Book Brouhaha

Summary: An eight-year-old girl who has just watched as her sister was kidnapped... A nurse who holds the lives of a mother and child in her hands... A makeup artist who has just found a murdered starlet on a movie set... Find these characters and more in this book-length collection of short works by Mary Anna Evans, author of the Faye Longchamp mysteries. This collection includes stories and essays originally published in anthologies including FLORIDA HEAT WAVE, A KUDZU CHRISTMAS, MYSTERY READERS JOURNAL, NORTH FLORIDA NOIR, MYSTERY MUSES, and A MERRY BAND OF MURDERERS, as well as never-before published stories by Evans. Bonuses include a story by guest author Libby Fischer Hellmann and an excerpt from her environmental thriller WOUNDED EARTH. Mary Anna Evans is a recipient of the Mississippi Author Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, a Florida Book Awards Bronze Medal, the Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Award. KIRKUS REVIEWS called her latest release, PLUNDER, "deli...

How did you become interested in short stories? When I was a graduate student in chemical engineering, I found myself feeling stifled.  I scribbled numbers and greek letters on my papers all day, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd written a complete sentence.  To keep the right side of my brain from shriveling, I audited a course on short story writing, and I found the art form so rewarding that I wrote short stories almost exclusively for the next decade.  They weren't universally trashed--I won a campuswide award and I received complimentary rejections from people like Marion Zimmer Bradley, Algis Budrys, and Kristyne Kathryn Rusch--but none of those stories ever saw publication. Eventually, I got past my nervousness over the daunting prospect of writing a novel and I eventually wrote one that was published.  Six more have followed.  Shortly after ARTIFACTS came out, I had an otherworldly experience for a never-published short story writer--an editor...