Welcome to Windy Corner. A visit from Katherine Bolger Hyde

RHYS BOWEN: One of the things I love about being part of Jungle Reds is meeting new writers or coming across new-to-me writers. Today I'm happy to introduce Katherine Bolger Hyde, whom I met earlier this year and now has a brand new first novel to tell us about. It's all yours Katherine.. 

KATHERINE: What’s your favorite place—real or fantasy—to read? The beach? A cozy chair by the fire with a cat on your lap? A well-stocked home library redolent of polished wood and old leather bindings?

I love the sound of all the above. But I don’t often get to enjoy those environments for my own reading. That’s one reason I chose to give my protagonist-sleuth, literature professor Emily Cavanaugh, regular access to all three.

Early in the pages of Arsenic with Austen, Emily inherits property in Stony Beach, a fictional small town on the Oregon coast. 

As a devotee of the traditional English country house mystery, I wanted my heroine to have a country house of her own, so I included one as part of her legacy from her great aunt Beatrice. A mansion on the scale of the typical English manor house would not be credible in a town like Stony Beach, so I scaled it down to a nice seven-bedroom Victorian with a tower overlooking the sea. In consideration of the climate of the Oregon Coast and with a tip of the hat to E. M. Forster, I named the house Windy Corner, after the Honeychurch home in A Room with a View.

Poring over floor plans is a favorite pastime of mine, and I wanted to have a vivid picture of the interior of the home in my own mind in order to be able to paint it for the reader. So I bought several books of authentic turn-of-the-century house plans and paged through them until I found a house with an exterior and a floor plan that matched almost exactly what I had imagined for Windy Corner.

Of course, this floor plan had to have a library. The room at the heart of the house, marked as the “Sitting Room” in the plan above, was the perfect candidate with its semicircular bay window looking out over the ocean. It’s a room filled with books that were not merely collected but loved. (Atmosphere of old bindings: check.)

Here Emily sits reading or knitting with her cats, Kitty, Levin, and Bustopher Jones, curled up nearby. (Cozy chair by the fire with cat: check.) Here she is visited by friends and foes alike; here much of the drama of her new life as an heiress and reluctant sleuth unfolds.

One tiny section of the library is represented on the cover of Arsenic with Austen (along with a cat that must be an intruder, since it doesn’t resemble any of Emily’s three).

The library of Windy Corner is a welcoming room where a fire is nearly always burning and high tea is nearly always being served. Emily and I do most cordially hope you will join us there.

The magic door to the Windy Corner library may be found at kbhyde.com.

Katherine Bolger Hyde has lived her life surrounded by books, from teaching herself to read at age four to majoring in Russian literature to making her career as an editor. She lives in California with her husband and varying numbers of offspring and cats. Arsenic with Austen is her first novel.

When literature professor Emily Cavanaugh inherits a fortune from her great aunt, she expects her life to change. She doesn’t expect to embark on a murder investigation, confront the man who broke her heart 35 years before, and nearly lose her own life. Emily travels to the sleepy coastal village of Stony Beach, Oregon, to claim her inheritance, where she hears hints that her aunt may have been murdered. Soon another murder confirms these suspicions. While she and Sheriff Luke Richards, her once-and-possibly-future love, reenact the plot of Persuasion, Emily uses her knowledge of Jane Austen's characters to analyze the suspects and bring the killer to justice.