Meet Joyce and Jim Lavene: This Week's Treasured & Tipsy Timeslip Travellers

November 03, 2015

Five Places We Would Like to go and why

By Joyce and Jim Lavene

What a fun way to say something about our new book, A Dickens of a Murder! As writers and readers we can travel places many people can never hope to visit. It’s as easy to go to Mars or explore under the seas as it is to go down the block to the grocery store. We’ve indulged our imaginations to travel around the universe which makes it hard to choose five places we’d like to go. But we’ll give it a whirl!

Note from the bloghost: It is with great sadness I report the passing of Joyce Lavene. She died Oct. 20th at the age of 61 not long after writing this post. Although I never had the pleasure of meeting Joyce, I was honored that she stopped by my blog. It is a common sentiment that she was an intelligent, funny, talented woman born to write. My thoughts and prayers go out to her husband Jim, her children and grandchildren. Please feel free to leave a message below and please enjoy some of her final thoughts and words.

1. Probably the first place we’d like to go would be Mars. We’ve been before with John Carter, courtesy of his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who also took us into the earth and into the deepest part of the jungle. We’d love to help John figure out all of the problems on Mars.

2. We’d love to go under the sea with Captain Nemo in his wonderful submarine. We visited with him for a short time but it’s been years and we’re longing to go again. His creator Jules Verne was a revolutionary writer who foresaw so many things that we are just starting to create today.

3. We’d love to help Agatha Christie watch the goings-on aboard the Orient Express. We both like hats so no problem with the period clothing. Hercule might be able to teach us a thing or two about solving mysteries and we love dark train tunnels!

4. Who wouldn’t like to be with the first group of explorers to discover Egyptian mummies buried for thousands of years beneath the sand? Okay, so there was a curse, but its a small price to pay to be the first to walk through those ancient tombs in thousands of years. Sign us up for the expedition!

5. We long to hear the mournful cry of the hound on the moors and follow Sherlock Holmes as he solves the mystery of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle can bring the pipe tobacco. We’ll bring the good whiskey and a small revolver to keep ourselves warm and out of trouble.

Perhaps now you’re saying that those aren’t real places. Maybe so but they are as real to us as many places that we could drive or walk to right now. When you’ve been to such places as you can find in the pages of a book – it can take something away from those ‘real’ places.

Writing a book is the same experience. We’d love to live in our Renaissance Village with Jessie and Chase. We’ve been to Duck, NC but wish we could have visited Missing Pieces, our protagonist’s shop of the boardwalk. We’ve seen in our minds the three-story house in Old Towne Portsmouth, Virginia that becomes the Canterville Book Shop, but we’d love to walk in and talk to the ghost of Charles Dickens.

That might seem crazy to people who don’t read, but we know readers understand what we mean. Books have taken us everywhere. We hope you’ll have an opportunity to let our books take you somewhere special too!

Thanks for reading!

Canterville Book Shop Mystery 1
Genre - Cozy Mystery
Print Length: 111 pages
Publisher: J. Lavene (November 3, 2015)
ASIN: B015269QSI

Christmas at Canterville!

Lisa Wellman and Simon Canterville are surprised to find a dead man on their roof in the midst of rushing to open the Canterville Book Shop in time for the holidays. And not just any dead man – Ebenezer Hart – the man who opposed the book shop opening in Olde Town, Portsmouth, Virginia.
What might be more surprising is when Daniel Fairhaven – Lisa’s ex – turns up at the door of the three-story Victorian house to head the police investigation. She hasn’t seen him in years but the sparks start to fly as soon as they are in the same room together.

Simon and Lisa are obviously the best suspects for the murder. Each of them had something to gain by Hart’s death. Then an attempt on Simon’s life throws that theory into a tailspin.
But the biggest surprise yet comes when the ghost of Charles Dickens turns up to help Lisa with the murder investigation – and writing the mystery novel she has been working on for years.
Without a doubt, Daniel and Dickens in Lisa’s life means trouble. And there’s still the matter of trying to get the book shop open with a killer on their heels.

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