Jennie Bentley | When life imitates art and vice versa

Last year around this time, I was getting ready to start promoting my debut, Fatal Fixer-Upper, first in the Do-It-Yourself Home Renovation mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime, featuring New York designer turned Maine renovator Avery Baker, and her boyfriend, hunky handyman Derek Ellis. The book came out in November 2008, and since then, my life has pretty much gone by at warp speed. Launching a first book was insane, and then came Thanksgiving and Christmas, before we sold one house and moved into another in January. Since then, we’ve been renovating what is our ninth house in nine years. All while we’re going about the dual businesses of real estate and writing, and while raising two boys under eleven and caring for the menagerie of pets they’ve accumulated between them.

The latest house is a brick mid-century ranch, long and low- slung, with a big picture window in the front, situated on a large lot surrounded by tall trees. Chapter 1 of Spackled and Spooked has a description that matches that one in pretty much every particular. In Spackled and Spooked, Derek and Avery are renovating just such a house. It’s a local haunted house; I thought the idea of a haunted ranch would be fun.

My house isn’t haunted, and for the record, the book came first, my house second. That is, I’d already handed in the manuscript for Spackled and Spooked by the time our new house came on the market. So I didn’t decide to write about a mid-century ranch because I was renovating one; I guess I decided to renovate one because writing about it, and researching the era, and describing the big rooms and spacious openness, made me realize I’d enjoy the challenge.

It isn’t the first time I’ve started a project or been interested in something new after reading a book. I developed a love for all things archaeological and Egyptian after reading Elizabeth Peters. I decided to visit the English Lake District after reading Diana Killian. Ditto on Scotland after reading Lillian Stewart-Carl. And I’ve cooked many a recipe from books by Diane Mott-Davidson. It’s the first time one of my own books has influenced me into tackling something new, though.

Not that my problems in renovating have been anything like Avery’s. The worst thing I’ve come across, is a plumbing problem resulting in an overflowing utility-sink, caused by the line from the washing machine being too long and turning too narrow just before entering the big sewer under the house. It may not sound like a big deal, but when the wash water overflowed into the brand new HVAC system because the tech who installed the latter had hooked the AC drain directly into the waste line from the washer, it seemed like one. As I mopped dirty water two inches deep from the pan holding the three-day-old HVAC system, I thought for sure I’d just wasted $3,800.

It’s a long story. And it’s all fixed now, anyway. The system still works, too.

Avery’s problems get fixed in the end, too. Most of them, anyway. There’s still that pesky little issue of Derek’s too-perfect ex-wife to consider, and Avery’s cousins, the Stenhams, whom she’d love to get out of her hair before they can turn picturesque Waterfield into a sprawling suburb of Portland, 45 minutes away. But the unexplained footsteps walking down the hallway when no one is around, those go away. So do the eerie screams when the front door is opened. And the skeletal remains in the crawlspace, they get a decent burial in the end, after the police figure out where they belong. The murderer gets caught. And Avery makes it out with her life, to fight—and renovate—another day. Plaster and Poison will be coming in March 2010. I guess I’d better go look for an old Victorian carriage house that I can turn into a romantic Parisian-inspired retreat for two, now that the work on the ranch is almost finished...

You can read an excerpt of Spackled and Spooked, in stores August 4th, as well as find out more about Jennie, by visiting her website.