As part of our Sizzling Summer Series, the August meeting was held August 6th, hosted by us, the Sisters in Crime Los Angeles chapter, and featured Sara Paretsky as the speaker and Anne Louise Bannon as the reader.

The topic was “Readers and writers, are we an endangered species” and featured a conversation with Sara Paretsky.

This conversation, moderated by Los Angeles Chapter President Paula Bernstein, focused on four points:
– Efforts to ban books
– How the industry is fighting back
– The threat to writers from AI
– What we can do as individuals and as members of writers organizations like SinC.

Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. By creating a detective with the grit and smarts to take on the mean streets, Paretsky challenged a genre in which women historically were vamps or victims. V.I. struck a chord with readers and critics; Indemnity Only was followed by twenty more V.I. novels. Her voice and her world remain vital to readers; the New York Times calls V.I., “a proper hero for these times,” adding, “to us, V.I. is perfect.”

While Paretsky’s fiction changed the narrative about women, her work also opened doors for other writers. In 1986 she created Sisters in Crime, a worldwide organization to advocate for women crime writers, which earned her Ms. Magazine’s 1987 Woman of the Year award. More accolades followed: the British Crime Writers awarded her the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement; Blacklist won the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers for best novel of 2004, and she has received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from a number of universities.

Paretsky’s work is celebrated in Pamela Beere Briggs’s documentary, Women of Mystery. Today Sara Paretsky’s books are published in 30 countries.

Anne Louise Bannon read from her book, Running Away to Boston.

Author Anne Louise Bannon’s husband says that his wife kills people for a living. Bannon does mostly write mysteries, including the Old Los Angeles Series, the Freddie and Kathy series, and the Operation Quickline series. She has worked as a freelance journalist for magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She and her husband, Michael Holland, created the OddBallGrape.com wine education blog, and she co-wrote a book on poisons. Her latest novel is book four in the Old Los Angeles series, Death of an Heiress. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. Visit her website at AnneLouiseBannon.com or follow her on Facebook, (https://www.facebook.com/RobinGoodfellowEnt/).

About Running Away to Boston:
There’s always a way in…

Jannie Miller finds people. The only person she can’t find is her mother, who supposedly perished in a tornado, but is deep in hiding from Jannie’s abusive father. When Jannie’s ex-boyfriend, FBI agent Brent Mikkelson, hires Jannie to find Tanya Coleman, a young witness to a vicious murder, he unwittingly drags Jannie into the violence.

Set in Los Angeles, Jannie soon suspects that Tanya might have more to her than anyone would guess. She’s been working for Wheeling Corp., a think tank that only pretends to be benevolent. When Jannie gets too close, her mother comes out of hiding to warn Jannie off, but then accepts her daughter into the ragtag group of ethical computer hackers intent on bringing Wheeling down. It’s not just Wheeling’s unethical behavior. The group has discovered that the think tank is writing a virus that could bring the American economy to its knees.

It’s a race against time and a hired assassin, as Jannie comes to know a mother who never really abandoned her and faces a boyfriend who couldn’t be there for her.

Our Sizzling Summer Series is a collaboration between the Sisters in Crime Chapters in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and Northern California.

The June meeting, held June 17, was hosted by SinC San Diego and featured Matt Coyle. Matt Coyle is the author of the best-selling Rick Cahill PI crime novels. His books have won the Anthony Award, the San Diego Book Award, the Ben Franklin Award, the Shamus and the Lefty Award.

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