About the Book

Book: Mabel and the Unholy Night (Mysteries of Medicine Spring Book Four) Author: Susan Kimmel Wright Genre: Cozy Mystery Release date: November 5, 2024

Faithful dog Barnacle has run off into a snowstorm, disrupting Mabel’s fun outing at the Christmas tree farm. Things don’t improve much when he reappears…with a human skull. Since Mabel moved into her late grandma’s house, the sleepy village of Medicine Spring has provided clean air, a close-knit community, and charming small-town shops. To her surprise, it’s also offered up several murders—and romance with a handsome private investigator. Now, Barnacle’s discovery plunges Mabel into the mystery surrounding a decades-old unsolved murder and the disappearance of her friend Nita’s great uncle. Before Mabel, boyfriend John, and her friends can find answers and bring justice for Nita and her family, more complications develop. Incredibly, a sixty-year-old Christmas card arrives, bearing Mabel’s name and address and containing a plea for help. Are the mysteries related? While Mabel tries to get to the bottom of these strange events, a second suspicious death casts suspicion on Nita. Can Mabel find the real killer in time? Or will her Christmas season end on an unholy night?

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About the Author

Susan Kimmel Wright began her life of mystery in childhood, with reading. That led to writing kids’ mysteries and eventually to Medicine Spring with Mabel. A longtime member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, Susan’s also a prolific writer of personal experience stories, many for Chicken Soup for the Soul. She shares an 1875 farmhouse in southwestern PA with her husband, several dogs and cats, and an allegedly excessive stockpile of coffee and tea mugs.

More from Susan

Does Christmas make you nostalgic? In Mabel & the Unholy Night, fifty-year-old Mabel is observing her first Christmas in her late grandma’s house. As she sets out each fragile, vintage ornament, she feels that same familiar lump in her throat. What we treasure may have to do with when we grew up. I love mid-century glass tree ornaments from Woolworth’s, ceramic elves stamped “Made in Japan,” and Gurley candles shaped like carolers, some still bearing 29¢ stickers on the base. Ever since childhood, I’ve loved the tiny cardboard village under our tree. Houses and churches sparkled with glitter in their landscape of cotton-batting snow and bushes of dried moss. A sheet of glass atop light-blue construction paper made a perfect pond for tiny skaters. As someone once pointed out, accuracy of scale is of no concern in the cardboard village. Reindeer may loom over the houses like the mutant product of scientific experimentation gone wrong in a “B” horror movie.

Cardboard villages, properly called “putz houses,” originated with Moravian immigrants. Once handmade, houses were later imported from Germany and Japan. While nowadays we’re more likely to buy a ceramic village we can light up, I’ll take the primitive charm of a putz village any day. Maybe best of all, we can build our own putz villages to suit ourselves. A new tradition for child and parent or grandparent might be building a new house each year, to add to the tiny community. While kits are available, you can also find plans online, such as this free resource: https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/make-traditional-glitter-houses-2365171 Perhaps our yearning for the things of the past is rooted in a longing for a more carefree time, when beloved faces, now gone, were still around us as we enjoyed the season together. When our slower-paced celebration centered on Christ’s birth, and family closeness. Building a putz house or church with loved ones might let us recapture just a bit of that old-fashioned Christmas spirit.

Interview with the Author

If a reader were to ask you what author you were like, what would you answer?

I think I write most like the humorous cozy authors. Many readers compare the dry, character-driven humor of my imperfect main character Mabel, to Agatha Raisin, created by the late British author MC Beaton (pen name for Marion Chesney). I also enjoy throwing in some screwball humor and slapstick, like Donna Andrews, who writes the Meg Langlow series of bird-themed cozy mysteries.

What is your favorite book and why?

After a long lifetime of reading, it’s hard for me to pick a favorite book. In childhood, I loved Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. It’s a very old-fashioned (©1916) book about a little orphan girl named Betsy, being raised in the city by her aunt and adult cousin until an illness in the family forces her to be sent off to stay with the dreaded Putney cousins on a farm in Vermont. Betsy has learned to be completely dependent on her nervous guardians and is anxious and fearful about pretty much everything. With the Putneys—an elderly couple and their unmarried daughter—Betsy discovers she is capable of doing more for herself and others than she realized. Along the way, she confronts her fears, makes friends, and acquires a kitten. This is a lovely book that I’ve often re-read and still think about. Many of the lessons Betsy learned still resonate with me.

What is one thing readers would be surprised to learn about you?

I’m often asked what part of the South I come from (because of an accent I never realized I had)! I always reply that I’m a Yankee from the southwestern Pennsylvania mountains, and that accent is “pure Appalachian hillbilly!”

What inspired you to write this book?

I had many specific sources of inspiration for this book, but before I had a single plot idea, I knew I wanted to write a “very Christmasy book,” one that honored the precious gift of Jesus, but also had humor, mystery, and heart.

What is one question you would like readers to ask you? What would be your answer? Why?

“Why do you write?”

Even if I never published a word, I would write for the pure joy of writing. But my only goal for what I’ve written is to give readers an escape from the cares of life. I don’t care about money, awards, or recognition. When a reader tells me my books made her laugh when life was hard, and she really needed that laughter, nothing makes me happier. It warms my heart when someone tells me my books got her through chemotherapy, or sitting at the bedside of a dying loved one. And even if I never write a bestseller, there’s nothing better than the readers who tell me they’ve read my entire series several times over, because they feel at home in Medicine Spring.