Ashes to Ashes
by Lillian Stewart Carl

Historian Rebecca Reid comes from Missouri to a replica of a Scottish castle located outside a small town in Ohio. She's cataloging a collection of historical artifacts, among them, suppposedly, a scandalous letter written by Mary, Queen of Scots. But her co-worker, Scottish historian Michael Campbell, has his own plans. And the ghosts of the past, not to mention a very contemporary antagonist, wants them both gone.

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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