An Illustrated Death blog tour

Title: An Illustrated Death
Author: Judi Culberton
Genre: Mystery
Publication Date: October 1, 2013, (ebook only) by Witness Impulse, an imprint of HarperCollins
Event organized by: Literati Author Services, Inc.

Book Synopsis

When bookseller Delhi Laine gets the opportunity to appraise the late Nate Erikson’s personal library, she jumps at the chance. It’s not every day a bookseller gets to peek into the mind of a famous illustrator, not to mention his fascinating collection of rare books. Invited to spend time with the artistic Erikson clan at the family compound in the Hamptons, Delhi is intrigued by their eccentric and eclectic ways.

But when death visits the family once more and another Erikson is found dead, dark family secrets come to light—including the death of Nate Erikson himself. Surrounded by the charmed family not quite as idealic as they once seemed, Delhi is determined to solve the murders once and for all. But digging up truths can get you dirty…and Delhi is about to discover how far some will go to keep them buried.

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Purchase Links

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About the Author
Judi Culbertson graduated from Hampton DuBose High School in Florida, and majored in creative writing at Wheaton College in Illinois. After two years in Philadelphia she moved to Long Island where her son Andy was born. Here she published GAMES CHRISTIANS PLAY (Harper & Row, 1967), followed by THE LITTLE WHITE BOOK ON RACE (Lippincott, 1970) with a friend, Patti Bard.

In 1970 Judi began working for the Suffolk County Department of Social Services, working with families at risk, children in foster care and, finally, in the Court Unit where she wrote petitions to free children for adoption. During this time she was writing articles for Glamour, The New York Times, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day, Working Mother, and others and travel stories for major newspapers.

In 1986, after a trip to Paris, Judi and her husband, Tom Randall, wrote a travel story that developed into PERMANENT PARISIANS,An Illustrated Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris, published in 1987 by Chelsea Green Press. This was followed by four more: PERMANENT NEW YORKERS; LONDONERS; CALIFORNIANS; and ITALIANS.

After earning an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College, Judi published THE NURSERY (St. Martin's Press, 1996). By then she had started speaking professionally on a subject that had long fascinated her, people's attachment to stuff. This led to two books: SCALING DOWN, Living Large in a Smaller Space, written with Marj Decker (Rodale 2005) and THE CLUTTER CURE (McGraw-Hill, 2007).

Judi left social work in 1999 to pursue her interest in selling used and rare books on the Internet.
It is this background that helped create the Secondhand Prose Mystery Series. A NOVEL DEATH is the first book, published by Avalon Books in June 2011. AN ILLUSTRATED DEATH will be published on October 1, 2013 by Harper/Collins. When not writing, she and Tom travel extensively and enjoy their twin grandchildren, Andrew and Emily, as well as the three cats they live with: Ignatz, Vladimir, and Pangur.

Connect with the Author: Website | Goodreads

Tour-Wide Giveaway
Ten (10) ecopies of An Illustrated Death. Winner must have access to Bluefire Reader and have an Adobe account to receive free download.

Literary Halloween Parties

Happy Halloween!  Last year I combined my enjoyment of entertaining with my love of books and came up with a Come-as-Your-Favorite-Literary Character Party.  I knew if I’d had a regular Halloween party, some of my friends would have refused to come in costume.  They hate the idea of dressing up. But everyone got inspired by the theme and really outdid themselves.

I considered coming as my favorite character, Holly Golightly, but decided I wanted the chance to dress up in something other than a little black dress and pearls.  So I chose Nitta Sayuri  from Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha.  I ordered a black wig and white makeup online and made an obi for a kimono I owned.  My husband Tom went a more minimalist route with T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, wearing white flannel trousers rolled and a tie with peaches and mermaids.

When I should have been thinking about writing something to win the Nobel Prize, I was making witch’s hat cookies instead. Very easy--you buy Keebler’s striped shortbread cookies, top them with Hershey kisses, and draw on a hatband and bow with orange frosting.  There was other orange food--shrimp with cocktail sauce, Buffalo wings, and pumpkin cheesecake, but I concentrated on what would taste good.

It was exciting to see how unrelated people complemented each other.  We had Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Anne of Green Gables and Mathew and Marilla Cuthbert, Captain Queeg, Holden Caufield, Bilbo Baggins, Alice in Wonderland and some fairy tale and Shakespearian characters, as well as a “shipwreck” from Moby Dick.  Part of the fun was trying to guess who people were.  To my shame, I didn’t guess Lisbeth Salander, though I love the Milennium books.

After the party, instead of going back to writing the Great American Novel, I made booklets for people with a picture of each printed against a background of the book they had chosen.  Not as virtuous as writing An American Tragedy, but a lot more fun.

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