About the Book

Book: Mabel Goes to the Dogs Author: Susan Kimmel Wright Genre: Cozy Mystery Release date: June 5, 2022

When Mabel finds herself sharing a thicket with a dead body while volunteering with canine search-and-rescue, her life has clearly once again gone to the dogs! After losing her job at age forty-nine, Mabel thought she’d turned things around. Now, she’s doing good by volunteering and, surely, she’ll soon be a successful author, writing about her experiences. After solving two notorious, decades-old cold cases while serving as a historical society volunteer, she’s already getting invitations to appear on TV. Her new assignment couldn’t be simpler. All she has to do is hide in the woods and let Millie the search dog practice finding her. But to her horror, Millie finds more than Mabel–there’s a dead body hiding in the same patch of brush. To make matters worse, Mabel’s maybe-boyfriend, suspended PI John Bigelow, has a dark history with the victim. While struggling with maid-of-honor duties for best friend Lisa, a string of disasters created by handyman Acey, and a disagreeable new neighbor, can Mabel solve another murder in time to save John’s detective license–if not his neck?

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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

I got stuck. When I was outlining my story for Mabel Goes to the Dogs, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. This isn’t unusual for me, or, I’m sure, many other authors. When it happens, I have to go search for inspiration—or at least, step away from my project for a bit and do something else till a fresh idea lands in my brain. Luckily, I soon stumbled upon the Empty Frames podcast, which explored what was, at that time at least, the single largest property theft in the world—the 1990 art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Thieves impersonating police subdued the guards and over the course of the next eighty-one minutes methodically removed thirteen pieces of art then estimated at $200 million. That dollar valuation quickly escalated to between $500-600 million. The stolen artwork including paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet, was never recovered and remains the highest-value museum robbery in history. The museum has offered a $10 million reward and never stopped trying to find its missing art. Thirty-four years later, empty picture frames still occupy the walls where the irreplaceable, stolen paintings once hung. The story was engrossing, and I soon started down a rabbit hole, learning more about art theft and art-theft detectives, such as Charley Hill, the subject of the book The Rescue Artist. Sadly, it’s been estimated that nine out of ten stolen artworks will never be recovered. But Hill defied the odds in managing to retrieve Edvard Munch’s famous work, The Scream, brazenly stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway on the eve of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. The Rescue Artist tells the story of the theft, as well as Hill’s wild quest to locate and retrieve The Scream. After I resurfaced from my own odyssey through Empty Frames and The Rescue Artist, I felt re-energized and ready to write again. Every time I write a book, I learn new things, which I like to share with my readers. I always hope they’ll find them as fascinating as I do!

Interview with the Author

1. Do you read books in this genre? If so, who do you like to read? I love reading cozies—they’re my favorite bedtime reading! Currently, I’m enjoying A Very Woodsy Murder by Ellen Byron. I also love the Key West Food Critic books by Lucy Burdette, Blue Ridge Library Mysteries by Victoria Gilbert, VM Burns Dog Club series, Vivien Chien’s Noodle Shop Mysteries, and so many others.

2. What helps you to write? Do you eat snacks, listen to music? I always have tea or coffee in a themed mug (either seasonal or related in some way to my current work-in-progress, like the flying saucer mug I bought for writing Mabel & the Little Green Men). Sometimes, I also gather props related to my book. I do enjoy snacks, but I try to use them as a reward for hitting my word count (I can’t eat too much while I’m actually writing, because then I’m thinking about the food instead of my work, and I tend to make the keys greasy and get Doritos dust inside my laptop, which is embarrassing to explain to the computer tech!).

3. If you could travel back in time, what time period would you go to? This is so tough—I’m torn between visiting the 1930s-1940s because of my personal interest in the period when my parents were young, and maybe meet my great-grandparents, or going back to the 1950s and ‘60s, so I can see my parents and grandparents, and my late cousin again…

4. What is your favorite hymn and why? Another very tough choice, but one of my favorites is A Mighty Fortress.

5. Share with me a few of your favorite things.

Oh, goodness! Well, here are a few. I love nature…I lost twenty minutes yesterday morning, watching baby gray squirrels playing outside the hollow in the old buckeye tree outside our bathroom window, while their parents raced back and forth across the driveway (apparently relocating their nest to the woods over there). I love rain and fog and mist beyond all reason—I was the only member of my family walking the beach in the rain to visit an old lifesaving station in Massachusetts years ago. I love Stravinsky and the old Mississippi Delta blues. Fall is my favorite season, and I much prefer jeans and flannel and sweatshirts to summer clothes.