Kathleen Marple Kalb’s first novel, A Fatal Finale, was published this spring to wonderful reviews. I was lucky enough to review it for Mystery Scene and loved the humor, adventure, and main character, a female opera singer who does “trouser” (i.e., male) roles. It was as much fun to read as it apparently was to write. It’s well worth seeking out.

Robin Agnew for Mystery Scene: Your first book came out in the middle of a pandemic with the usual methods of promotion—conferences, a book tour—a closed door. What steps are you (trying) to take to get word of your book out there?

Kathleen Marple Kalb: It’s a daily scramble. I’m lucky enough to be with a big publisher, so I did get some very good and important early reviews. (Thank you, Mystery Scene Magazine!) The publicist at Kensington has been AMAZING, keeping her eyes open for any virtual event or scrap of attention she can throw my way. But it’s still mostly social media. I start every day on Twitter and Facebook looking to see if authors or bloggers are promoting guest posts/interviews/podcasts, then tracking people down and pitching myself. Everyone has been amazingly nice to the crazy lady dropping in… but I’m still building the plane in the air, and it’s tough. Which, even on a bad day, is really a very small problem to have right now.

A Fatal Finale is set in 1899 New York, not an uncovered time period, but you've set it in the world of opera. What calls to you about that world?

It was the trouser roles, male leads played by females, that drew me into the opera setting. I read a lot of awful historical romance stuff as a teenager (in addition to Nancy Drew, Robert B. Parker, and Elizabeth Peters) and I always found it so annoying that the hero did all the swashbuckling while the heroine just stood there. Years later, I read a book about young singers at the Met, including a mezzo who played trouser roles, and it all clicked. Opera was very popular at the time but it was still a respectable and elevated art form, so I could write a character who was both an action hero, and every inch a lady. Perfect! Bonus: since Romeo is a trouser role, I could use a very accessible opera as the frame.

To my mind a lot of the best traditional detective fiction is now taking place within the pages of historical mysteries, I think partially because of the lack of forensics. The detectives are forced to use deductive reasoning, just like Sherlock or Poirot. Was that a reason for you to want to set your novel in this time period?

You’re right! It’s actually more fun, and more challenging, from a writer’s standpoint: you can’t rely on a DNA report or the mass spectrometer to save you. It’s just “the little gray cells,” as my favorite Belgian would say.

You have had a long career as a journalist, what made you want to try your hand at writing a mystery?

When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot of fiction, none of which was published or publishable, honestly. When my son started kindergarten, I decided to try again. Since I’m an avid mystery reader, it made sense to write in a genre I know and love. The one thing I was ABSOLUTELY certain about, though, was that I was never going to write a story that would come across my desk at work. That sent me toward the cozy end, which was fine by me.

What surprised you the most when you set out to write a novel? What was hardest about it? What was easiest?

Eighty-thousand words is a lot if you’re used to writing three-sentence news stories! My problem is the exact opposite of most writers’: I go too short, because of my broadcast background. I had to relax into the idea that this isn’t Subject, Verb, Object. For a long time, I felt guilty and wordy for describing the weather, or the clothes, or the food in a given scene—even though as a reader, I know all of that is really important. As for the easiest part, no contest: being allowed to have an opinion and a personality. Working journalists aren’t allowed any opinions at all… and even anchors aren’t supposed to have much personality. Ella, of course, has plenty of both.

Do you see a long character arc for Ella, the main character of your novel? Are there more books planned?

I love Ella—I’ll write her as long as I can! I have a three-book contract with Kensington, and the second and third are in process, with Ella and everyone else living and evolving. Of course, a big part of that is the question of what happens with Ella and the Duke. But there’s plenty more; all of the major characters have their own arcs, woven through the main plot lines. In the next book, A Fatal First Night, due next spring, Ella’s reporter friend Hetty is finally off hats and onto a murder trial, while Ella and her singing partner Marie are bringing out a new opera, when something very bad happens.

What sparks your story telling journey—character, setting, or plot? Or all three?

All three! For me, it all has to come together. I like the way TV and movie critics talk about a scene being “earned,” and I always work to earn it. Even that big duel with the killer on the catwalk in Finale: you know how you got there, you know why you’re there, you know it makes sense with everyone involved. Interesting aside here (no spoilers!) I originally set the book in 1899 because I wanted to have the option of somehow getting Ella in a room with Queen Victoria, who was very aged, but not in yet in her final decline. I’m still trying to figure out how I can earn that. But wow, would I love to bring them together if I could.

Did Ella just come to you, or did you spend some time thinking of what character traits you wanted her to have? Lots of writers tell me their character just intrudes on their consciousness and makes her/himself known to them, and they themselves are just the scribe for that person. What's your process?

I had the trouser role/lady swashbuckler idea first, and Ella sort of created herself around it. Her personality reminds me of Beverly Sills: brilliantly talented, while still unpretentious and fun. But she also behaves a bit like Robert B. Parker’s Spenser. Ella has a very clear code, mostly based on her Jewish mother’s ethics, and she will always do what she considers to be the right thing, even when it isn’t easy.

Can you name a book that was transformational to you, that changed your life as either a reader or a writer?

Die for Love, by Elizabeth Peters. I found it in my library when I was a teenager, and it was the first time I realized that a mystery could be seriously funny. That it was okay, even really good, to bring a sense of humor to the proceedings. It made think maybe I could write in something like my own voice, which even then was wry and a bit snarky. (I was NOT an easy kid!)

What makes you happiest when you sit down to write?

Just being with my characters again. It’s the same feeling I get when I do a shift with my best newsroom friends: I’m with people I love doing work I enjoy, in a wonderful place. Even if it all exists only in my mind—and now, (hooray!) in a book.

One last question, is your middle name seriously MARPLE?

Yes, I sure was born Miss Marple! At every radio station where I’ve ever worked, somebody has asked if I changed my name. When I finally had an agent, he wasn’t entirely sure if I should even use it because it was “too on the nose.”

Kathleen Marple Kalb grew up in front of a microphone and a keyboard. She’s now a weekend morning anchor at 1010 WINS New York, capping a career she began as a teenage DJ in Brookville, Pennsylvania. She worked her way up through newsrooms in Pittsburgh, Vermont, and Connecticut, developing her skills and a deep and abiding distaste for snowstorms. While she wrote her first (thankfully unpublished) historical novel at age 16, fiction was firmly in the past until her son started kindergarten and she tried again. She, her husband the Professor, and their son the Imp, live in a Connecticut house owned by their cat.

Louise Penny fans don’t have to be convinced to pick up one of her novels, but this one makes a case for jumping in, late in the series, as Penny has taken the Gamache family to Paris. The Gamaches’ two children, Annie and Daniel, both live there, and the family has gathered as Annie awaits the birth of her baby. She is married to Gamache’s former second in command, Jean Guy Beauvoir, who now works as a project supervisor for an engineering firm.

In All the Devils Are Here, Penny reveals some of Gamache’s childhood backstory. Series readers know he was orphaned at a young age, but the details of who he grew up with and who raised him have never previously been made clear. It turns out he was raised by his godfather, the wealthy Stephen Horowitz, and his grandmother, Zora. Stephen has journeyed to Paris along with the Gamaches to await the birth of Annie’s baby.

After a joyous family reunion dinner, however, Stephen is hit by a car as they come out of the restaurant, and Armand and Reine Marie are sure it was deliberate. As they reel from the grave injuries to their old friend, the Gamaches also begin to investigate what happened with the grudging acceptance of the head of the French police, Claude Dussalt, who seems reluctant to share his investigation with the Canadian “hayseeds.”

As always, Ms. Penny has lots of themes and character development that morph this book into the rich and satisfying experience her readers now expect. Most poignantly, to me at least, is the fractured relationship between Gamache and his son, Daniel.

There has long been a distance between Daniel and his father, somewhat exacerbated by Gamache’s close relationship with Jean Guy. The subtleties of family relationships are fully examined here, mainly in the relationship between father and son. It shades the book. When another man is found dead in Stephen’s hotel suite, the Gamaches snap into full detection mode.

I truly enjoyed seeing Reine Marie, a librarian, at work here, as she collaborates with French archivists to find clues to help solve the case, an incredibly complex one. As the Gamaches try to dissect Stephen’s final actions before his accident, the danger to all of them deepens, as does the mystery.

Penny’s writing, to me, is an immersive experience. Her take on the world—with its shadings of grief and joy, dark and light, subtlety and harsh reality, memory and fact—is a completely absorbing one. Some books of hers are more successful than others, and this one, to me, is one of the more successful entries in this long-running and beloved series. Taking the Gamaches to Paris refreshes the characters, and having the main actors be members of the Gamache family made the book even more compelling and vivid.

And of course, there’s simply the beauty of Paris—the food, the wine, the George V, the Eiffel Tower—all indelibly rendered by Ms. Penny’s hand. If you are a fan, you won’t want to miss it. If you are new to her writing, it’s a great novel to start with. I am already sad that I must now wait an entire year for a new book.

In Alyssa Cole’s first thriller, When No One Is Watching, Sydney Green returns to her mother’s house in Brooklyn, New York, after an unpleasant divorce and an equally unpleasant life in Seattle. Instead of finding comfort and a long-desired sense of home, Sydney finds her mother sinking in debt, her best friend Drea missing, and her childhood neighborhood uncannily changed. Gifford Place, a historically African American neighborhood, is finding its community, history, and spirit erased to make room for VerenTech, a ghoulish medical center that lurks in the background of the neighborhood.

Sydney becomes increasingly frustrated as her beloved neighborhood is picked apart and blanched of its community spirit. The local bodega is replaced by a strange and unruly racist shop owner, the elderly homeowners mysteriously vanish and are quickly replaced by obnoxious families, and Sydney herself is hunted by debt collectors and an untrustworthy meter man.

But anger soon gives way to paranoia as Sydney begins to suspect the rapid gentrification is even more sinister than it first appears. Many of the chapters end with extracts from the neighborhood’s group on OurHood, an app where residents air their fears, their conspiracies, and their theories about Gifford Place. As she digs, she finds an unexpected ally in her new neighbor Theo, an unemployed white man, with time on his hands, whose relationship with his live-in girlfriend is on the rocks. But since Theo appears to be one of “them,” can he be trusted?

Cole plays neatly with eerie instances and feelings of dread. She taps into elements of noir by having both Sydney and Theo glancing out from their windows, spying on the street, their neighbors, and each other, successfully eliciting the unnerving feeling of being watched. The suspense, however, can feel drawn out and the villains underdeveloped, but the denouement is both thrilling and horrifying. The strength of the novel is in the character of the fictitious Gifford Place and the residents with history there. Readers will root for them in this thriller-horror mashup.

I haven’t dipped into Alexander McCall Smith in quite a while, and after reading his new Isabel Dalhousie book, I am seriously questioning that decision. I absolutely loved this gentle, beautifully written and felt novel. While it’s not really a mystery, it has some mysterious events in it. It follows the life and musings of Isabel Dalhousie, the editor of a philosophy review, mother of two young children, and beloved wife of Jamie.

She and Jamie’s strong and unquestioning love for each other binds the book together, but not in a sappy or emotionally unbelievable way. It feels real. Isabel, who is wealthy, and who feels guilty about it, also administers a trust, which helps to keep her niece Cat’s life up and running.

At dinner with her husband as the novel opens, Isabel witnesses a scene between some of the diners, one party liberal, another part of a conservative think tank. The liberal diners get up and leave in a huff, and Isabel, witnessing the situation, goes over to the conservatives’ table and apologizes to one of the men, telling him he should have never been treated that way in public. A fellow diner observes this interaction with great interest.

As Isabel is filling in at her niece’s deli during the lunch rush, she’s approached by the man who witnessed her act of kindness. He has an unusual request. He wants her to be the executor of his will. He can’t decide which of three relatives to give a beloved piece of Scottish property to, and he doesn’t want to split it up. He asks her to decide on one of them. She reluctantly agrees, as she is always governed by what is the right or kind thing to do in any situation. She feels she can’t decline the wish of a dying man, especially one who, it turns out, knew her father.

Isabel’s life is governed by her tender heart. She stands up for her fellow diner; she helps her niece out when she can; she agrees to be an executor for a stranger; she worries about her niece’s employee, Eddie; she helps a woman she meets at a school concert, who worries about her son and asks her to intervene with Jamie, his music teacher. She really can’t say no when it comes to helping.

The delights of this novel are many. To prevent it from being too full-on corny, there is plenty of gentle and intelligent humor. For those of you who follow the series, you are probably familiar with Gordon and Hamish, Isabel’s lawyers. They are hilarious.

Isabel is also sure Cat’s fiancé, Leo, is part lion, and the ways she observes his “tawny” hair and thinks about his skin texture (are his hands padded?) are so subtly funny that her observations stick with you and continue to bloom in your mind, even after turning a page or two.

As Isabel sorts out the matter of the man’s will and the matter of her niece’s increasing demands for money from the trust, many of Isabel’s assumptions are not only challenged, they are sometimes proven wrong. This is a philosophical journey as well as a journey of personal discovery, and the true meat of the novel are the philosophical thoughts and behaviors that underpin every character. Though the story may be slight, the novel is not. It’s full of genuinely thoughtful observations on morality and behavior, ways all of us could behave if we just tried a little bit harder. To Isabel, the behavior is natural. She’s my new hero.

If you like Carl Hiaasen, you know his political bent and point of view, so it won’t be a shock to see that one of our most gifted satirists is taking on President Donald Trump. The president is not referred to by name in the novel, but rather by the code (I imagine fictional) assigned to him by the Secret Service: Mastodon. Along with our president, Hiaasen has turned his laser focus to Palm Beach society, an almost as easy—and juicy—target.

As the book opens at a charity ball, one Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons ventures into the garden of the estate where it’s being held. She disappears mysteriously, though it fairly quickly becomes clear that she’s not been murdered—she’s been squeezed to death by a giant Burmese python.

Hiaasen often has a kick-ass central female character, and in this novel, she’s one Angie Armstrong, who is kept busy capturing and setting free the many wild creatures in South Florida that venture into human territory. A former wildlife protection officer and a former criminal, Angie now runs her own business wrangling Florida’s “pests.” As a former felon, she’s not allowed to carry a firearm, so she uses a machete on the python and hauls the snake away for an autopsy to see what the creature has swallowed.

The ensuing hijinks are pure Hiaasen—the snake is stolen and somehow ends up blocking traffic near the Winter White House as the First Lady (here referred to as Mockingbird) is headed there for the weekend. Meanwhile, one Diego Beltran, an immigrant recently smuggled in near the snake-infested estate, ends up being unjustly charged with Kiki’s murder.

The dead woman had been a generous donor to the president, and so he makes a Twitter victim out of poor Diego, demonizing him as a gangbanger and an illegal. Angie makes it her personal mission to set him free.

The satiric look at the presidential marriage, the president’s incendiary take on immigrants, the kind of fawning society members who surround the first couple, and the whole Palm Beach scene is pointed and well-aimed. There’s also a look, on the part of the ecologically minded Hiaasen, at the poor pythons themselves, who are not native to Florida but were adopted as pets and are now a threat to native species in the Everglades.

Hiaasen’s favorite character—and a favorite of many readers—Skink, the roadkill-eating ex-governor, also has his part to play. This is a beautifully told and assembled story that had me laughing and wincing, sometimes simultaneously. Hiaasen makes you laugh, but he also makes you think—a rare and welcome skill.