Category: Books

The Calling

The first Mae Martin psychic mystery

When an extraordinary ability intrudes on an ordinary life, ready or not, everything changes.

A down-to-earth North Carolina country girl, Mae Martin-Ridley Mae is a former high school athlete whose interests run to sports and fitness, not spirituality or mysticism. The last thing she ever expected to be was a psychic or a spiritual healer. Obeying her mother’s warning, Mae has been hiding her gift of “the sight” for years. When events compel her to use it again, the unforeseen consequences spread to affect every aspect of her life—work, marriage, and family. To qualify for a new job Mae takes a class in Norfolk, Virginia, where she meets people who not only accept her abilities but push her to explore them further. She struggles with the shadow side of her gift. Though she wants to use “the sight” to help people, it gives her access to secrets she could regret uncovering. Torn between those around her who encourage her and those who condemn or doubt, Mae has to find her own path.

Boxed Set Sale $2.99 Mae Martin Mysteries Books 1-3

Start reading the Mae Martin Series. Buy the first three books for only $2.99 through November 14th, 2026. Available from all eBook retailers. 

The Calling

A missing father. A mother with a secret. A professor who might be a shaman—or a fraud. As Mae discovers her gift of “the sight,” she overturns her own life and the lives of those around her.

Shaman’s Blues

A gifted musician disappears. A questionable seer vanishes, to Santa Fe or another dimension. Finding two missing people proves easier for Mae than learning the truth about either—or getting one of them, once found, to go away again.

Snake Face

Musician Jamie Ellerbee needs Mae’s psychic aid. His tour is being trailed by bad luck, an anonymous fan, and a strange new friend—who may not be a friend after all.

 No murder, just mystery. Every life hides a secret, and love is the deepest mystery of all.

 

A New Mexico Book Review: Tortuga by Rudolfo Anaya

Though far from new, this book is timely. It takes place when kids were still sent to institutions, and the polio vaccine was not yet available. Discussions are currently occurring about the possible institutionalization of disabled children again, after years of integrating them in schools and giving them full opportunities.

The characters in the book are children with various disabilities ranging from being kept alive with iron lungs to treatable conditions caused by serious accidents. They’re housed in the Carrie Tingley Hospital for Crippled Children. It’s not named, but it’s obvious to someone who knows southern New Mexico. The Tortuga of the title is both a boy in a body cast and the turtle formation on Turtleback Mountain in Truth or Consequences. The town was still named Hot Springs back then, and the building, which has now expanded and become the New Mexico State Veterans’ Home, was smaller and more isolated. Anaya spent time there is in his childhood after fracturing vertebrae in a diving accident when swimming in an irrigation ditch.

The book is not quite autobiographical, but he used his experience to create an intense and important story. The narrator is a sixteen-year-old boy with a severe injury like Anaya’s, gradually recovering while his entire spinal column, even his neck, is encased in a cast—thus he’s the turtle, and he chooses Tortuga as his nickname. He shares a ward with other boys who have significant injuries and a boy with progressing ichthyosis. The girls are on another ward. The polio victims in iron lungs are referred to by these more able-bodied boys as the vegetables. One older boy among them is left alone to read, the only thing he is capable of doing, but he becomes a philosopher.

As in many of Anaya’s books, the male characters are complex and fully developed while most of the female characters are not. The nurse’s aide, Ismelda, is essentially the same healing feminine archetype seen in his other books. Ultima is the elder version, Rita in the Sonny Baca novels the womanly version, and Ismelda the girl of eighteen. She is loving, giving, nurturing, beautiful, understanding, and wise, demanding nothing.

Tortuga falls in love with her, and they develop a relationship modern standards would consider inappropriate, as Ismelda gives him baths and appreciates his arousal at her touch when he cannot yet move more than his fingers and toes.

The physical therapist KC seems to relish her close contact with the boys as she manipulates their limbs, and being teenaged boys, they don’t object, but to a modern reader, KC seems to cross a line. She also shows appreciation of Tortuga’s arousal. I had a sense of the staff unthinkingly reacting this way without considering the impact of the boys’ disabilities and their isolation from normal female companionship. The wildness of a boys-and-girls field trip to the movies (Frankenstein, a great choice for the plot) only emphasizes how deprived of a normal life the kids are.

They get an education. They have a swimming pool, they have the hot spring waters in a special bath, and they have an excellent surgeon who genuinely cares. But they don’t have a full life. Jerry, a Navajo boy, personifies the urgent need for family and culture and connection.

As always, Anaya’s language is poetic and vivid, sweeping dreams into reality. The Turtle on the mountain is made into a myth that I’ve never heard in this town. I think it’s Anaya’s invention, but it works for the story—except for the hot spring water being the stone turtle peeing down through the mountain. Yuck. But teenaged boys—hey, they like this. And this book is fully in the mind and heart of a boy, a boy of his time.

Anaya also take a novelist’s liberty with our seasons for poetic purposes. In his Sonny Baca series, the seasons play significant symbolic roles. In Tortuga, the author gives southern New Mexico a cold, snowy winter with gray clouds and icy streets. He describes summer as a time of hot dry wind, and makes spring green and refreshing. Our mild, sunny winters, dry springs with high winds and dust storms, and summers of thunderstorms greening the mountain don’t fit the story’s needs.

A tragic twist near the end truly surprised me.  I was expecting something more predictable to go wrong. It doesn’t. The unexpected turn is perfectly prepared, however, and all the stronger for not being what I thought would happen.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to explore Anaya’s work in depth and to examine an aspect of twentieth century history. It’s not a light read, and yet it has luminous moments.

*****

The picture of Turtleback Mountain is by Donna Catterick, whose work is seen on the covers of many of my books. I took the pictures of the original building at the New Mexico State Veterans’ Home, the portion that was once the Carrie Tingley Hospital.  I wonder how small those trees were when Anaya was a patient.

Cover Reveal!

It’s always exciting to see the cover of a new book. I love this photograph Donna Catterick took in the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, one of the settings in the book. The book should be available for sale on e-book retail sites by mid-November.

The tenth Mae Martin Psychic Mystery

Blackmail, birdwatching, 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, but it’s also urgent. A friend’s two elderly dogs are lost. Another friend’s former lover has vanished. The police think he left intentionally, but would a birder leave without his binoculars? His family fears the worst.

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? Can she stop his enemies from finding him first? And what will the effort cost?

The Mae Martin Series

No murder, just mystery. Every life hides a secret, and love is the deepest mystery of all.

 

A New Mexico Mystery Review: A Summer to Remember by Amy M. Bennett

This is one of those series I keep reading for the engaging characters. Also, it’s set not far from where I live, and knowing the geography and the various cultures makes it even richer. For someone who’s not a New Mexican, the series could be a great way to get acquainted with the mountain region near Ruidoso and Mescalero.

In this book, Corrie and J.D. are bordering on a closer relationship when everything that can go wrong goes wrong. That’s an author’s job, of course. Make trouble for your characters. Bennett handles the task brilliantly. As a reader, I want the best for these characters, so the obstacles they face—personal and professional—matter. J.D. is up against a series of cold case murders that he until recently thought had been solved. The development of possible suspects is complex and believable. By the time I felt sure of the killer’s identity, I was one short step ahead of the characters. If this effect was intentional, it was masterful, because it added enormously to the suspense. Corrie proves her strength under extraordinary circumstances.

Needless to say, I’ll keep reading the Black Horse Campground series.

 

Help Me Pick the Cover Picture

Mae Martin book ten is now with my editor. I’ve even written the back cover copy.

Wounded Healer

The tenth Mae Martin Psychic Mystery

Blackmail, birdwatching, 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, but it’s also urgent. A friend’s two elderly dogs are lost. Another friend’s former lover has vanished. The police think he left intentionally, but would a birder leave without his binoculars? His family fears the worst.

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? Can she stop his enemies from finding him first? And what will the effort cost?

The Mae Martin Series

No murder, just mystery. Every life hides a secret, and love is the deepest mystery of all.

Now, it’s time to choose the cover. I’m fortunate to have a friend who does beautiful photography, Donna Catterick. Her moody shot of Turtleback Mountain graces Shadow Family, her picture of the elephant-shaped formation in Elephant Butte Lake is on the cover of Gifts and Thefts, and the cover of Chloride Canyon is a picture she took in that location. For this book, I needed a scene at the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, and I needed birds.

I’ve narrowed my options down to these two. Imagine the whole thing wrapping as a paperback cover, and part of it cropped for an eBook. Which image do you prefer? Vote in the comments.

These next pics are bonus material, birds who have roles in the book. The cute little verdin has a cameo, while the curve-billed thrasher gets an action scene.

If you like Donna’s work, follow her photography blog Always Backroads. Before we met, I’d been following it, and she’d been reading my books. If you read my books, you know what Kenny would say. “The Universe lines things up.”

 

Lost in a Book

After the usual two years of work, I’ve finished the fifth complete draft of the next Mae Martin mystery, tentatively titled Wounded Healer. The mystery centers around a missing birder. The bird in the picture, the desert cardinal, plays a role in the story.

I’m currently going through the manuscript for words I use too often. Most can be cut. Some require revision. I’ve analyzed the plot, the level of tension, the variety in types of scenes, the pacing, the sensory detail, my characters’ process of solving the mystery, and how the red herrings are working. Next, I need to complete the cleanup and send it to my beta readers. They will notice problems and make suggestions, and then I’ll revise it and clean it up yet again. And that’s the status of the book. I’m so fixated on getting it finished that I haven’t been blogging, despite many inspirations for posts. I’ll get around to them once the book is with my betas!

 

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

 

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.

 

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 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.