A Deadly Homecoming

Death of a Proper Bostonian is book six in the Old Los Angeles series. It is currently available at the fine retailers below. The paperback runs just under 300 pages and costs $16.99, and the ebook costs $4.99

The Synopsis:

It’s August 1873, and at long last, physician and winemaker Maddie Franklin Wilcox makes the journey home to her beloved native Boston. Her business is to deliver her ward and apprentice, Elena Ortiz, to the local women’s medical school, and that also includes visiting her father, her sister and her family.

But at a dinner with the family of Maddie’s late and very much unlamented (at least, on her part) husband, young John Wilcox, a cousin there to entertain the guests with his nature talk, is shot. Then the next morning, the eldest of the Wilcox brothers is found shot in his bed. Maddie quickly concludes that the shooting of the oh, so charming naturalist was but a distraction for the shooting of her former brother-in-law.

Chased by a corrupt Boston police officer, confronted again and again by the relentless prejudice of the city’s medical practitioners, and in danger of losing her heart to young John Wilcox (who had plenty of reasons to want his cousin dead), Maddie’s happy homecoming becomes a morass of suspicion with someone willing to kill her and the people she loves.

How I wrote Death of a Proper Bostonian

When I first set out to write the memoirs of Maddie Wilcox, I had no intention of writing this book. Maddie was going to abjure marriage and romance, and she would never even think of going home to the father who had spurned her and forced her to marry Albert Wilcox, who became the late and unlamented Albert Wilcox. But characters being the willful beasts they often are, Maddie had other ideas.

I do not know when this part of Maddie’s larger story, and the basic plot of this one, came into my head. It was definitely after Death of the City Marshal came out. My friend and editor, Carol Louise Wilde, when I told her about the potential for romance, pointed out that Maddie had said in that book that she never remarried.

I wrote the very last scene of Proper Bostonian in my head long before I had the basic plot in place. I don’t normally do that, but in this case, it became a specific statement about the choice Maddie makes at the end of the book.