By Dani Greer, Chief Red Pencil When I first heard about Peg Brantley’s new novel, The Missings , I wanted to know the Gore Meter Rating. Most of you know my weak heart can’t handle much more than a good cozy mystery when it comes to spine-tingling reads. It turns out the first chapter was about as gory as it got. The thrill level was definitely alive and well in this fast-paced novel though. But what thrilled me most of all is something we don’t see all that often in a plot-driven read: great character development. All of us feel fear, but I recently read in Psychology Today that we are born with only a few, such as fear of falling and fear of starvation. That means humans have acquired a lot of other fears through learned behavior. Some of the most common ones include fear of insects; fear of water or fire; fear of public speaking; fear of rejection; fear of nuclear war; fear of success or failure. In The Missings , Brantley plays on common fears many of us ha...

First, thank you to the Blood Red Pencil for hosting me for this stop on my two-week-long virtual tour for Mercury’s Rise , the latest book in my Silver Rush historical mystery series. Truly, I have to thank BRP for more than that, because it was BRP’s Dani Greer who helped me out of a tight spot regarding word usage in Mercury’s Rise . It all began with whiskey. And whisky. I had taken great pains to determine under what circumstances my protagonist Inez Stannert would use which term. After all, Inez runs a high-class saloon in 1880s Leadville, Colorado, so she would certainly know the difference. My conundrum began when the line editor at my publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, noted that some places in the manuscript were “whiskey” and others read “whisky.” Which is correct? she asked. I sent her a long reply (with links!) noting that they weren’t the same. (New York Times weighed in here and The Boozin’ Blog had a discussion here .) But I began to worry that switching between the...