The Sense of Place

Just got back from two wonderful weeks on Mt. Desert Island, Maine, a combination of relaxation and work.

The relaxation for me generally meant sleeping in (no dogs needing to be let out and fed), taking walks, swimming in the cove, and eating great food (Fiddlers' Green!). My husband added hiking and kayaking to that agenda.

The work was the result of the fact that MDI is the setting for much of the action in The Sense of Reckoning so I spent some time doing some final research before sending the manuscript off to my editor, Jen Blood. Many thanks to Virginia Mellen and Sean Cox of the MDI Historical Society—Virginia has been helping me since last year to research mid-twentieth-century MDI and Sean read through the manuscript to make sure I got the details right of the Fire of 1947 that burned much of Bar Harbor. (Click here for more information about the fire.)

We also got a behind-the-scenes tour of The Turrets at the College of the Atlantic. I already have a Chester County-based plot in mind for Ann Kinnear Book 3, but I may be exploring The Turrets in Book 4—that looks like a place that has a lot of good ghost stories to tell!

And we visited the lovely and gracious Claremont Hotel, which serves as the basis for the Lynam's Point Hotel in Reckoning—should I ever need to hide a body at The Claremont, I know just the place.