my study downstairs to work on my book, I felt a frigid breeze. Glancing into the the rec room, I saw the source of the cold air—an open window. My brain finally unfroze as the fifth clue sank in. The burglar had found another way into the house, and might still be inside! I zoomed up the stairs, ran to my neighbor’s house, and called the police. 

FAST FORWARD

Three decades later, I came up with the idea for my Five-Ingredient Mysteries. 

Though the burglary was far from my mind, my subconscious might well have latched onto five clues as essential to solving a mystery. Of course, I made my sleuth a lot smarter than I was at her age. But wait, there’s another connection between the burglary and my writing.

BACK TO THE PAST

The police agreed the house had been burgled and by someone wearing gloves who left no fingerprints. They explained that burglars often shove books to the back of the shelves to find valuables the residents might have hidden there. Because my jewelry box contained my diamond engagement ring and a gold bangle from Tiffany’s, the burglar could be charged with grand larceny if caught, but that was unlikely. Nonetheless, the police took down my description of the car and the man.

Ten days later, while I was teaching my night class, my husband answered a call from a Washington, DC, policeman, who asked if we’d had a burglary recently. They’d arrested a man in a stolen car, which had my jewelry box in the trunk. My gold bracelet and a few other pieces of good jewelry were not in the box, nor was my ring. However, the ring was on the finger of the woman who was with the burglar in the stolen car. I would get the ring,  my costume jewelry, and the memorabilia in the box (letters, clippings, photos) after the trial. 

One of the clippings in the box was the first article I’d sold to the Washington Post. The byline listed my name, occupation (freelance writer), and the community where I lived. That information allowed the police to track down who owned the jewelry box.  

So the burglary and my writing were connected long before my first mystery was published. Without that Washington Post article, I’d have never gotten back my jewelry and the burglar would have gotten away with his crime. Despite watching many Perry Mason episodes, I was really nervous when called to the witness stand during the trial. Though my estimate of the burglar's height had been off by a few inches, at least I'd nailed the make and model of the stolen car parked on my street. The burglar was sentenced to ten months in the county jail.

In A Parfait Crime, my latest Five-Ingredient Mystery, a crime in the past leads to murders in the present.

READERS: Has an incident in the past affected you years later OR have you ever had a brush with a crime?

To enter the drawing for A Parfait Crime, leave a comment by Wed, May 1, with your e-mail address, so I can contact you if you win. I'm sorry I can send books only to U.S. addresses. 

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

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