BOOK REVIEW + GUEST POST + GIVEAWAY: The Glass House by Nancy Lynn Jarvis (Cozy Mystery)

Let me start by confessing that I’m an identity thief, a murder idea thief, and a location thief.  

 I know you’ve all seen posts on Facebook from writers that say things like, “If you annoy me, I’ll kill you in my next book,” so you know writers make characters out of the people who surround them. I do that in the extreme, but I also gather material from locations around me and even use suggestions from murder victims as to how I should kill them. 

When I’m not writing, I host Airbnb. I have a guest from Long Island who is a glass artist. She flies to California every few months to take glass fabrication classes taught at a local glass studio. She does her best to share her work with me by taking photos during class, but I never get to see the finished product because it’s always carefully packaged for her flight home.  

At her last stay, she took a poppy-making class from a well-known glass artist in town to teach and was so enthusiastic about the class creations that she came up with a way for me to see her finished project before it was made flight-ready. She suggested that I should slip into the studio while the class was having lunch in the owner’s house and sneak a peek. 

I did, but I felt so guilty for breaking and entering that after I satisfied my curiosity, I went to the owner’s house and confessed what I had done. Instead of calling out police with handcuffs, the owners invited me to join the class for lunch. My Airbnb guest announced that I was the mystery writer she had been telling them about and the class turned to me with questions about writing mysteries. 

The class instructor was used to getting all of his students’ attention, even during breaks. He decided to regain center stage and sidled over to me. “I know a great and very unusual way to kill someone in a glass studio,” he said, and then explained how. I didn’t think his murder weapon sounded plausible so I laughed and asked if I could kill him using his technique. He told me I was free to do my worst. 

I do a lot of research for the mysteries I write, so when I got home, I looked up what he said and discovered he was right. By the time my Airbnb guest came back to my house with her securely wrapped poppy, I had an outline for how to do the murder, a floorplan of the studio and the owners’ house hastily drawn before I forgot it, and a list of motives and suspects, two of whom were the studio owners.  

Thief that I am, the murder victim was killed by his own hand as it were. The studio and the owners’ house became the setting for “The Glass House,” and the kind studio owners got repaid for lunch by being wildly modified to do things they would never dream of doing. 

Watch out for me. If we ever meet, I just might steal you.