Interview with author Mary Welk

SUITE:Tell me a little about your books and what genre they are.

MARY: My books could best be called medical cozies. My protagonist, Caroline Rhodes, is an ER nurse in the rural university town of Rhineburg, Illinois. Caroline is a middle-aged widow with three adult children who, in the first book, has moved from Chicago to Rhineburg after the hit-and-run death of her husband. Caroline's son, Martin, is a post-graduate student at Rhineburg's Bruck University. Martin and his wife, Nikki, introduce Caroline to Carl Atwater, a seventy-something-year-old professor of history who becomes Caroline's sleuthing partner in the series. My first book, A DEADLY LITTLE CHRISTMAS, is a holiday mystery that won the Readers' Choice Award for Best First Mystery at the Love is Murder Mystery Conference 2000. It deals with multiple murders on a hospital psychiatric unit. SOMETHING WICKED IN THE AIR continues the adventures of Caroline and Carl and features murder and mayhem at Bruck University's annual Renaissance Faire. In my third book, TO KILL A KING, Caroline travels back to the Chicago suburb of Niles, Illinois, to spend her summer working in the ER of Ascension Medical Center. When a co-worker is found murdered in her apartment, Caroline calls on her friends from Rhineburg for help in exposing the killer. I'm currently working on the fourth book in the series, a Halloween mystery.

SUITE: When did you first start writing? First start publishing?(short stories, books,etc)

MARY: I started writing mystery stories when I was in 7th grade. As a child, I'd been laid up with rheumatic fever, a disease that affected my heart and required a long period of bed rest. Books were my best friends during that time, and when a neighbor gave me the entire Nancy Drew series to read, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I fell in love with mystery novels, and when we started a newspaper in my 7th grade classroom, I wrote a three-part mystery for it. That was my first "published" work. A few years later I started working as a nurses' aide at a local hospital, and I bought a guitar with my first paycheck. Soon after that, I started writing music. I was a member of two local folksinging groups (remember now, this was back in the sixties!), and actually met my future husband as a result of that. Fred and I played guitar for weddings and parties, and after we had children, I started

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