Writers Read: Paula Munier

Friday, October 13, 2023

Paula Munier

Paula Munier is a literary agent and the USA TODAY bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mysteries. A Borrowing of Bones, the first in the series, was nominated

for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. The sequel Blind Search, inspired by the real-life rescue of a little boy with autism who got lost in the woods, was followed by The Hiding Place in 2021 and The Wedding Plot in 2022.

Munier's new Mercy Carr mystery is Home at Night.

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

I’m always reading several books at a time, all in different formats: There are the hardcovers on my coffee table that I read whenever I take a break from work. There are the audiobooks I listen to as I’m cooking dinner every night. And there are the e-books I read on my iPhone in the dark at night in bed before I fall asleep. Some of the books are research and some are just for fun. And some are big break-out novels that I read to see what the fuss is all about.

I've been rereading Ulysses by James Joyce, and it's way more compelling this time around, much more so than it was when I was a young woman reading it. It’s taking a long time because I have to look up a lot of the Latin as my Catholic-school Latin is a little rusty these days. Along the same literary lines, I'm also reading the new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the classic into English. I listened to it on audiobook first, and now I'm reading the print version. It’s really quite good. Wilson’s translation of The Iliad just came out, and I’ll have to read that next.

I also read a lot of nonfiction, especially related to science and nature and, well, death. I’m loving All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes, by Sue Black. It’s a fascinating study of all the aspects of death—physical, emotional, cultural, and more. All fuel for the fire of a mystery writer’s imagination.

For fun I’m reading The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves; I’ll read anything she writes. I’m filing Edwin Hill’s fab thriller Who to Believe under the just-for-fun category, too, even though I have to read it with the lights on. It’s the same for The Sandbox by Andrews & Wilson, which is a wicked scary AI story. Finally, there’s Emma Straub’s All Adults Here, a warm and wise novel about one matriarch’s mission to correct the mistakes she’s made with her family, like it or not.

On my TBR list for the snowy days of winter ahead: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, and What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman.