profile | Novel Escapism

Born: Los Angeles, California

Kate Carlisle began writing after a twenty plus year career as an Associate Director for various television game and variety shows. She worked as a Dating Game chaperone and performed on The Gong Show. After deciding to get out of show biz, Carlisle went to law school and during her first year she started writing fiction as a way to escape studying. She soon dropped out of law school and began taking writing classes. The rest, as they say, is history.

Carlisle’s Bibliophile Mystery Series is currently seven novels plus one short story. The series centers on heroine Brooklyn Wainwright who is a rare book expert and bookbinder living in San Francisco. Brooklyn has a knack for solving mysteries in the books she restores and a proclivity for discovering dead bodies. I happen to love Brooklyn as a character because of her wit and passion for good books and good food.

In addition to writing mystery and crime novels, Carlisle is also a romance author. She has written five steamy romance novels. Carlisle is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers and Romance Writers of America. She lives in Southern California with her husband.

Bibliography:

Bibliophile Mystery Series

Homicide in Hardcover (2009)

If Books Could Kill (2009)

The Lies That Bind (2010)

Murder Under Cover (2011)

Pages of Sin Novella (2012)

One Book in the Grave (2012)

Peril in Paperback (2012)

A Cookbook Conspiracy (2013)

Romance Novels

The Millionaire Meets His Match (2010)

Sweet Surrender, Baby Surprise (2010)

How to Seduce a Billionaire (2011)

An Innocent in Paradise (2011)

She’s Having the Boss’s Baby (2013)

Born: January 11, 1961 in London, England

Website: http://www.jasperfforde.com/

Jasper Fforde began his writing career working on movies such as “Goldeneye,” “The Mask of Zorro,” and “Entrapment.” After nineteen years in the film industry, Fforde decided to write his own stories. Ten years and 76 rejection letters later, Fforde’s first novel, “The Eyre Affair” was published and his heroine, literary detective Thursday Next was born.

Fforde’s Thursday Next series consists of seven books and was a hit in both the U.K. and U.S. Thursday Next’s novels are set in an alternative world where Wales is a socialist republic and pets are clones of extinct animals. Thursday’s job as a literary detective includes rescuing characters who have been kidnapped from their books and mending plot holes.

Fforde has also started three other series. The Nursery Crimes books feature Jack Spratt solving Humpty Dumpty’s murder and Goldilocks’ disappearance. In 2010, Fforde released “Shades of Grey,” which is set in a color-blind, post-apolcalyptic world where your worth is determined by which color you can see. His latest series is a for the young adult genre. “The Last Dragonslayer” was released in the United States last year and it’s sequel “The Song of the Quarkbeast” will arrive later on this year.

Fforde is known for his comedic absurdity and rich worlds. My favorite example of his oddity is in his Thursday Next novels. As a literary detective Thursday can jump in and out of books and while she is inside a book she communicates with her colleagues via the footnoter phone where they talk in the footnotes.

Bibliography:

Thursday Next

The Eyre Affair (2001)

Lost in a Good Book (2002)

The Well of Lost Plots (2003)

Something Rotten (2004)

First Among Sequels (2007)

One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011)

The Woman Who Died A Lot (2012)

Nursery Crime

The Big Over Easy (2005)

The Fourth Bear (2006)