#TuesdayTreasures with C Hope Clark!

Good Morning!

Please help me welcome C. Hope Clark as she shares some treasures with us....

Why Write Mysteries on a Beach?

By C. Hope Clark

I never realized until I wrote my own mysteries that setting is intensely important when I crack a book’s spine. Upon entering a story, I want to sink into the environment. I mean…on page one, the author needs to acclimate me.

Don’t tell me a small town. . . name it, describe it, let me smell and hear it. Don’t tell me an old house. Let me feel the ghosts of past residents and see their impact on having lived there. Give me the old dusty scent. Make me squint when the sun comes in glaring just right from that window in the corner of the dining room.

So when my publisher asked me to create a new series, and place it in one setting that I loved, it took me seconds to settle on Edisto Beach, my favorite getaway at almost the tippy end of my home state of South Carolina. However, I write mysteries, and this had to be a series. Edisto Beach only has a population of 500 people, and in 16 years, no murders, one rape, and two robberies. A few summer thefts by kids.

But to me, that sounded perfect and helped me sculpt my protagonist. Being from South Carolina, she escaped suffocating, political parents and married a Yankee only to move to Boston where he became a US Marshall and she became a homicide detective. But a criminal she finally nabbed arranged a hit on her husband, leading her to obsess over it. . . and lose her job. Limping home to South Carolina, her father, recognizing her need to be alone, deeded her the family’s vacation cottage at Edisto Beach. She moved for just what a beach is supposed to do. . . soothe and heal. Never wanting to be a law enforcement officer again.

The perfect setup for conflict. A juxtaposition of opposites in so many ways.

Dying on Edisto is the most recent release, book 5 in the Edisto Island Mysteries. In the previous books Callie Morgan evolved to become police chief of the beach, and has spotted and solved numerous crimes that nobody would’ve seen, much less solved, without her skills. They don’t believe in crime on their beach. She does, and pays a hefty price for her efforts.

Enter the Edisto River leading to the ocean, a plantation home renovated into a bed and breakfast, and a dead travel blogger who was bent on ruining the plantation’s reputation before it ever gets off the ground. Dying on Edisto oozes with setting, and one cannot navigate the mystery without drinking the humidity, smelling the restaurant, and feeling the gnats and trickling sweat.

Yeah, this is how I like my stories. Practically three dimensional. Hopefully you do, too.

C. Hope Clark is the award-winning author of the Carolina Slade Mysteries and the Edisto Island Mysteries. During her career with the US Department of Agriculture, she met and married a federal agent-now a private investigator. She plots murder mysteries at their lakeside home in South Carolina, when she isn’t strolling Edisto Beach. 

She founded FundsforWriters.com, selected by Writer’s Digest for its 101 Best Websites for Writers for 18 years. Her newsletter reaches 35,000 readers. www.fundsforwriters.com / 

Find our more about her at www.chopeclark.com  

Her latest release is Dying on Edisto, Book 5 of the Edisto Island Mysteries and can be purchased at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Find out more about the series HERE.  

Hope you enjoyed today's post and that you'll check back often.

Until next time take care and God bless.

PamT