It Wasn't Exactly Murder At A Scottish Wedding!

About Traci Hall

From cozy mysteries to seaside romance, USA Today bestselling author Traci Hall writes stories that captivate her readers. As a hybrid author with over sixty published works, Ms. Hall has a favorite tale for everyone.

Mystery lovers, check out her Scottish Shire series, set in the seaside town of Nairn, or the Salem B&B Mystery series, co-written as Traci Wilton. Her latest project is an Irish Castle cozy as Ellie Brannigan. Whether it's her ever-popular By the Sea romances, an Appletree Cove sweet romance, or a fun who-done-it, Traci finds her inspiration in sunny South Florida, living right near the ocean.

Traci wants to hear from you!

Traci@TraciHall.com 

Married instead of murdered is how my own May nuptials played out in 2022. While planning in January, I was writing Murder at a Scottish Wedding…at the same time I was in edit mode for Murder at an Irish Castle (written as Ellie Brannigan) a mystery about a bridalwear designer on Rodeo Drive. It was fun and the many episodes I watched of Say Yes to the Dress were research. Really. 😉

I discovered that the average price in the US for a wedding dress was around the five grand mark, but that wasn’t my experience—I even bought four before deciding that the most casual boho style was The One. And less than a hundred bucks.

Because of Covid we had put the wedding off a year. We kept our beach wedding very low-key, with less than forty guests. Spring storms had been predicted, but that day dawned with blue skies. The airshow didn’t start until around one and we said our vows at noon. All good! We were vaccinated and boosted yet still ended up with Covid. We spent our honeymoon in different rooms of our apartment—not exactly romantic, lol, but the day of the wedding was lovely and all I could ever want.

You know someone really loves you, and you love them, when you are both sick at the same time and don’t kill each other lol. We will be together ten years this May and just might take that honeymoon.

So, tell me what's your favorite style of wedding gown?  

Comment and you just might win an autographed copy of one of my books,

Murder at a Scottish Wedding

Buy link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W8X5K6V

Buy link to Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/murder-at-a-scottish-wedding-traci-hall/1141407207

Buy link to Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/murder-at-a-scottish-wedding

Co-writing the Cozy Mystery by Traci Hall

Celebrating collaboration

Thank you so much for having us as a guest blogger!

I’m Traci, half of the writing duo Traci Wilton. Patrice Wilton is the other half—you can see that we decided not to get too crazy with our pen name J. We wanted our romance readers to be able to find us.

Between us, Patrice and I have well over seventy novels—Patrice is a New York Times bestselling romance author and I especially love her Paradise Cove series. My backlist meandered a bit more to include medieval romance, paranormal romance, and young adult, and there are sixteen novels in my contemporary romance By the Sea series. In the Dog House, a sweet contemporary romance, was released in February.

After so many years of writing romance, we decided to stretch our writing wings and tackle a cozy mystery. In romance there are different levels of heat, as you may know, and Patrice and I are similar in varying the level of sexy depending on the story. Let’s face it, sometimes we aren’t in the mood, lol. With mystery, we didn’t have to be—though in Mrs. Morris and the Ghost, we have two love interests for our widow. We stuck with the traditional format of the handsome detective, because our ghost makes for a very unique third party.

In the first book, Charlene, a native of Chicago, buys a mansion sight unseen in Salem, Mass. to escape the memories of her life with her husband, who was killed in a car accident.  The house, as it turns out, is haunted by Dr. Jack Strathmore. According to her sources, it is believed that he died of natural causes, but he’d actually been murdered and Charlene is the only one who can see him.

We’ve written three of the stories so far and they are so much fun—we’ve completely fallen in love with Jack ourselves.

We get asked quite a bit how it is to write with a partner and it helps that we’ve been critique partners since 2003, before we were published, so we trust each other with our words and our writing styles. We follow a plot, which is key to keeping us both going in the same direction, and alternate chapters to write, and then when we do our next pass, we switch those. If one of us feels strongly about writing a certain scene, we try to be supportive of that because at the end of the process, this is about the story, and not ego. When we disagree, we leave a note in the comment section, and come back to it later. We made a pact that we are friends first and always!

Authors in Salem, Mass doing
research

We co-authored a romance before this to see how we worked together, so we knew we could do it and it was so much fun working with a friend, when writing can be so solitary. I am a plotter, she is a pantser, and we both are very goal-orientated, so we make a great team.

We hope to write many more Mrs. Morris cozy mysteries—I think they are being called the Salem B & B cozy mysteries? As writers, our characters are family, so we just think of them as Charlene and Jack.

Thank you again for letting us visit with you all at Romancing the Genres!

Traci

Learn more about Traci Wilton on their websites:

http://tracihall.com

https://patricewilton.com

You can find Mrs. Morris and the Ghost at these e-retailers.

https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Morris-Ghost-Traci-Wilton-ebook/dp/B07K5ZC4TS

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mrs-morris-and-the-ghost-traci-wilton/1129811220#/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/604324/mrs-morris-and-the-ghost-by-traci-wilton/9781496721518