Writers Read: Catriona McPherson

Sunday, December 1, 2024

Catriona McPherson

Catriona McPherson was born in Scotland and lived there until 2010, then immigrated to California where she lives on Patwin ancestral land.

A former academic linguist, she now writes full-time. Her multi-award-winning and national best-selling work includes: the Dandy Gilver historical detective stories, the Last Ditch mysteries, set in California, and a strand of contemporary standalone novels including Edgar-finalist The Day She Died and Mary Higgins Clark finalist Strangers at the Gate. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, The Crimewriters’ Association, The Society of Authors and Sisters in Crime, of which she is a former national president.

McPherson's new novel is Scotzilla.

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

This writer certainly reads. I love writing and I’m a writer in all of my daydreams but if I was one of those writers who couldn’t read while working on a book I’d be something else for work and keep reading.

Recently, because I was coming to Washington DC for the season, a friend pressed Jackie, by Dawn Tripp, into my hands. It’s a fictional account of the life of Jackie Kennedy, from when she was Jackie Bouvier up until after she was Jackie Onassis. It’s not at all the kind the of book I would normally read (although I enjoyed Curtis Sittenfield’s American Wife, a novel about Laura Bush) but I devoured it. Walking the streets of Georgetown where Jack and Jackie lived certainly helped, but it’s a lush novel wherever you might read it.

The last book I finished was Delia Pitts’ Trouble In Queenstown, a series opener about a PI in NJ. Vandy Myrick is an African American woman with a bruised heart, who takes on a murder case mired in small-town politics of the very murkiest kind. I got it signed when Delia and I were at a mystery conference together in Chicago recently. It went straight to the top of the TBR pile, because it’s a novel bursting with originality and wit, and it gets increasingly “up all night” as it goes hurtling to the denouement. I’m so glad it’s a series. I’ll be back.

One that’s in my TBR pile for next month is Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone This Christmas has a Secret. I was one of the millions who admired his debut (Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone) and I do like a Christmas book or two in the pile I curate for the holidays. I’ll read this in Santa pjs by the fire in a houseful of food. Lovely!