Hi all:
As you know on Fridays it’s guest author day. Recently I’ve been trying to catch up with some authors whose blogs I’ve been following for a while, but for some reason I haven’t featured yet. Today, it’s the turn of Noelle Granger (or N.A. Granger in her books).We not only have background interests (medical ) in common, but Noelle also spotted we had both studied at Mount Holyoke College (in my case only one year as an exchange student, but hey, it goes to prove the world is very small).
First, as I’ve mentioned her blog, and to make sure I don’t forget it, here is SaylingAway. Go and check it and you’ll see that Noelle loves her traveling, but she also features fellow authors, shares her writing, and muses about life.
And a little about her:
Noelle A. Granger grew up in Plymouth, MA, in a rambling, 125 year old house with a view of the sea. Summers were spent sailing and swimming and she was one of the first tour guides at Plymouth Plantation.
She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a bachelor’s degree in Zoology and from Case Western Reserve University with a Ph.D. in anatomy. Following a career of research in developmental biology and teaching human anatomy to medical students and residents, the last 28 years of which were spent in the medical school of the University of North Carolina, she decided to try her hand at writing fiction.
Death in a Red Canvas Sail is her first book and features an emergency room nurse as her protagonist. The book is set in a coastal town in Maine, similar to Plymouth, and she has used her knowledge of such a small town, her experiences sailing along the Maine coast, and her medical background to enrich the story.
She has also had short stories, both fiction and non-fiction, published in Deep South Magazine, Sea Level Magazine, the Bella Online Literary Review, and Coastal Style Magazine. Her second novel in the Rhe Brewster mystery series, Death in a White Dacron Sail, is her most recent novel.
N.A. Granger lives in Chapel Hill, NC, with her husband Gene, a physician, and is the mother of two children.
Check her Amazon page for more updates:
http://www.amazon.com/N.A.-Granger/e/B00DN6I8GQ/
Her books:
Death in a Red Canvas Chair: A Rhe Brewster Mystery (Rhe Brewster Mysteries Book 1)
On a warm fall afternoon, the sweet odor of decay distracts Rhe Brewster from the noise and fury of her son’s soccer game. She’s a tall, attractive emergency room nurse with a type A personality, a nose for investigation and a yen for adrenalin. This time her nose leads her to the wet, decaying body of a young woman, sitting in a red canvas chair at the far end of the soccer field. Her first call is to her brother-in-law, Sam Brewster, who is Sheriff of Pequod, the coastal Maine town where she lives. Sam and Rhe’s best friend Paulette, Pequod’s answer to Betty Crocker, are her biggest sources of encouragement when Rhe decides to help the police find the killer.
Her discovery that the victim is a student at the local college is initially thwarted by an old frenemy, Bitsy Wellington, the Dean of Students. Will, Rhe’s husband and a professor at the same college, resents her involvement in anything other than being a wife and mother and must be manipulated by Rhe so that she can follow her instincts.
Rhe’s interviews of college students leads her to a young woman who had been recruited the previous year to be an escort on a Caribbean cruise ship, and Rhe trails her to a high class brothel at a local seaside estate. The man behind the cruise ship escort service and the brothel is the owner of a chain of mortuaries and is related to the dead student.
When Rhe happens on the murder of a young hospital employee who also works for the mortuary chain, she becomes too much of a threat to the owner’s multiple enterprises. She is kidnapped by two of his thugs and is left to die in a mortuary freezer. In the freezer she finds frozen body parts, which are linked to a transplantation program at her hospital.
Despite all the twists and turns in her investigation, Rhe ultimately understands why the student was killed and who did it. And she solves the riddle of why the body was placed in the red canvas chair on the soccer field.
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Red-Canvas-Chair-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00DMCL2VE/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Red-Canvas-Chair-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00DMCL2VE/
Here a review I loved for the enthusiasm (and surely, I must read this book as soon as I can!):
Rhe Brewster is my new favorite sleuth
By Elizabeth Hein – author of How To Climb The Eiffel Tower on June 26, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition
N.A. Granger has given me a new favorite sleuth. I immediately fell in love with Rhe Brewster. She is a nurse, a mom, and wicked smart. Rhe, an insightful tenacious snoop, finds a body beside the Pequod soccer field. She then uses her connections with the sheriff and medical examiner to insert herself into the investigation. I felt like I was right there with Rhe as she chased down clues between making dinner for her son, shifts in the ER, and eating muffins with her best friend. By the end of the book, I felt I knew Rhe.
Death In A Canvas Chair is a fun read. The quaint little town of Pequod, Maine is a hotbed of iniquity – they’ve got co-eds behaving badly, gangsters lurking in the shadows, and dead bodies turning up on soccer fields. I could not put the book down until I knew who killed the co-ed.
Death in a Dacron Sail (Rhe Brewster Mysteries Book 2)
On an icy February morning, Rhe Brewster, an emergency room nurse with a nose for investigation, is called to a dock in the harbor of the small coastal town of Pequod, Maine. A consultant to the Pequod Police Department, Rhe is responding to a discovery by one of the local lobstermen: a finger caught in one of his traps. The subsequent finding of the body of a young girl, wrapped in a sail and without a finger, sends the investigation into high gear and reveals the existence of three other missing girls, as well as a childhood friend of Rhe’s. Battered by vitriolic objections from her husband about her work, the pregnant Rhe continues her search, dealing with unexpected obstacles and ultimately facing the challenge of crossing an enormous frozen bog to save herself. Will she survive? Is the kidnapper someone she knows? In Death in a Dacron Sail, the second book in the Rhe Brewster mystery series, Rhe’s nerves and endurance are put to the test as the kidnapper’s action hits close to home.
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Dacron-Sail-Brewster-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00U8EXHLW/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Dacron-Sail-Brewster-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00U8EXHLW/
And another five star review as an example:
5Cozy yet exciting crime mystery
ByLuccia Gray “‘It always seems impossible until it’s done.’ (Mandela)”on March 17, 2015
Death in a Dacron sail is the type of book I love to read. It’s a cozy yet exciting crime mystery.
The plot is tightly woven with plenty of forensic information given by Rhe Brewster, nurse and amateur sleuth narrator. Rhe is helping the police, as consultant, with an unpleasant crime involving a missing child. There is plenty of fast-paced action and suspense, in spite of the idyllic small town location, and there are many surprises and twists, making it a gripping page turner.
It’s also very well written. The prose flows so smoothly that it is a pleasure to read.
However, the very best part of this novel is the characterization. Readers won’t be interested in a good plot and wonderful writing if they can’t engage with the characters. Detective, crime thrillers, and mysteries often run the risk of being plot driven in detriment of character development, but that’s not the case here. On the contrary, the reader will love Rhe, because she is clever, and generous, and caring, but she’s also naïve, sometimes insecure, and others too patient with people who just don’t deserve it! I’ve wanted to tell her to be careful with someone who’s close to her since book one (no name so no spoilers!), and to stand up to her bullying boss!
The other characters, both good and bad, are also so real they almost jump out of the page to watch you reading!
By the way, just in case you were wondering, it can be read as a stand-alone novel, because the cases are independent, and although the main characters are the same, there is enough background information for readers to feel comfortable reading book two alone or first.
I’m impatiently waiting for book three because although Rhe Brewster will be solving another riveting case, I’m just as interested in finding out the direction her personal life will take in book three.
Thanks so much to Noelle for being our guest, thanks to all of you for reading, and you know what to do, like, share, comment and of course, CLICK!
Just Olga 