Madison author Mary Holmes still remembers every detail of a disastrous trip she took to Switzerland in 1999, stuffed into a tour bus with a group of senior citizens from Iowa. The food was bad and the weather worse. “And I still don’t know what the Alps look like,” she says, “because there was so much fog.”
Fortunately, Holmes, who began her career as a romance writer but had begun to feel restricted by the genre at the time of the trip, found humor in the situation. She recalls long hours spent lingering over a poker table, watching the Iowans play pranks on each other to ward off cabin fever. “I remember thinking: Wouldn’t this be interesting? A story about a group of seniors traveling the world?”
Now, nearly two decades later, Holmes has written 11 mystery novels under the pen name Maddy Hunter (yes, Maddy is short for Madison) with punny titles like Hula Done It? and Alpine for You — earning Agatha Award and Daphne du Maurier Award nominations for the latter. Her latest book, Say No Moor, was released on Jan. 8.
Like the other books in the Passport to Peril series published by Midnight Ink, Say No Moor follows the exploits of Emily Andrew-Miceli, a plucky travel agency owner who leads a group of rowdy retirees — from, you guessed it, Iowa — on trips around the world. Along the way, she stumbles across an improbable number of corpses, but her clients never seem especially phased by the bodies piling up around them. In Say No Moor, their tour of Cornwall is briefly derailed when their surly innkeeper takes a nasty spill down a steep staircase. But, like the Brits they’re staying with, they keep calm and carry on.
The premise for the story may be outlandish, but its setting is very real, and lovingly described. Holmes drew upon her own experiences traveling through Cornwall when plotting the novel, and later retraced her steps online, to make sure she’d gotten the details right. One of the more dramatic scenes is set at St. Michael’s Mount, a small island that Holmes describes as rising out of the sea like “some horny beast in the middle of the harbor, all spiny rock and jagged pinnacles.” Beautiful, but deadly.
Holmes cites Janet Evanovich — another author who got her start writing romance novels, then switched to mysteries — as a major source of inspiration. Holme’s protagonist is a little more level-headed, and a lot less oversexed, than Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum. But she’s just as adept at working killer one-liners into her murder investigations, and just as endearing to her readers.
There’ll be a book launch party for Say No Moor at Mystery to Me (1863 Monroe St.) on Jan. 14 at 2 p.m. Holmes says she’ll be on hand to chat about her writing and hand out door prizes.
