Meera Lester

Meera Lester is the author of nearly two dozen nonfiction books and the proprietress of the real Henny Penny Farmette, located in the San Francisco Bay area. Raising chickens and honeybees, she draws on her life at her farmette as the basis of her Henny Penny Farmette mysteries.

Lester's second Henny Penny Farmette mystery is The Murder of a Queen Bee.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m currently reading After the Storm, by Linda Castillo. I’m enamored of her extraordinary storytelling ability. She writes police procedural thrillers that include Her Last Breath, Pray for Silence, Sworn to Silence, and others. An added plus is that she populates them with believable characters—English and Amish. These books tick all the boxes for me—an engaging and believable protagonist, and equally worthy adversary, and the intense roller-coaster ride for the truth. The author seamlessly integrates what activities the police must do to find a killer while revealing the inner conflicts, suppressed emotions, and compassion of her sleuth.

As with other authors, reading informs my writing. My choices in reading run an eclectic gamut, from early Christian history and Celtic spirituality to cozy mysteries, thrillers, women’s fiction, and modern fables. I often re-read novels and nonfiction books as diverse as Hallucinating Foucault (by Patricia Duncker), The Palace (by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán), and Anam Cara Eternal Echoes (by John O’Donohue). I’ve also spent many enjoyable hours reading poetry. In my twenties, I got hooked on Russian poets—a phase that encompassed more than a dozen years.

Diverse reading helps me create a culturally inclusive lens for my sleuth’s worldview. Abigail Mackenzie lives in a Las Flores, a small town in Northern California that borders Silicon Valley (populated from people from many different countries and cultures). I’ve loosely based many of her stories on stories on those I’ve heard from law enforcement members of my own family as well as my experiences working ambulance and helicopter runs when I was a respiratory therapist for many years working for a large county hospital that had six ICUs and an emergency room.

Visit Meera Lester's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Murder of a Queen Bee.

The Page 69 Test: The Murder of a Queen Bee.

--Marshal Zeringue