About the Author

Sarah Graves lives with her husband John, a musician and luthier, and their black Labrador Retriever in a house very much like the one Jacobia Tiptree is remodeling in Eastport, Maine. When she's not writing Jake's adventures, Sarah works with her husband on the house (of course!) and she plays the 5-string banjo (not well, but enthusiastically!)

Sarah has been a writer (and a reader!) all her life." I sent my first story to McCall's magazine when I was seven or so," she says. "It was about a squirrel lost in the woods. The editors sent a form rejection letter, possibly because it was not very realistic for a squirrel to be lost in the woods?" But this began her literary career of getting creatures (especially human creatures) into peril, and letting them figure out how to get themselves out again.

To listen to Sarah Graves on NPR’s “Morning Edition” interview, click here

Send your questions or comments for Sarah Graves to homerepairishomicide@verizon.net

A Word from Sarah

It was a hot summer day in Maine, and I stood knee deep in a dumpster full of demolition refuse. Boards bristling with rusty nails that I just knew were loaded with tetanus germs stuck up at me on all sides, and if they didn’t get me, there were always the blackflies, tiny vampires out for my blood. Swatting and cursing, I rummaged stubbornly through the debris, occasionally coming up with a bit of old sandwich someone had tossed in there...

Yuck. This was not what I’d planned when I moved to a Maine island to fix up an antique house and write mystery novels about it. The dumpster-diving was worthwhile, though, because buried in there were a lot of old discarded wooden shutters. Once they were fixed and painted, they’d look great on our 1823 house.

Or so we thought. But old-house jobs, it turns out, are like mysteries: the endings can surprise you.

Back to the shutters, though... We hauled them home, hosed them down, and got to work on them. Through the autumn and winter we scraped off old green paint, exposing the wood beneath. We fixed or replaced slats, filled old nail holes with putty, and sanded them smooth. Then we hauled them all up to the work room on the third floor, where in the pale, cold February light from the south windows, we primed and painted them.

Meanwhile, work on the new book, A FACE AT THE WINDOW, went forward also. And just like the books’s heroine, Jake Tiptree, when I needed to think I found the tranquil tasks of old-house repair provided the peace of mind I needed. Until...

The end was in sight. Jake raced against time – and against the worst, most implacable enemy of her life, the man who killed her mother – to save an innocent child. Simultaneously I hurried to finish all those shutters – 36 of them! – while people with tall ladders were available to put them up on the house. (I don’t like going up on ladders any more than Jake does.)

And then came disaster: the book’s ending. Wrong...I could feel it in my bones, that a character I’d tried so hard to give a happy, uplifting resolution to wouldn’t cooperate...

But to tell any more would spoil things, wouldn’t it? So let’s just say instead that those rehabilitated shutters did get put up. And after all our work on them they looked awful, like false eyelashes on your sweet old great-grandmother. So we took them down, stored them in the cellar, and called it a learning experience, one of many our old house has provided.

As for the stubborn character from A FACE AT THE WINDOW, he was educational, too. Because just as some shutters turn out to be ugly, sometimes characters are bad to the bone no matter how much I want to save them.

The difference is, when that happens I don’t just store them in the cellar. After all, I’m a mystery writer, so...

I buried him down there.

Peace --

Sarah Graves