My love of mystery books started with Nan, Bert, Freddie, and Flossie in the rather tame adventures of the Bobbsey Twins. That led to the teen amateur sleuths Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and their never ending escapades both separately and together. I've always enjoyed the thrill of mysteries and like the challenge of putting the clues together to figure out who is guilty.
In 2003, I discovered If Looks Could Kill, the first of the Bailey Weggins series by mystery author Kate White. I've read all the books in the series including Book 8 Such a Perfect Wife which was released this year. I was super excited when I saw that Kate White would be speaking about Such a Perfect Wife at a discussion at my local bookstore in Brooklyn.
We gathered in a circle in the back of the bookstore and had an engaging conversation with Kate about the book and many other topics. Kate was pleasant and made a point to call each person by their name. She wanted to know from each of us if we guessed who the killer was in the Such a Perfect Wife book and at what point we had figured it out. I asked Kate why all the Bailey book covers were different since they were a series and she said it's because she had different editors over her time of writing the books. She was eager to hear the group's thoughts on the book industry's trend towards psychological thrillers and away from procedural serials like the Bailey Weggins books. We also talked about mysterious deaths in the news, like vacationers in the Dominican Republic, and deliberated what happened with them.
Kate's best advice was sharing the key to committing the perfect crime -- it's to have a really good alibi! Kind of reminds me of a plot of a Nancy Drew mystery I read back in the day.