Rosie Genova | Authors Who Inspire Me

I didn’t start out writing mysteries. The first book I completed, nearly ten years ago, was a romantic comedy set at the Jersey shore. At the time, I saw myself as a writer of women’s fiction, but a reader of mysteries. Happily for me (and I hope for my readers) I learned I could write mysteries, too: that’s how the Italian Kitchen Mysteries were born.

But I take inspiration for my cozies from a variety of sources--authors who have inspired me and modeled for me the best of mystery writing:

1. From Dorothy L. Sayers, brilliant author of the Lord Peter Wimsey series, I learned an all-important lesson—give your audience credit for some brains. Sayers crafted complex, smart mysteries with a wealth of suspects and a ton of red herrings, confident that her readers could keep it all straight. (And even if we couldn’t, we could always go back and check.)

2. From Agatha Christie, that peerless puzzler and creator of those sneaky sleuths, Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot, I grasped the importance of back story, or a suspect’s past will lead you straight to motive. Christie knew that the sum of a person’s experiences brings him or her to what can be fateful choices, so I try to layer my characters’ experiences while incorporating clues, not just to the crime, but to their behavior as well.

3. From Elizabeth George and Deborah Crombie, I learned to appreciate the emotional entanglements that complicate the lives of their sleuths. In other words, a little romance adds some balance and diversion in a mystery. Even detectives, whether amateur or professional, are human. They get their hearts broken. Sometimes, they break the hearts of others. And their personal lives often collide with their investigations in unexpected ways, providing added an emotional suspense to the overarching mystery plot.

4. From Louise Penny's example I know that secondary characters, whether people who support the sleuth or bedevil him, need to be three-dimensional and believable to the core. One of the things that brings me back to Penny’s Three Pines series is her wonderful cast of secondary characters, all of whom have their own quirks and personalities. Penny has taught me this: Take the time to flesh out every character who appears on the page.

5. From my readers, I’ve learned a whole lot of stuff, but here is perhaps the most important: Get your facts, straight, lady. If you kill somebody with a plant poison, make sure it grows in the area of the country in which your story is set. If you are using real geographical landmarks, it better be in the right place. If someone’s eyes are blue on page 7, they should not turn to green on page 103. Most importantly, all the clues to the mystery must be available to the astute reader, whether laid out in the narrative or in the slueth’s internal or external dialogue. On the other hand, it can’t be too easy for the reader to figure things out, or you lose all suspense.

I hope I’ve incorporated these lessons into my Italian Kitchen Mysteries—I suspect I’ll hear from readers if I haven’t. Speaker of readers, what about you? Who are the mystery authors that keep you guessing until the end? And keep you coming back for more?

About Rosie Genova

A Jersey girl born and bred, national bestselling author Rosie Genovaleft her heart at the shore, which serves as the setting for much of her work. The atmosphere of the Jersey shore is present in the details, whether it’s the smell of the sea, the sound of a Springsteen song, or the taste of Kohr’s custard from the boardwalk. And no summer is complete unless she has sand in her shoes.

A bookworm from the time she could sound out words, Rosie spent many happy hours in her home town library where she hid behind the stacks reading the titles she was too young to check out. She earned two degrees in English from Rutgers University, where she discovered to her delight that reading Jane Austen was actually considered homework. Though she’s always considered herself a writer, she didn’t pen her first novel until ten years ago, and she hasn’t stopped since.

Her series, the Italian Kitchen Mysteries, is informed by her deep appreciation for good food, her pride in her heritage, and her love of classic mysteries, from Nancy Drew to Miss Marple. Her debut novel, Murder and Marinara, was named a Best Cozy of 2013 by Suspense Magazine and was a finalist for a 2014 Daphne Du Maurier Award. An English teacher by day and novelist by night, Rosie also writes women’s fiction as Rosemary DiBattista. She still lives in her home state with her husband and her youngest son.

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About A DISH BEST SERVED COLD

The national bestselling author of THE WEDDING SOUP MURDER returns to the Jersey Shore where a killer is stirring up trouble during a hurricane…

At the Casa Lido, the end of summer means a party, and hit whodunit writer Victoria “Vic” Rienzi and her family are cooking like crazy for the restaurant’s seventieth anniversary celebration. As they chop onions and garlic, old family friend Pete Petrocelli stops by, saying he knows something that would make for a good mystery novel. Curious, Vic asks Nonna to elaborate on Pete’s claim and learns of a relative who mysteriously disappeared back in Italy…

The night of the party brings a crowd—and a full throttle hurricane. When the storm finally passes, everyone thinks they’re in the clear—until the first casualty is found, and it’s Pete. Remembering his visit, Vic isn’t certain Pete’s death was an accident and decides to dig deeper into his story. What she finds is meatier than Nonna’s sauce…