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.

Author Interview

How has your life experience helped in your writing journey?

I don’t know how any author can write a book without really living first. My experiences as a lawyer, country girl, dog and cat mama, and aspiring writer really help inspire my main character, Mabel. I also share some of her insecurities (and voracious appetite, even though I don’t dare indulge myself the way she does). There are many specific instances too where my life experiences come out in various ways. In Mabel Gets the Ax, for example, I drew on the period when my husband was Director for the local historical society. In Mabel Goes to the Dogs, I fell back on my time volunteering with canine search-and-rescue, serving as a subject for training the dogs to find lost persons.

What is the funniest thing to happen in the process of writing one of your books?

The funniest thing that happens to me on a daily basis is the “assistance” I receive from my cat and three dogs. Cirrus the cat wants nothing more than to wander across my laptop, typing her own content. My tiny dog Louie insists on trying to occupy my lap, as if to say, “You already have a laptop—his name is me!” Multiple times a day, his sister Betty Sue tries to alert me to danger—turkeys or deer in the driveway, or delivery people breaching the perimeter. My old cattle dog Blue concentrates on lying as close to me as possible, blocking my path so that I’m sure to trip over him on my way to the bathroom or to go reheat my tea. I don’t know what I’d do without them!

Where do you find your greatest inspiration?

My inspiration comes from within me (my experiences, memories, etc.), from around me (walking in nature, things I read or hear, things happening to other people around me), and ultimately, from beyond me. I truly believe God gives me ideas I’d never have gotten on my own, just when I need them the most.

Who is your favorite author? Why?

I can’t say I have one favorite author, but I do especially love the classic mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers, a gifted British writer from the time of Agatha Christie. Sayers created the wonderful Lord Peter Wimsey, who is witty, charming, and brilliant. Her mysteries are deftly and intricately plotted, but the characters are my greatest joy. A special aspect of Sayers’ writing is that she was a Christian with a strong interest in theology.

What do you need in your writing space to help you stay focused?

I must always have my notebooks and a big supply of my favorite pens, as well as my laptop and phone (and their chargers), a mug of coffee or tea, highlighters, an occasional snack, and my faithful assistants—Cirrus the cat, and my three dogs, Louie, Betty Sue, and Blue. I should also add that the right mug is everything. It needs to match the season and/or the book I’m writing (such as my UFO mug when I was writing Mabel & the Little Green Men). Sometimes, I also like to add an album of photos from my setting or even a prop for extra pizazz!