Sweet Book Found
Posted by ascamacho on July 5, 2008
One of the best things about attending writers’ conferences is the chance to meet new writers and learn of their work before anybody else does. At Deadly Ink I got to know Peggy Ehrhart, a charming Jersey girl who used to teach English but now mostly writes fiction and plays guitar. She has written a mystery that didn’t at first look like my kind of book but held a few surprises.
The book, “Sweet Man Gone” is a traditional mystery featuring amateur sleuth Maxx Maxwell. If you’re a blues fan you know the book has a musical theme, since the title is a gentle homage to the Muddy Waters tune, “Who’s Gonna Be Your Sweet Man When I’m Gone.” As it turns out, Maxx is a blues singer in a band on the high road to success before their guitarist takes a header from his New York apartment window. The threat to the band’s future gives her good reason to investigate this apparent suicide.
It’s not QUITE a cozy, although it has most of the elements. Still, it hooks you with the great characters and a protagonist you can’t help but fall in love with. And as a music lover, I enjoyed the blues based setting populated with Manhattan bar bands. But of course the most important part was finding a good, solid, character driven mystery plot riding on that background theme music.
Like I said, I got to see it early thanks to an Advance Readers Copy Peggy was kind enough to give me. The book is still a few days from release, but it’s not too soon to pre-order your copy, and I highly recommend that you do that right away.
