Category: Behind the Stories: Inspirations and Encounters

A New Mexico Mystery Author Interview: Amy M. Bennett

Last week, I reviewed No Lifeguard on Duty, and today I have the pleasure of welcoming the author for an interview.

Bio: Amy M. Bennett, author of the Black Horse Campground mystery series, has worked as a cake decorator, vino-slinger, and retail worker in preparation for writing murder mysteries. She consumes way too much coffee, New Mexico wine, and true crime documentaries to be considered normal, but her husband and son love her anyway. She lives in Bent, New Mexico, and is always thinking about, if not actively writing, the next book.

AF: Were you always a mystery writer, or did you start with another genre? I ask because you have such a knack for the romantic elements in a mystery.

AMB: I have always loved mysteries, ever since I was a kid and grew up reading… The Three Investigators! Yes, you probably thought I was going to say Nancy Drew, but she was unrelatable to me, an awkward pre-teen with no illusions about being a pulled-together “titian-haired” 18-year-old with her own convertible! But three young teenage boys with a secret junkyard headquarters and the use of a vintage limo they won in a jellybean guessing contest? Okay, maybe still far-fetched, but more relatable to me! That’s what I’ve always wanted to do: create characters that are relatable. I tried to write mainstream romance, was even encouraged to write for Harlequin, but the mystery-lover in me kept going back to my roots.

AF: I may be able to guess the answer, but I’d like to hear it from you. Why did you choose a campground as the setting? Your background as professional cake decorator and your work at a winery offer more conventional cozy setting possibilities.

AMB: There are SOOOO many mystery series that are centered around food and wine (restaurants, cafes, bakeries, wineries, etc.) that I wanted to think of some setting that wasn’t overdone. After a camping trip with my husband and son to Silver City (NM) where we stayed in a very well-run KOA Campground, I realized I had my setting. I took a lot of notes on that trip and any subsequent vacation we took where we stayed in a campground. Also, my concern about having “Cabot Cove syndrome” was dispelled in part by the fact that campgrounds allowed my characters to interact with strangers from other places instead of the people they encountered in their day-to-day life, so a wider range of suspects and victims. (Incidentally, I’d have been eyeing Jessica Fletcher with a lot more suspicion with all the bodies dropping dead in Cabot Cove and she being the common denominator!)

AF: Do you have connections in local law enforcement in your area? If so, what did you learn from them? The scenes with the sheriff and deputies feel authentic and natural. You seem comfortable writing about them. If this is all from research, it’s good research.

AMB: I know a few police officers but, believe it or not, I’ve never taken advantage of them to do a “ride along” or an interview or anything like that. Back when NaNoWriMo was in its prime, they had a few forums where experts—law enforcement, legal, medical, etc.—would offer to answer questions about almost everything you could think of, so I did ask a lot of questions there. I also did a lot of research online about questions pertaining specifically to New Mexico law enforcement. Having a very small-town setting helps, because law enforcement is a lot more likely to be involved with the locals than in a big city.

AF: Where do you start when writing a book? Do you begin with a plot premise? A situation into which you put your characters to see what they do? A blank page and inspiration? Something else?

AMB: I started my series with a setting and a vague idea of who my characters were. That, and I knew I wanted to write a mystery! Now that I’ve established my setting and characters, I just say, “Okay, guys, now what?” Sometimes, when in the midst of a book, I get an idea that really doesn’t fit in the story I’m writing, I set it aside for a future book. Then I tell myself to throw that situation at my characters and see where it goes.

AF: What is the greatest challenge for you in writing a series, and what is the greatest satisfaction?

AMB: I had so many people tell me, at first, that they HATED love triangles in a mystery because the reasons were always so dumb. I think I was able to pull off the love triangle in a believable manner but I also knew when it was time to settle it and move on. The challenge is in coming up with a mystery that isn’t too easy to solve but also not so difficult that it confuses the reader. I also have to do better at keeping notes … I’m always having to revise names I’ve already used in previous stories!

AF: Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t think of? Answer that missing question.

AMB: I do have a story I love to share, and it has to do with getting recognition for my writing in a most unexpected way! I work for a local winery, Noisy Water, based out of Ruidoso. One of their best-selling and best known wines is a sweet white blend called Jo Mamma’s White. One time, my husband and I were working a wine festival in Tularosa and our booth had big banners advertising our wines and one of them had the Jo Mamma’s label printed on it. A woman was walking up to us excitedly and she said, “Oh, my gosh, IT’S REAL! I can’t believe it’s real! There really IS a Jo Mamma’s wine!” She went on to say, “I read a mystery book where the main character drank a wine called ‘Jo Mamma’s White’ and I honestly thought it was made up! I can’t believe there really is a Jo Mamma’s White!” Well, when I told her that I was the author of the book she read, she got so excited, she bought a bottle of the wine and asked me to sign it for her! I think that was the first time I and my books were better known than my workplace and their wines!

AF: Thank you for a delightful interview!

*****

To learn more about Amy’s books, go to

https://www.amymbennettbooks.com/books

 

The Holiday Short Story

Here it is! I hope you enjoy it, whether it’s for the first time or the tenth. Happy holidays!

Santa Claus Checks in at the Fat Buddha Spa

 

A Tail and a Tale: Bob Can Talk His Way Out of Anything

There’s a lot of wildlife we don’t see. The Rio Grande is low right now, making it easy to cross from the empty desert land on the other side. Tracks in the mud from recent rain showed small hooves trotting around on the mesa near Healing Waters Trail where I was running. I’ve never seen a javelina up there, but those were their little pointy feet. No surprise. We expect them around here. A friend sometimes has them in her yard.

But I never expected to encounter a mountain lion. Its tail was toward me and it was sniffing the ground on the far end of the trail where it gets narrow and steep near the Veterans’ Home—my destination—so I didn’t get a good look at its head. I didn’t need to. Nothing else is that big, that color, and has a tail like that.

About a year ago, my friend Bob told me he’d looked out his window at night and seen a mountain lion. His bedroom window faces the mesa, not the rest of the Veterans’ Home campus. I detoured away from the animal and took an alternate route to go visit Bob. I told him about the sighting. Of course, he had a story.

He was much younger, hiking alone in upstate New York. He loved the woods and often spent hours exploring, but this was the only time he met a mountain lion. They met suddenly, practically face to face, and close enough that the cat could have reached him in a few bounds. Bob didn’t want to back away and look like prey, and he knew better than to approach. Feeling stuck, he improvised. He took his knife from his belt, held it up, and started talking.

“I know you probably want to eat me for lunch, and you could take me if you tried, but I’m warning you, you’re gonna get very scratched up in the process.”

The cat didn’t move, so Bob kept talking. It looked at him as if it was taking in every word. Finally, he took a step back, still holding the knife. Then another slow step. And they went their separate ways.

 

Undefeated, the flowers came back.

 

Perhaps you remember my post about a man squirting weedkiller on unwanted plants. He explained that if they weren’t eradicated, they would take over. I’m happy to report they have done exactly that—only a few weeks after their apparent demise. Welcome back!

A New Mexico Mystery Review: Jemez Spring by Rudolfo Anaya

I wish I could say that Jemez Spring was as good as the rest of the series, but it’s not. I had to finish it because it wraps up the Sonny Baca series, but it doesn’t do the story cycle justice. Even Sonny himself is not as strong a character. He becomes something between a caricature and an archetype. I almost stopped reading early on, when Sonny—a private investigator—and a police detective are in the presence of the murder victim who died in a hot spring bath at Jemez Springs, and they derisively discuss the size of the dead man’s penis. At that point, I no longer liked Sonny. I thought, why is this episode here?

His girlfriend, Rita, was always simply an archetypal female ideal with no depth. None of the women in this book have any dimensionality except Naomi, the Jemez Pueblo potter. She has a personality. She’s original. I love it when she gets in Sonny’s truck and says, “You got spirits in this truck?” (One of the strongest characters is the ghost of Sonny’s late neighbor don Eliseo, riding in Sonny’s truck and giving him advice.) But like other women in the book, Naomi is an object of desire. The power players are all men, unless I slept through a scene that breaks that pattern

Between each important event, there are often three pages of digression on New Mexico politics, history, culture, and food, beautiful descriptions of the land, excessive backstory, discussions of whether or not dogs dream, and reflections on mythology. These side trips are masterful word craft and some could make good essays collected outside of a novel, but keeping track of the plot took patience.

The final confrontation between Sonny and Raven is in an intriguing setting and has some mystical moments, but it’s also full of philosophical discussion at a point when it deflates the tension instead of escalating it.

The outcome of the ongoing threat with the bomb made me feel as if the author had written himself into a corner and couldn’t get out of it, so he wrote it away into a trick. That’s almost as bad as “it was all a dream.”  I found flashes of delight in certain settings, good lines, and the few good characters, like the Green Indians, but I’m still disappointed in this work by an author whose books I normally love.

 

Disobeying Orders

The state park employee walked slowly with a small tank and a squirt nozzle he aimed onto each unwanted bit of vegetation on the playground. I hoped he was only getting rid of silver nightshade. It’s prickly and toxic, though it has pretty flowers. But there wasn’t much of it. There were many tiny, tough yellow flowers.

I asked the man with the tank how he chose which plants got to stay and which plants had to go.

“They all have to go,” he replied.

“All of them? I like the little yellow flowers. I just watered one of them.” Encouraging its survival in the desert heat, I’d given it what was left in the water bottle I take on runs.

With an air of apology, he added, “We don’t do weed control except in the developed areas.”

Of course not, because a wildflower isn’t a weed in the wild. I didn’t say what I thought, but he kept explaining while he squirted. “If we let them go, they take over.”

“Yes. You’d have a meadow.” I smiled at the memory. One year, the flowers did take over. There were so many, I sometimes accidentally picked them with my five-fingers running shoes, snagging yellow blossoms between the toes when I crossed the playground to stretch on the equipment.

He kept squirting. I felt sad for the flowers, but finished stretching and went home. A few days later, I was back, and all the flowers were gone, sprayed to death and shriveled away. Except one. He saved the one I’d watered.

 

Book Ten Progress Report

I’ve been so busy writing the next book that I’ve neglected to write any blog posts. So, what have I accomplished?

I finished the first draft of Mae Martin Book 10 and have completed the first stage of revision—reading without making changes yet, taking notes as if I were critiquing for another writer. This is challenging. I see things I want to change right away, but why fix it if I might end up cutting it?

I grasped the importance of a theme I had doubts about I while I was writing, a theme relating to Mae, to Jamie, and non-ordinary spiritual experiences. It’s funny, but writing a paranormal mystery series, I sometimes pull back and ask myself, “Was that too paranormal?” But then I read through the work in progress and think, “That’s the best part.”

The book doesn’t have a title yet, but I’m leaning toward Wounded Healer. Here’s my first draft of the blurb:

Birdwatching, blackmail, and out-of-body travel.

A letter from Nashville gives Mae Martin hope that it’s safe to recover her psychic gift. The healing process is precarious and strange, but it’s also urgent. A friend’s two elderly dogs are lost, and another friend’s former lover has vanished. Spirit medium Azure Skye hasn’t seen her son’s father for twenty-one years. Then she hears his voice. Only the dead speak to her that way.

To learn his fate, Mae pushes her limits as a healer and seer, entering aspects of the spirit world she never knew existed—some beautiful, some dangerous. Will she find the missing man alive? What will his enemies do to stop her? And what will the effort cost?

*****

Prices on the whole series remain low on all e-book retailers. The Calling and Gifts and Thefts are $2.99 each, and the other books $3.99.

A New Mexico Movie Review: Eddington

“Are you on Team Joe or Team Ted?” asked the person at the swag table after the Truth or Consequences premier screening of the movie, Eddington on July 10, 2025. I picked a “Ted Garcia for Mayor” button. Given the choice, I’d have voted for him over Sheriff Joe Cross, but I was really on a third team.

If this movie were a mystery, the person solving it would have been the Pueblo cop who wasn’t minding his own business, who was encroaching on the sheriff’s territory because a crime took place on the border between Sevilla County and San Lupe Pueblo. (Both fictitious locations, FYI.)  He would have been the protagonist. I was rooting for him as the person figuring it out, observing who is acting suspiciously, and what circumstances suggest that people aren’t telling the truth, but the story is not told as a mystery. He’s actually part of the Western movie tradition of conflict with Native Americans. He’s trouble for the sheriff.

Eddington is a modern dystopian Western. Or maybe an anti-Western, turning the genre on its head. It’s primarily in the points of view of the sheriff and the mayor, political rivals who have different visions for the town and its future, and they disagree about how to cope with COVID. The mayor is enforcing the strict approach to COVID taken in New Mexico in the spring of 2020: mask mandates, no large gatherings, keeping your six-foot distance, and limiting the number of customers inside stores at one time. However, the sheriff has asthma and hates wearing a mask. The trouble begins in T or C’s real grocery store, Bullock’s. Sheriff Joe Cross defies the mask mandate on behalf of an elderly man who says he can’t breathe in a mask. Cross  goes into the store unmasked and buys groceries for the guy. The sheriff can get away with it. He hands him the groceries and doesn’t ask him to repay, making him both a law breaker and a compassionate guy.

When you think of the sheriff in a western he’s usually a tough guy. Sometimes corrupt, sometimes heroic, but tough. This sheriff is too, in some ways, but unlike the stereotypical version of the role, he wears glasses, needs to carry his inhaler around, and has problems in his marriage. Joaquin Phoenix is brilliant as Sheriff Joe Cross. (Perhaps getting out and about in T or C as much as he did helped him in his portrayal of the sheriff in a small New Mexico town.) Pedro Pascal’s portrayal of Mayor Ted Garcia is more restrained and equally powerful. Emma Stone plays the fragile and damaged Lou Cross, the sheriff’s wife, a new take on the Western trope of the woman with a past. Her conspiracy theorist mother is a 21st century addition to the genre cast of characters. The self-healing pseudo guru Lou and her mother follow is a new variation on the itinerant preacher and/or snake oil huckster of the old West.

Eddington also presents 21st century takes on the genre tropes of the bar fight, the stand-off, the big shootout, and the evil outsiders coming to town.

The conspiracy theory aspect of the pandemic is portrayed quite realistically, and the presence of phone and laptop screens gets appropriately oppressive. Toward the end, one of the secondary characters, a teenage boy, changes radically. His transformation is shown on a phone screen, as if the person he becomes exists only as seen through this medium.

One of the film’s themes is “you’re being manipulated.”  Notably, Joe Cross can’t spell it correctly; his campaign signs say “your being manipulated.”

Ari Aster, the director, was at the El Cortez theater to speak to the crew, who made up half the audience, about how wonderful they’d been to work with, and to tell the townspeople present how much he loved working in T or C. He seemed humble and not terribly comfortable speaking in public. I didn’t get a chance to talk with him after the movie, though some friends did. I would have liked to ask him how much the town influenced the final script. Did he see our water tower with Apaches on horseback painted on it and then decide that a scene on that hill would be perfect? I also wonder if Aster was inspired by our museum. When the sheriff crashes his way through it in extreme duress in the middle of the night, he’s scrambling through exhibits of the history of this area and coming out the actual exit, which is an old miner’s cabin. Rushing through the history of the West and coming out the other side.

Other strengths of the movie are the complexities of relationships, the absurdities of the political campaigns, the corruption, the deception, and the COVID realism. (I don’t know that this detail even shows in the movie, but they had signs on Bullock’s announcing toilet paper back in stock, with limit of a certain number per customer.)

Garcia’s bar, created for the movie in an old antique store long out of business, reopened for us after the screening, serving non-alcoholic drinks. There was a drone show out over the river, hundreds of drones lighting up with the logo of the production company A24, the name of the big bad tech company in the movie, and a 3D New Mexico Zia symbol accompanying the words Eddington, New Mexico. The town we will perhaps always be, at some level. Our Geronimo Springs Museum now has an Eddington Room, a permanent exhibit. I recommend the movie. It’s thought-provoking. Ambiguous. Ambitious. And it’s ours.

*****

For a look at the town when it was a film set, see my post from last year, None of These Places Are Real.

 

Bob Stories: A Cup of Coffee at the DMZ

Bob told me this story as he enjoyed a fresh cup of hot black coffee on the patio at the New Mexico State Veterans Home on a ninety-nine-degree day. In the shade. the weather wasn’t bad—dry heat really is quite tolerable—and his coffee stayed hot. Bob loves coffee, and it has to be strong, hot, and black. According to him “there’s no such thing as strong coffee, only weak people.” His favorite beverage led to the story of a welcome cup seventy years ago.

Bob remained in Korea after the armistice. He liked the country and preferred to be there rather than go back to a base in California. On a rainy night, he was one of the men on lookout duty at the edge of the DMZ, lying under some sort of waterproof shelter with his rifle at ready. Rain dripped from a tree nearby, but it just missed him. The ground was rough, “not a place where you would go out for a stroll.” They had to hold still and stay alert “in case hell broke loose.”

One of his fellow Marines was sent out with fresh, hot coffee, not a job the guy delivering it liked, since he had to get wet. Bob was so grateful, though. He found a place in his shelter where the coffee could sit on a rock right within reach, protected by another rock, so the rain wouldn’t get in to cool or dilute the coffee. And then the wind blew a dribbling tree branch directly onto it.

The man who’d been bringing the coffee around came back to check on Bob.

Bob indicated the branch. “Can you do something about this?”

“Better yet. I’ll bring you a fresh cup of coffee.”

 

A New Mexico History Review: The Villista Prisoners by James W. Hurst

The great strength of this book is its emphasis on the ordinary people involved in the international incident at Columbus, New Mexico in 1916. The book is not about Pancho Villa. It’s not about General Pershing. It’s about the men who were captured during Villa’s raid on the small town on the border of New Mexico and Old Mexico. One of the Villistas captured was a twelve-year-old boy. Their stories—how they came to be in Villa’s army, whether or not they knew they were in the United States, whether they wanted to be doing what they were doing—were matters of controversy at the time.

The author is an excellent historical detective, learning everything about these men that he could. Many of were illiterate conscripts who had been forced into Villa’s army; others had joined because they feared the army of his opponent, Mexican President Carranza. They didn’t want to be at war at all, though, and this issue came up in their trials, as did other questions Could the governor of New Mexico pardon them? Shouldn’t unwilling, illiterate conscripts be considered innocent? But there was a precedent set in both the United States and in Scotland that a soldier who follows an illegal order is still guilty of a crime.

I will not tell you how everything turned out them through the twists and turns of their of their trials. The book starts with the raid, not from the point of view of the leaders, but of the town’s people. And it ends with the fate of equally ordinary people entangled in international and national matters. I recommend this book if you have an interest in history and like to understand not only what happened and why, but who was involved and how they were affected.