Good Morning, Booklovers!
Welcome to this week’s Coffee Chat, a book spotlight on TAPESTRY OF TEARS by Michele Drier. And please pop over to read her interview on my mystery blog HERE.
Welcome to the blog, Michele. While we’re taking a look at your book, what can I get you to drink?
MD: Hi, thanks for inviting me to your blogs! Ahhh, coffee, the nectar of the gods in the morning. I drink French Roast, black and strong.
Ally: Now that we’re comfortably settled on the deck, please tell us about your book.
Genre: Traditional Mystery
History had always been a strong magnet for Rosalind Duke. She took up the medieval craft of making stained glass and was building a solid international reputation, taking on larger and larger commissions. Her idyllic life with her husband, Winston Duke, an art historian at UCLA, was cut short when he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting.
After moving to a small town on the Oregon coast, she’s offered a commission to translate the medieval embroidery, The Bayeux Tapestry, into stained glass for a museum at a small Wisconsin university. Roz jumps at the chance. Not only to try to transfer the Tapestry into a new medium, but to spend time in Southern England and Northern France, tracing the path taken by the invading Normans under William the Conqueror.
But the 21st century drags her back when she finds a body crumpled against a wall in an ancient stone church in the small town of Lympne, on the southern coast of England. Has she walked into a contemporary murder?
Buy link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P5Q8JMT
Sheep. Faint, slow-moving blobs of lighter grey occasionally obscured by tilting gravestones, drifted through the mist. Here on the south Kentish coast, the fog came in like fingers, sliding up from the Channel, hiding then revealing objects and movement.
She was used to fog now. When she moved from Los Angeles to the Oregon coast, she’d found the grey mist oppressing, folding over her and trapping her fears. It echoed the fuzziness in her mind, making it not-clear and closing it in.
In LA, on a clear winter afternoon, she saw for miles, awed at the massive snow-capped mountains ringing the flat valleys. She and Winston would drive up into the Angelus National Forest to watch how the flatlands, filled with millions of people, smoothed out to the blue Pacific.
Now, wintering in Oregon’s mist and fog cut down the expanse and openness in her mind and built up coziness, a need for smaller vistas and closer ties, introspection.
England was different. Here the fog was a breathing thing, a force that ebbed and flowed and carried centuries of history, shifted battle outcomes, determined victors.
Enough. Roz shook her head to rid it of a thousand years of ghosts. I’m here for my future, she thought.
She picked her way carefully through the damp, tall grass, saying a silent thanks that sheep didn’t poop large patties like the cows in the pastures at home. A big patch of fog glided away, and she nearly tripped over a gravestone tipped almost flat. She squatted down and tried to read the mossy inscription, rubbing the lichen-covered stone with a woolen glove.
This is part of what you came for, wanting to be surrounded by hundreds of years of human history, wanting to understand and discover why such beauty of glass and stone sprang up, she told herself.
Roz stretched up and headed for the door of the church that sheltered the graveyard, taking in the shapes and arches added to the building over the centuries.
This began as a Saxon church about 640, was remade in the Norman style just after the conquest. As this area of Kent became part of the medieval Cinque Ports, the hugely important center of trade with the Continent, the church was upgraded.
A Gothic spire, added around 1350, testified to its long life. She wasn’t so interested in the outside as the inside, wanting to see if the stained glass changed as much over the last millennium as the façade.
The heavy wooden door creaked as she pushed it, knowing it warped during its long life in this damp climate. Inside, it was as dank as the graveyard, cold and clammy. How long had it been since there was a congregation or any warmth in here?
Fine hairs on the back of Roz’ neck rose as she looked up at the windows. A few small stained glass ones that must have been installed in a Gothic redo because the windows fitted into the pointed arches. Two rectangular ones at the back of the nave remembered local men who died in the two world wars and one window space was filled with frosted glass. A window lost during a World War II bomb and never restored?
Interesting, but unremarkable. Small, out-of-the-way churches dotted this part of Kent, most of them too poor or too plain to be looted during Henry VIII’s dissolution of church properties.
She shivered. Her walk through the grass had soaked dew into the bottom of her jeans legs and the wet denim clung to her, adding to her chill.
I came here to check this church out, I need to make it worth my while, she thought and flicked on her flashlight, moving toward one of what she assumed might be a Gothic window. It looked like a parable of the shepherd with his flock, typical of a window for a population who raised sheep but couldn’t read.
This one seemed odd, though. She skirted a row of chairs set out for a non-existent congregation, gazed up and peered closely. There was a smear on the bottom of the window. Looking more closely, Roz saw the smear continued down the gray stone of the wall. She flashed the light lower and saw the smear ended on the floor. At a pool of blood puddled out from a body. A man’s body.
Dead? She didn’t even want to know, spun around, ran back to the grazing sheep and dialed 999.
Michele Drier is a fifth-generation Californian and spent better than 20 years as a reporter and editor at California daily newspapers. She is the past president of Capitol Crimes, a Sisters in Crime chapter; the Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime, current president of NorCal Sisters in Crime, and co-chaired Bouchercon 2020.
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 May 2017.
Her paranormal romance series, SNAP: The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, was named the best paranormal vampire series of 2014 by PRG. Book Eleven, SNAP: Pandemic Games was published in 2022.
Her new series is the Stained Glass Mysteries, Stain on the Soul and Tapestry of Tears, and she’s working on the third, Resurrection of the Roses.
She lives in Sacramento with her cat, Malley.
Contacts:
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