My Inspirations by Judi Lynn

My friends and family know that I’m a writer, and they know how much I love mysteries.  We’ve taken a small bedroom at the back of our house and turned it into an office for me, and we lined it with bookshelves.  The shelves aren’t just crammed with books, but I showcase some of the wonderful gifts I’ve been given that tie into my writing, too.

I love Agatha Christie, so my husband bought me a clever teapot that looks like a writer’s desk.  The piece of paper in the typewriter has words “typed” on it from one of Christie’s novels.  The pages tossed in the wastebasket are filled with her words, too.  A handgun lies on manuscript pages.  Here’s what it looks like:

My sisters bought me a typewriter, too, with little mice scampering across the keys.

And since Agatha has a love of poisons, my friends sent me these:

And this one (don’t look at the dust.  It’s on the top shelf and hard to reach?

I have a framed picture for a story in a chapbook of short stories I wrote.

There’s more, but you get the idea.  My writing room is full of great memories, things to inspire me.

High summer in River Bluffs, Indiana, is always sweltering and sweet. But the heat is really on when a decidedly dead body turns up in the neighborhood.

When established house flippers Jazzi Zanders and her cousin Jerod donate a week’s worth of remodeling work to Jazzi’s sister Olivia, they’re expecting nothing more than back-breaking roofing work and cold beers at the end of each long, hot day. With Jazzi’s live-in boyfriend and partner Ansel on the team, it promises to be a quick break before starting their next big project—until Leo, an elderly neighbor of Olivia’s, unexpectedly goes missing . . .

When the friendly senior’s dog tugs Jazzi and the guys toward the wetlands beyond Olivia’s neighborhood, they stumble across a decomposing corpse—and a lot of questions. With Jazzi’s pal Detective Gaff along to investigate, Jazzi finds her hands full of a whole new mystery instead of the usual hammer and nails. And this time it will take some sophisticated sleuthing to track down the culprit of the deadly crime—before the killer turns on her next . . .