Susan Kelly

I’ve done a considerable number of television appearances in connection with The Boston Stranglers. These seem to be re-run constantly on the cable stations. If you’re interested, check your local listings.

Brilliance Audio has re-released three of the Liz Connors novels: Until Proven Innocent; And Soon I'll Come to Kill You; and Out of the Darkness in MP3 CD form. Go to www.brillianceaudio.com to order. You can listen to audio samples of all three books.

Blackstone Audio has released an audiobook edition of The Boston Stranglers. If you would like to listen to a sample of it, go to www.blackstoneaudio.com. You can order a copy directly from Blackstone, or Amazon or one of the other online bookshops.

Brian De Palma has expressed interest in directing a feature film of The Boston Stranglers. The script was written by Alan Rosen. As of this moment--June 1, 2009--I think they are casting the movie.

Here are a few good books I've read recently:

"Betray the Night," by Benita Kane Jaro. This novel deals with one of history's great mysteries: why, in 8 A.D., the poet Ovid was exiled by the Emperor Augustus. The "detective"--so to speak--is Ovid's wife Pinaria.

"Back Then," by Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan. This is a beautifully written memoir, told in alternating chapters by a famed husband and wife team, of literary life in New York in the 1950s.

Some sad news: On August 1, 2009, Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge, Mass., will close. Kate Mattes opened the shop in 1983, and it quickly became THE hangout for New England crime writers. No one was better than Kate at promoting new authors and launching books.

Even sadder news: I just learned today (August 1, 2009) that my good friend William G. Tapply has died. The author of at least forty books, Bill was most famous for his Brady Coyne series. In January 2008, Bill was diagnosed with leukemia; he battled it off with chemotherapy, but a sudden infection overcame him. He died July 28, 2009. Bill was a wonderful man, a superb writer, and a great friend. My deepest sympathies to his wife, writer Vicki Stiefel; children; mother; and sister.

Check out the interviews with various authors I've posted on the blog. (I hate the word "blog". It sounds like something my two-year-old nephew said when I tried to feed him pureed squash.) Anyway, these are conversations with Robert Pinksy, Mary McGarry Morris, Elinor Lipman, Dominick Dunne, and others.

From now on (1/10/10), I'll be putting book recommendations in the blog (pureed squash department) rather than here.

A memorial service for Robert B. Parker, who died last January, will be held at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, May 10, 2010, in the Metcalf Ballroom of the George Sherman Student Union at Boston University. The address is 775 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. (Bob received his doctorate from B.U.) One of the speakers will be Sue Grafton, who described Bob as "a dear soul." He surely was.

Bill Martin has just published "City of Dreams" (May 11, 2010), the latest in his series of historical mysteries featuring rare book and document dealer Peter Fallon and Fallon's lover/co-detective Evangeline. What makes Martin's books especially compelling is that the chapters alternate between the present and the past. "City Of Dreams" has to do with the search for a box containing bonds that represent the unretired debt of the American Revolution.