Wednesday, June 24, 2015

An Afternoon with Nancy Atherton


Kerry Hammond is back from an afternoon book signing with one of her favorite authors, Nancy Atherton. The signing was at Denver's Tattered Cover bookstore and she's telling us all about it .  


I am a big fan of Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity series, and I consider myself very lucky that the author and I reside in the same great state of Colorado. We have a local bookstore chain called the Tattered Cover, and when I saw Nancy Atherton on the line-up, I cleared my schedule.

Nancy Atherton events are a lot of fun. Not only is she a great author, but she’s also extremely happy, bubbly, and excited about her books and her writing. Her website bio will tell you that if you run into her at a conference, she’ll be the “woman in jeans and sneakers who's bounding around like a hyperactive gerbil.” At her signings, she talks about how much she loves being a full-time writer and how lucky she is to love her profession as much as she does.

Her series started out when two sentences popped into her head, “When I learned of Aunt Dimity’s Death, I was stunned. Not because she was dead, but because I had never known she’d been alive.” She wasn’t quite sure where it came from, but she used it to start her book series with the first installment, Aunt Dimity’s Death. The books revolve around a character named Lori Shepherd, an American now living in the small fictional village of Finch, located in the Cotswolds in England. The first book explains how Lori came to live in Finch, and how she realized that by opening a blue journal she could communicate with a woman named Dimity from beyond the grave. Some of the stories take place in Finch, but others are set in other places around the globe. Mysterious happenings follow Lori and her family, so there is no place that is safe from her investigating.



Aunt Dimity and the Summer King came out this year, and it is book #21 in the series. It takes place in Finch and has Lori Shepherd taking care of a brand new baby girl. She comes across an eccentric inventor and a shady real estate dealer. As usual, Lori will take it upon herself, with the help of Aunt Dimity, to make sure Finch and its residents are safe from any evil that may lurk in the shadows.


A little bonus, Nancy stamps all her books with a pink bunny when she signs. (Reginald is Lori's pink flannel bunny in the series.)


If you’re looking for an entertaining series with lots of surprises but little in the form of blood and gore, you can’t go wrong with these books. Click here to read a Mystery Playground Drinks with Reads Review of another Aunt Dimity Book.


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