Mark McNease

At long last it has arrived! The second book in the Maggie Dahl Mysteries series has just been released as an eBook on Amazon Kindle. The paperback is coming in a week or so, as well as wider distribution after 90 days as a Kindle Unlimited exclusive. For now you can get Open Secrets for just $4.99, or as a member of Kindle Unlimited. And you can read a six chapter sample FREE by just downloading it HERE from BookFunnel. Welcome back, Maggie! Lambertville has been waiting for another murder for you to solve.

About ‘Open Secrets’

Maggie Dahl returns in ‘Open Secrets.’ It’s been six months since the media circus surrounding the last murder Maggie solved, and a year since her beloved husband David died. The dust seems to have finally settled. Then one morning a customer walks in and asks Maggie to do her a favor.

Soon a body is discovered on a rural New Jersey road. A body Maggie is sure belongs to a local author whose next book was rumored to reveal secrets not everyone wanted known. But were they enough to kill for? And who murdered the woman found in the woods? Maggie is determined to find out, even as her life continues its road back to normal, complete with the possibility of new love. Can she find the answers she seeks in the death of a local celebrity? And will love be part of her life once again when she least expects it?

About ‘Black Cat White Paws’

In Black Cat White Paws, recently widowed Maggie Dahl finds herself faced with challenges on all fronts: life alone in a new town, running a business she and her husband had dreamed of and started together, and now pursuing a killer. Her sister Gerri moves from Philadelphia to Lambertville, New Jersey, to support her sister and start a new life of her own. Together the women search for a murderer, helped in critical ways by their neighbor’s cat. A black cat with white paws. A cat whose independence sets it all in motion and sees it through to the end.

Black Cat White Paws finds Maggie moving from New York City to Lambertville, an idyllic river town with artists, restaurants, incredible landscapes, and enough local characters to populate a murder mystery. Join Maggie, Gerri, Checks the cat, and a cast of colorful small town natives just as eager—and as shocked—to find a killer in their midst.

I’ve had a Facebook group for LGBTQ older people for many years now (LGBTSr), as part of my website of the same name. One of the members told me he was leaving the group because he is afraid “they” will begin tracking us, and not because they want to sell us products and laxatives.

I told him I was sorry to see him go, and that I would resist until my last breath. While fear is becoming pervasive among many of us who know it is a rational response to the hostilities we have known throughout our lives and that are daily returning with a vengeance, disguised as concern for parental rights and the defending of gender conformity, fear is something I refuse. Fear serves those who benefit from instilling it.

I think about the aged among my peers. Simply being able to marry has meant we are not denied access to our loved ones. We are not erased when they die. We are not refused services (although the incidence of LGBTQ people going back into the closet when we need nursing home care is unspeakably heartbreaking). It is the simplest of dignities and the frailest of protections in a world that would prefer to offer us none.

While Clarence Thomas is a cruel wretch, he is at least honest about what they plan to do. The lying reassurances from Alito and Kavanaugh (much like the lies some of them told in their confirmation hearings) remind me most of the way we calm animals before we euthanize them, assuring them that all will be okay as the needle goes in. Remove the blinders if you still have them on. Of course they intend to overturn marriage equality. Of course they intend to strip our rights, whether it’s the right to be intimate with the person we choose to be, or the right to have our children kept free from religious coercion.

Part of their magic trick is to pummel the country with imaginary reason, while our society is dragged in their preferred direction one ruling at a time. They did not save us from a coup when they refused to do Trump’s dirty work. They are simply carrying it out themselves.

There is nothing alarmist in saying what I see. Unfortunately millions and millions are sleep walking into a country many of us will not recognize in a few years, led by the feckless Joe Biden and a geriatric Democratic leadership that refuses to say it’s raining as their clothes soak through.

And that is that.