April 2023 Chapter Meeting

On April 2, 2023, five contributors to the 2023 anthology, ENTERTAINMENT TO DIE FOR, talked about their work: Nancy Cole Silverman, Kim Keeline, Avril Adams, Laurie Fagan and Lisa Morton, with Nancy moderating.

After twenty-five years in NewsTalk radio, Nancy Cole Silverman retired to write fiction. Her Carol Childs Mysteries features a single mom whose day job as a reporter at an LA radio station often leads to long nights solving crimes. Her Misty Dawn series is centered on an aging Hollywood Psychic to the Stars, who supplements her day-to-day activities as a consultant to LAPD. Silverman’s newest work, The Navigator’s Daughter, was inspired by her father’s experiences as a WW2 navigator/bombardier.

Kim Keeline, when not running a 1907 Steam Locomotive or lecturing on Shakespeare, is active in the mystery community, including organizing Bouchercon 2023: San Diego (and before that, co-chairing the committee for Left Coast Crime 2020). Her first published story was a 2021 Derringer finalist. She’s just had her sixth story accepted for publication. She is revising a cozy book about a volunteer at a train museum and another about two women who inherit a bookstore from their mutual ex-husband. Check www.kimkeeline.com for her short stories, novels in progress and freelance work for authors in marketing & web designing.

Avril Adams lives in the Inland Empire. She writes crime fiction, often in the Noir genre. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies produced by Sisters in Crime / Los Angeles, including LAst Exit to Murder, LAst Resort, and Avenging Angelenos. She has had several other short stories published elsewhere. In addition to crime fiction Avril writes science fiction with a humanist twist and children’s stories. She is working on a novel starring an African-American female PI. Her animals are an inspiration for her fiction.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as“consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram StokerAward®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her short stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2020, Odd Partners, Scream and Scream Again, In League with Sherlock Holmes, and many more. Her recent releases include Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances; forthcoming in 2023 from Applause Books is The Art of the Zombie Movie. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com .

Laurie Fagen has penned for radio and television news, corporate videos, films. documentaries, magazines, and newspapers. An honorable mention in an Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine contest and love of whodunits led to three published novels in her Behind the Mic mysteries. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Los Angeles, San Diego and Grand Canyon Writers. www.ReadLaurieFagen.com

Jeri Westerson read from her book, Courting Dragons, the first in her new Tudor series, The King’s Fool Mysteries.

Los Angeles native JERI WESTERSON is the author of fifteen Crispin Guest Medieval Noir Mysteries, a series nominated for thirteen awards from the Agatha to the Shamus. Jeri currently writes a Tudor series called the King’s Fool Mysteries, and a Sherlockian series called An Irregular Detective Mystery. She also authored several paranormal series, standalone historical novels, and numerous short stories in various mystery anthologies, including the recently released Akashic Noir Series SOUTH CENTRAL NOIR. She has served as president of the Southern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, president and vice president, respectively, for two local chapters of Sisters in Crime (Orange County and Los Angeles), and is also a founding member of the Southern California chapter of the Historical Novel Society. See more at JeriWesterson.com