Why I Write Mysteries by Cate Conte

Jenn McKinlay: One of the blogs that we Reds love is The Wicked  Wicked Good Mysteries, and I am so pleased that we have one of them here with us today to tell us all about her latest! Please welcome Cate Conte, aka Liz Mugavero.  

 

Cate Conte:

Readers often ask me how I started writing mysteries. I think sometimes the real question they want to ask me is, why are you so obsessed with crime and murder, but regardless, it’s a valid question. 

 

In any event, I never really thought about it much at the beginning. I loved mysteries, had always (to my parents’ chagrin) been fascinated with serial killers and other high profile murders, and that was really as far as it went. But when I started writing the Cat Cafe Mysteries and my protagonist Maddie’s Grandpa Leo was born, I had to rethink that answer. 

 

In the books, Grandpa Leo is the former police chief of Daybreak Harbor, retired for a few years and still unwilling to let go of his job. He’s an integral character from the beginning, and the main reason why Maddie decides to return to her hometown. Through a series of events (some unfortunate) in the first book, Maddie not only ends up returning home but also decided to move into Grandpa Leo’s house, where she actually spent the first few years of her childhood. Her grandpa is her favorite person, she often says. 

 

Readers seemed to really like Leo, and as the series went on it became obvious that he was Maddie’s true sidekick. She has her animal rescue friends, her lifelong best friend, her business partner, her sisters, and some men in her life, but no one is better at looking at the murders that keep popping up in front of her and helping her figure them out than her grandpa. Yeah, his former job has a lot to do with it—not to mention his current job, the PI firm he opened to keep his head in the investigative game—but also it’s the way they each approach things, how well they bounce ideas off one another, get on each others’ nerves, and ultimately come together to put things to rights. 

 

So back to me and my twisted obsessions with murder. At some point on this journey, I realized I didn’t get there on my own. That my love of crime, mysteries and even storytelling is courtesy of my own grandpa. Like Leo, he was a cop at heart - a detective, not a chief - and took great pride in his work. Unlike Leo, he worked days as a mason and nights as a cop. Like Leo, he had a full head of white hair up until the day he died at 85. Also like Leo, he had a particular fondness for his granddaughter (that would be me).

 

 

My grandpa was my favorite person. He was funny, patient, brilliant, modest, hardworking. He loved to watch me practice piano and try out new dance moves - those never made it out of the basement - and he taught me and my brother how to play 45s, a card game that was unique to our particular area of New England. Those card games got pretty lively for sure. He had a great sense of humor and was super loyal to my grandma. They were married for 60 years. 

 

 

But most of all, he was a storyteller. I never thought of it that way until much later, when I’d started writing my own books. I mean, he never wrote anything. But he loved to literally tell stories. Tales from his police beat, tales about the characters he came across in his other life, stories about him and my grandmother from their early years together. He loved to captivate people with his words. Make them laugh. Make them care.

 

I hope all these years later I’ve done him justice in my own storytelling. And these days, when a reader asks where I picked up my crime writing habit, I tell them I got it from my grandpa - the best storyteller in the family. 

 

What about you, Reds and Readers, who was the storyteller in your family?

 

The latest Cat Cafe Mystery, Claws for Alarm, is out on July 27. 

Here’s a blurb:

 

It’s the heart of the busy season, and JJ’s House of Purrs is booming―until a killer is let off the leash.

 

Maddie James has finally given in to her friend Katrina’s pleas to open up her cat cafe to more than ten felines: they’re now up to fifteen purring friends. In fact, JJ’s House of Purrs is making such a splash that she’s getting national attention. The East Coast Animal Rescue League is quite interested in the cafe, and so Maddie accepts a request to meet with Jillian Allen  the executive director. Jillian shows up at the cafe and asks Maddie if they can partner on a fundraiser to support the local rescue efforts―and she offers up her celebrity endorser and her celebrity cat to sweeten the deal. Maddie, caught up in the prospect, offers up her sister Val to help plan the event.

 

But when Val shows up for a site visit at the venue, she finds Jillian strangled with a fancy cat leash―a piece of swag they were intending to use for the fundraiser―leaving Maddie with a lot of questions to answer. Was her death a tragic one-off event, or is there something more sinister going on? Maddie has to figure it out fast, before anyone else in the rescue community is jeopardized.

 

 

Cate Conte writes the Cat Cafe Mysteries and the new Full Moon Mysteries. As Liz Mugavero, she writes the Pawsitively Organic Mysteries, the first of which was an Agatha Award nominee for Best First Novel. She lives in Connecticut with her rescue pals.