Sleuthing in Seattle!

Me and my shadow

Greetings from Seattle!

I'm out here this week taking TOKYO HEIST on the road, as well as tracking down some great bookstores and local mystery reads.

And look what I stumbled across! Seattle Mystery Bookshop, on 1st and Cherry: a mystery-lover's delight!

Actually, I was graciously invited here by the bookstore owner, JB (and yes, the initials are his name; so mysterious and cool!). TOKYO HEIST is one of the staff picks in their kids section, and they had a healthy stack of them for me to sign.

This store has warrens of shelves bursting with mysteries, their own crime scene tape (I love that), and a cool chalk outline of a human form splayed out on the ground. (Don't ask).

Blogging in the hot seat!

I got to meet JB in person, as well as booksellers Adele and Amber. Amber is the YA reader for the store, and she wrote a glowing review of TOKYO HEIST a few months ago.You will not find a person on earth who knows kids mysteries as well as Amber. I could have hung out all day talking about mysteries with her and my Penguin sales rep, learning more about new and forthcoming mystery titles. She has her finger on the pulse!

I almost did hang out all day because after I signed their stock, and then signed their big white book of visiting authors (wow!), I got dragged invited over to their computer and ordered at gunpoint politely asked to blog on the fly. Yeah, no pressure, right? Gulp. Anyway, you can read what I wrote for their bookstore blog right here!

I left this store sweating from the spontaneous blogging, but totally energized from my visit. Mystery for teens and tweens is thriving, folks. This store has a swelling bookshelf full of new titles (see right). Teens wandered into the store to browse.

Check them out online for great reviews, book lists, and breaking news. Oh . . and did you know you can avoid big online retailers, support a great local mystery bookstore, and buy online from this place? They make it very easy!

Three cheers for Seattle Mystery Bookshop! And three cheers for middle grade and young adult mystery!

(I know, that's six cheers total, lots of cheering. Now go drink some water).

Let me remind you that our ARC giveaway of Nikki Loftin's THE SINISTER SWEETNESS OF SPLENDID ACADEMY (a great middle grade mystery debut) is on for three more days. If you missed our Interrogation Room interview with Nikki earlier this week, you can find it here, as well as the Rafflecopter thingie for the giveaway. I will sign off with a mystery photo to mull over, taken on location here in Seattle. Can you guess what it is?

It's the Mickey Mouse Pancake Special, complete with old bacon and swollen blueberries, served up at a sleazy bar near our hotel, which happens to serve some semblance of breakfast. The biggest mystery I'm grappling with now is why I actually fed this to my child!