Month: November 2020

Connie Berry initially dreamed of becoming an archaeologist, but that ended when she learned there was more to it than discovering the tombs of lost pharaohs. Deciding to write about history rather than uncover it, she created the Kate Hamilton Mystery series, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Two books in the well-received series have been published, A Dream of Death and A Legacy of Murder. The third book in the series, The Art of Betrayal, is scheduled for release in June 2021.

Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by charmingly eccentric antiques collectors who opened a shop, not to sell antiques but to give them an excuse to keep buying them. Besides reading mysteries and writing them, Connie loves foreign travel, cute animals, and all things British. She lives in central Ohio with her husband and adorable dog, Emmie.

Connie’s passion for all things British came naturally. Her paternal grandparents were born in Scotland, so she grew up with the accents, tastes, and tales of the “auld country” in her ears, mouth, and heart. To her, the best thing about the British Isles is the richness and depth of history — the past. She’s a history junkie, which means the older the better. Everywhere you go in the British Isles, history lives and breathes.

Connie is especially interested in the complex dynamics of villages. She believes that may stem from her early exposure to Agatha Christie, but she likes nothing better than writing about a small community with plenty of interconnections and conflicts to create havoc — and murder.

In addition to writing the Kate Hamilton series, Connie’s been writing articles on the craft of writing for several trade publications, including the Sisters in Crime Quarterly and the Mystery Writers of America newsletter. 

Connie has degrees in English from DePauw University and The Ohio State University. She also studied at the University of Freiburg in southern Germany and St. Clare’s College in Oxford, England. Connie is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, is on the board of her local SinC chapter, Buckeye Crime Writers, and is on the Steering Committee for the SinC Guppies chapter.

Connie’s debut novel A Dream of Death was a finalist for an Agatha Award and the Silver Falchion and won the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Mystery.

The work of acclaimed crime fiction writer Robin Yocum has been strongly influenced by his upbringing in the heart of the industrialized Ohio River Valley. Born in Steubenville into a family of steelworkers, coal miners, and railroaders, he grew up in Brilliant, a small town in Eastern Ohio. Determined to forge a different path, Yocum was the first in his family to attend college. A journalism major at Bowling Green University, Yocum worked at a variety of jobs ranging from newspaper carrier and truck driver to gas station attendant and night janitor at the Steubenville Country Club.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he started his journalism career at the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, moved to the Martins Ferry Times Leader and finally landed at the Columbus Dispatch from 1980 to 1991, where he started out on the crime beat and was later the senior reporter on the newspaper’s investigative team. During his time as a newspaper reporter and investigator, he received more than 30 local, state, and national journalism awards in categories ranging from investigative reporting to feature writing, the most important of which were from the Press Club of Ohio and the Associated Press.

Yocum, the father of three grown children, is now the president of Yocum Communications, a public relations and marketing firm in Westerville, Ohio, as well as a crime fiction writer. He uses the Ohio River Valley where he grew up as the setting for several of his novels. He also uses some of the people he grew up with and his family as inspiration for some of the characters. 

Yocum is the author of two non-fiction books and five critically acclaimed novels: A Welcome Murder, A Brilliant Death, Favorite Sons, The Essay, and A Perfect Shot. Favorite Sons was named the 2011 USA Book News’ Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense. It was selected for the Choose to Read Ohio program for 2013 – 2014 and was a featured book of the Ohioana Book Festival. A Brilliant Death was a finalist for the 2017 Edgar Allen Poe Awards presented by the Mystery Writers of America.

Yocum has also turned his prodigious talents to writing short stories. He was a contributor to Columbus Noir, an anthology edited by local author Andrew Welsh-Huggins, and his short story The Last Hit was one of 20 stories selected for the Best American Mystery Stories 2020, an annual anthology edited by the legendary Otto Preminger. Yocum’s many fans anxiously await his next contribution to the world of crime fiction, The Sacrifice of Lester Yates.