Julia Spencer-Fleming: committed

Excerpts from the interview by Lynn Kaczmarek in the April/May 2004 issue of Mystery News

I was there in Las Vegas when Julia Spencer-Fleming's first book, In the Bleak Midwinter won the Anthony Award. I was there when it won the Macavity and the Barry. I missed the awarding of the Agatha and the winning of St. Martin's Press Malice Domestic contest...I am not one normally swayed by awards and the like, but not having read Julia's book, it occurred to me that I might be missing something.

Julia Spencer-Fleming's books, In the Bleak Midwinter, A Fountain Filled with Blood, and the soon to be released Out of the Deep I Cry soon found themselves at the top of my "to be read" stack -- they didn't stay there long.

Clare Fergusson used to fly helicopters in the Army, but in the beginning of In the Bleak Midwinter, she finds herself a newly ordained Episcopalian priest in the small town of Millers Kill in upstate New York. And I found myself captivated from the very first line:

"It was one hell of a night to throw away a baby."

That baby was lucky to have been left on the church stairs of Saint Alban's Episcopal Church. And it was lucky that Clare Fergusson had decided to run that night after all. But things get particularly nasty when a young mother is murdered. Clare teams up with the very married police chief, Russ Van Alstyne, to find a murderer and to discover exactly what would drive any mother to leave her baby on a doorstep...

...There [Julia] is working in her 180-year-old farmhouse outside of Portland, Maine. She's looking outside at the view of the maple trees in the front lawn. And above is "...genuine tin roof that was installed about the time of the Civil War." Sitting at the computer table, stacked high with papers, Julia Spencer-Fleming is surely writing one of the most interesting series I've stumbled across in some time. I know I'm going to keep reading these mysteries until the story arch is completed. And I'm sure going to be sad when it is. But in the meantime, I'm more than happy to let Julia Spencer-Fleming take me down the path because, as I suspected earlier, I was missing something.

Read the complete interview in the April/May 2004 issue of Mystery News