Ashes to Ashes
by Lillian Stewart Carl

Historian Rebecca Reid comes to a replica castle in Ohio to catalog a collection of priceless Scottish artifacts. She's not happy to discover that her working partner, Michael Campbell, is a young Scot with an attitude.

Soon she finds herself contending not only with him but with ghoulies and ghosties and a long legged beast-a cat who knows too much about the castle's secrets.

Someone wants Rebecca out of the way before she finds uncovers those secrets for herself. But who is it? The dismal housekeeper, the punk teen, the easy-going sheriff, the handsome estate attorney- or even the sometimes charming Campbell, who plays the bagpipes to die for.

Ashes to Ashes combines traditional Gothic mystery with contemporary romance, and accents it with a Scottish lilt.

Other Books by Lillian Stewart Carl

The Secret Portrait
A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron Mystery

Murder by Magic
Twenty Tales of Crime and the Supernatural

Lucifer's Crown

Time Enough to Die

Ashes to Ashes

Shadows in Scarlet

Memory and Desire

Lillian Stewart Carl's Bio

After growing up in Missouri and Ohio and spending many years in North Texas, I've developed a passion for mountains and oceans, particularly the ones in Scotland, which is heaven's front porch and which I visit as often as possible. In my youth I was lucky enough to travel to other parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, and Japan.

While I've worked a few "real" jobs, as an engineering aide, a librarian, a newspaper columnist, and a college history teacher, all along I was writing stories and critiques first for my desk drawer and then for fan magazines. My first professional fiction was published in the Amazons II anthology in 1982.

My husband is a retired geophysicist. Our two adult sons are in advertising and computers respectively. We have a cat, a thirteen-pound tabby, and an assortment of houseplants I view as rentals -- how long can I keep them before they die? Our home is a tract house cleverly disguised as a book-lined cloister.

My hobbies (or what I do when I'm trying to avoid working) include needlepoint and knitting, bread-baking, music (particularly Celtic folk/rock), gardening, public television, walking and yoga, and crossword puzzles.

Unlike more methodical writers, I never sat up one day and said, "I'm going to start writing now". I've always written, just as I've always read. Just as I've always breathed, for that matter. And I've been aided and abetted since the age of twelve by my best friend, science fiction writer Lois McMaster Bujold.

If I could be anything other than a writer (as if!) I'd probably be a librarian.

Over the years I've been inventing my own genre, mystery/romance with supernatural/ historical/ mythological underpinnings. And I've become a firm believer in the odd synchronies of the writing life. Soon after finishing Ashes to Ashes, for example, which is about a woman from Missouri named Rebecca working in a replica of a Scottish castle, I visited the real castle and discovered the tour guide was a woman from Oklahoma named Rebecca.

I am a member or former member of SFWA, MWA, Sisters in Crime, Novelists, Inc., and The Author's Guild.

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