Molly MacRae spent twenty years in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Upper East Tennessee, where she managed The Book Place, an independent bookstore; may it rest in peace. Before the lure of books hooked her, she was curator of the history museum in Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest town.
MacRae lives with her family in Champaign, Illinois, where she recently retired from connecting children with books at the public library.
Her latest novel is Come Shell or High Water.
Recently I asked MacRae about what she was reading. Her reply:
Mortal Radiance, the second book in Kathryn Lasky’s Georgia O’Keeffe mystery series just came out. But I didn’t know about this historicalVisit Molly MacRae's website.mystery series, until I heard about Mortal Radiance, so I rushed right out to get book one, Light on Bone. It’s wonderful. Set in 1933 New Mexico, it’s told from O’Keeffe’s point of view. She’s living alone in a casita at Ghost Ranch and protective of her painting time and solitude. That solitude is first shattered when she comes across a murdered Franciscan friar, and then by an accumulation of other events, including the arrival of Charles Lindbergh and his wife at the ranch. As O’Keeffe collects facts and suppositions about the murder and other events, she begins to think about them the way she thinks about art—about seeing the unseen and about making visible the invisible. Lasky’s vivid writing make me feel as though I’m in O’Keeffe’s beloved New Mexican
landscape and inside O’Keeffe’s fascinating mind.
I’m also making my way through the short stories in The Killing Rain; Left Coast Crime 2024 Anthology, edited by Jim Thomsen. The stories are all set in the Seattle area. They range from traditional to humorous to hardboiled. I’ve read nine of the fourteen stories, so far, and each is excellent.
In the early 80s I decided I wanted to make paper and started collecting cotton lint from our dryer. Life (and growing children) intervened. This summer (only forty years later) I’m going to try again. To help, I borrowed every book about papermaking the library has. Helen Hiebert’s Papermaking with Garden Plants & Common Weeds ismy favorite. Hiebert gives clear definitions, instructions, recipes, and charts of papermaking plants. She suggests techniques and projects, and she offers encouragement. I’ll start with some of the easier methods to see if I can really do this. If I can, then I’ll work my way up to making paper from the mulberries and Rose of Sharon that grow like weeds in our backyard. Weeding through papermaking sounds like an efficient plan.
My Book, The Movie: Plaid and Plagiarism.
The Page 69 Test: Plaid and Plagiarism.
The Page 69 Test: Scones and Scoundrels.
My Book, The Movie: Scones and Scoundrels.
The Page 69 Test: Crewel and Unusual.
The Page 69 Test: Heather and Homicide.
Q&A with Molly MacRae.
--Marshal Zeringue
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