Greetings

 Dear Friends and Readers,

Forgive me for being so wholly tardy in writing a new Newsletter. My last one
was soon after Katrina, and, dang, here we are, back into the new hurricane
season. In the yin and yang of living near the Gulf of Mexico, here came the
first storm of the year, and there was my sweet little house: back in the cone
again. But we needed the rain, and it was blessedly a small storm. And, you
know, that truck the tree fell on was old and in the way anyway.

The Big News on the book front is that BONE VALLEY, the third Lilly Belle
Rose Cleary novel, will go on sale October 24, 2006. It has a big, bright pink
cover you just cannot miss in the bookstore. Check it out at
www.clairematturro.com. If you would like a small sample of this new book, in
which our heroine Lilly tackles environmental law, Florida panthers, an
orphaned baby blue jay, and lust on a grand scale–oh, and a couple of murders,
very nearly her own–email me. And, no, I won’t sell your email address, but I
will use it to send you the occasional notice or newsletter, as well as an excerpt
of BONE VALLEY.

Now here’s something you can help me with–the title of the 4th one. I’m more
or less done with the 4th Lilly adventure, in which Lilly Belle goes home to
south Georgia, to her hometown of Bugfest, to help out when her reclusive
(think Boo Radley but with more attitude) mother is accused of shooting a bad
man in a dispute over a debt for a deep freeze full of voodoo eggs. Of course,
nothing is what it seems, and soon Lilly realizes someone is trying to kill her
mother, and then there’s the one-hit-wonder would-be Vince Gill, dead on the
barn floor, smothered in sweet feed. So here’s the rub: We can’t come up with
a title for it. My editor, who is a wonderful and brilliant person, wants the title
to be like a country western song, only pop country, not old-fashioned country,
and either funny or terribly clever, and, oh, suspenseful too, and if it can be two
words like my other titles, all the better. Alliteration is cool too.

Thus far, these titles have been offered and rejected: Mule Day; Bugfest, GA;
Settin’ the Woods on Fire; The One that Got Away; and Scallywag’s End.

So, friends, any ideas on this one, please, let me hear from you. And, no, sorry,
I can’t pay you, but if you come up with a title my editor likes, I will definitely
thank you in the book.

Now, what I’ve been up to recently in addition to burning up my keyboard and
thinking up rejected book titles is picking blueberries. We have 300 bushes, and
that’s a lot of blueberries. I showed Free Bird, my pet peacock, how to pick the
berries on the low bushes, but he kept eating them. And there’s a brown
raccoon who is making off with a lot of them, but she’s a big thing, and pretty,
and she’s got kits, so I am not arguing with her, and there’s plenty to share.
Right now, I’ve filled the freezer, donated buckets of the berries to the Great
Blueberry Wine project, made a dozen or so blueberry bunt cakes and one batch
of blueberry cornbread, sold berries at the Farmers Market, and blueberried
fruit smoothies until a plain old peach looks darn good. But, it’s my favorite
time of the year, summer, because: There’s Blueberries! And, about the time the
blueberries are done, the great Georgia peaches are ripe, and the tomatoes. And
the peppers..and the plums...

Eat hardy, folks, of the bounty that is summer. And, please, support your local
farmers market.

Think about this: In the Big Box Grocery store in my town, this week peaches
from California, shipped across country and picked green, were selling for
$1.29 a pound. Or I could go to our local farmers market, and get a local peach
that hasn’t toured the continental USA, and was picked a day or two before, for
$.69 a pound. And the profit went to the person who grew that peach, whose
hand I could happily shake, not to a host of middle folks who used precious
gasoline to ship it cross-country.

Of course, I realize not all of you are lucky enough to live in the Great Peach
States of the SouthEast, but almost every town has a farmers market. Go check
it out, please! Keep the small farmers of this country growing! Please.

The other big thing I did recently was go to the Romantic Times Convention in
Daytona Beach in May. Boy, was that a hoot. My publisher threw a party there
for a group of its women mystery writers, with an open bar and 400 free books,
and, boy, let me tell you: was that party a hit! As for the RT Convention itself,
wow, talk about different...a Vampire of the Carribean costume party, okay,
when do they do that at the Bouchercon Mystery Convention? Romantic Times
has a mystery component, and the first day of the event was Women of Mystery
day, and I was surrounded by some of the wonderful women writers I’ve been
reading for so long. For a good discussion of this, see Susan McBride’s blog at
...http://thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com/the_lipstick_chronicles/2006/05/you_
have_to_see.html

Life is good. Enjoy. Eat Fruit. And keep reading,

Sincerely,

Claire Hamner Matturro