We’re so happy to welcome back the wonderful Michele Drier. Setting is a huge component of mysteries and Michele’s take on the topic is spot on.

I’ve always considered setting as a character, both in my reading and my writing.

Although I don’t write much detail about my characters—leaving it up to the readers to picture them for themselves—I do include details about where the story and action takes place. I want readers to be able to orient themselves both in the real world and in their imagined space so I add details about what the characters are seeing and feeling around them.

All my life I’ve tried to imagine what went before in any place I’ve visited—or made up. As a child, going up to Yosemite I’d look at the grooves in the granite and dream of the Native Americans who ground acorns or the immigrants who dragged their wagons up the steep mountain passes.

So when I began my novel-writing career, as opposed to my news-writing and editing career, I made a conscious effort to bring setting into the story as both an understanding and a foil for the characters and action.

Photos from Michele’s journeys: a Paris street, the French countryside, and a church in England

My first novel, Edited for Death, is set in the San Joaquin Valley, in a place that may or may not be Lodi, and quickly moves to the protagonist sweltering in the summer heat. “…the pollution trapped in this valley like a bug in a jar. The haze and smog will cook into a dangerous-to-breathe soup as the day heats up.”

This heat becomes an element that the characters deal with.

My paranormal romance series, The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, is set in Eastern Europe, primarily Hungary and Ukraine, over 500 centuries of war, trade and change. The physical setting, major rivers of the area including the Danube and the Dnieper, are the routes the early members of the Kandesky family used to build their trading empire, which, in the 21^st century, has led them to be one of the richest families in the world.

The settings here are both LA, where the Kandesky’s major industry, SNAP, the world’s largest and best celebrity gossip media is headquartered, and Kyiv and Budapest where they maintain their homes. As the series progresses (now writing the 12^th book) the setting becomes a danger as the Russians move west to invade. The Kandeskys travel over this landscape with knowledge amassed during centuries and this becomes both their protection and their offensive weapon.

With my most recent series, The Stained Glass Mysteries, setting became such as strong character that readers have said, “Reading this makes me feel as though I’m there with the characters. I can feel the ocean,” or in the case of the latest, Resurrection of the Roses, “I feel as though I’m eating with them at that Parisian cafe. How do you do it?”

I met a woman a year or so ago who retired in a small town on the Oregon Coast and, when she read Stain on the Soul, the first Stained Glass book, she said, “How long did you live there? You’ve described it perfectly and I can feel the fog on the beach.” I had to admit I’d never lived there but had visited and the memories of the smells of the ocean and the feel of the air immediately took me back to that place.

I don’t intend my novels to be travelogues, but I use settings to put the reader in the place with the characters: to taste the pumpkin soup at the restaurant in Beaune or watch the tide come up in the small Kentish village, bringing a reminiscence of the Oregon coast.

Even though I’ve had fans tell me my novels made them want to travel—maybe my work here is done!—I do want to give readers as full an experience as I can.

They may not know how tall Roz is or the color of Maxie’s hair but they do know how the protagonists relate to the world around the “as the dark, soft Ukrainian night smoothed out across the miles of fields to the east, an easy road for centuries of conquests.”

And my 20th book, the fourth in the Stained Glass Mysteries, will take the reader across Europe as the main characters help track down international art thieves. I can’t wait to get back to Switzerland!

A rainbow over Paris

BIO: Michele Drier is a fifth-generation Californian and spent better than 20 years as a reporter and editor at California daily newspapers. She’s the past president of Capitol Crimes, the Guppies chapter, and current president of NorCal Sisters in Crime. Her Amy Hobbes Newspaper Mysteries are Edited for Death, (called “Riveting and much recommended” by the Midwest Book Review), Labeled for Death and Delta for Death. A stand-alone, Ashes of Memories was published in 2017.Her eleven-volume paranormal romance series, SNAP: The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, was named the best paranormal vampire series of 2014 by PRG. SNAP: Pandemic Games was published in 2022

Her new series is the Stained Glass Mysteries, Stain on the Soul and Tapestry of Tears, and Resurrection of the Roses.

SYNOPSIS for RESURRECTION OF THE ROSES: When Roz Duke receives an invitation to speak on stained glass at a medieval crafts conference in Paris, she’s torn about accepting. Then her friend Liam spots the invitation and conjures up a summer touring France, a lure Roz can’t resist. Before the conference officially kicks off, though, the body of a man, impaled on a large shard of ruby red stained glass, stops her. Once again, she’s the finder of dead bodies. Who is the dead man? And why her? One of the first police officers on the site is a beautiful French Surete inspector, Celie Lejeune, who instantly homes in on Liam.

Set against the vineyards and wineries of Burgundy, Roz, Liam and her rescue greyhound Tut, learn about making stained glass, wine and medieval crafts, but another body turns up and a couple of French cathedrals burn down. Arson?
Roz and Liam’s idyllic French summer takes on a distinct menacing tone, dogged by an inscrutable French policewoman. Does she have designs on Liam? Or is it Roz in her sights?

PURCHASE LINK

EXCERPT:

Maybe I should leave a trail of breadcrumbs, Roz thought as she turned the map of the Sorbonne over and over, looking for her bearings.

The University of Paris, established in 1150, had been broken up into separate colleges in 1970, but the original buildings were still used for classes, lectures, seminars and the Stained Glass workshops took up several of the medieval and later spaces. She looked up from her map, found a lecture auditorium where she was scheduled to give her keynote presentation later that day and crossed the soaring atria at the top of the grand staircase.

The auditorium was vast, could probably hold upwards of 1,000 people, and she hoped it wouldn’t be full. Speaking before groups didn’t much bother her, she’d learned to focus on people on the first few rows, but here the tiers went up into darkness. She took a breath, moved to the side of the stage and climbed to the speaker’s dais set up in the center.

The overhead lights weren’t on but a spot lit the dais and caught a flash of red near the backdrop curtain. Roz looked out at the auditorium, getting a feel for the space and how she’d shape her talk. She had slides so needed to talk to some of the audiovisual staff.

She turned around to check out the curtain behind the dais, caught the flash of red again and walked back. As she neared the curtain, the flash resolved itself into a two-foot long shard of glass, poking up from a pile of rags. No, it wasn’t a pile of rags, there was a shape there—and something wet looking. Closer, she saw it was a body, a man, who was curled around the shard as though embracing it.

It wasn’t an embrace though, it was a fatal wound, the shard protruding through his chest and spilling his life, the same color as the glass, out on the stage.