The Sleuth: The Original Nancy Drew Fanzine

When I was a girl, I used to hope and pray that on Christmas morning, I'd find a Nancy Drew book under our Christmas tree. Now, I have the next best thing: my Nancy Keene Mysteries are featured in the latest issue of The Sleuth magazine!! Thanks Todd Latoski and Linda Burns for this great opportunity to reach other Nancy Drew fans and I hope people enjoy my humorous PG-rated cozy mysteries that take place in some of my favorite cities in the world. 

Here's a link to The Sleuth:

http://www.ndsleuths.com/thesleuth

Louise Hathaway (me) is features in the series spotlight on page 44 

Here's a link to The Sleuth:

http://www.ndsleuths.com/thesleuth

#NancyDrew #TheSleuth

Books About Great Fathers

Happy Father's Day to all of the great Dads out there.  I was very lucky: I had a wonderful father and like to include him in my stories; especially the "Nancy Keene" stories that I wrote as an homage to the wonderful Nancy Drew Mysteries I grew up reading.  Mr. Drew was every girl's ideal Dad: definitely not a "helicopter parent", he gave Nancy all sorts of freedom.  All she had to do all day was drive her "roadster" around and solve mysteries with no pestering Mom telling her to clean up her room.  How lucky could a girl be?!

In the first Nancy Keene Mystery I wrote, "The Buried Treasure on Route 66", her Dad is having trouble accepting the fact that his precious Nancy has just turned 18, has a boyfriend, and is going away to college.  How will he handle the empty nest?  And what lessons will he learn when he joins Nancy and her boyfriend on a road trip?  This book is rated PG.

My Nancy and her Dad are big fans of "A Prairie Home Companion" and she talks him into going on a pilgrimage with her in search of the towns that inspired Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon.  Her Dad wants to go on a Bob Dylan pilgrimage while they are in Minnesota, but Nancy has other plans when a bachelor farmer goes missing.  This book is called, "The Missing Bachelor Farmer."  This book is rated G.

I love New Orleans, so I have Nancy going there on vacation with her Dad and her friends. When a docent at Oak Alley Plantation is found dead, Nancy will not rest until she figures out whodunit. They have to leave New Orleans before the murder is solved, but Nancy twists her over-indulgent Dad around her little finger and he allows her to return to the Crescent City to stay with her fun and funky Aunt Audrey in "The Ghost in the Plantation".  This book is rated PG.

My most recent Nancy Keene Mystery is about Nancy, her Dad, and her girlfriend going to London. Nancy has her first serious crush at 16 when she sees that Daniel Craig is staying at the same hotel as they are.  She's a big fan of James Bond and even goes to Harrods to try a find an outfit like one of the Bond Girls to impress him.  When someone steals his BAFTA award out of his hotel room, Nancy is hot on the trail trying to figure out who stole it and why.  This book is called "The Stolen Mask".  This book is rated PG.

All of these books are available at Amazon, iTunes, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo, and Smashwords.  If you subscribe to Scribd, it's free.

Father/Daughter Relationships

Now that Mother's Day is over, it's time to think about your Dads.  I wrote this book after I inherited some Nancy Drew books and reread them as an adult. I was really touched by the close relationship between our favorite teenage sleuth and her Dad; a relationship made even stronger by the death of Nancy's mother.  So I created my own teenage sleuth, Nancy Keene, and wrote this PG-Rated humorous story about her relationship with her Dad, who has been worrying about her ever since started dating and talking about moving away to college.  He doesn't want to let her go and she worries about what he'll be like when she's gone.  How will he handle letting her go?  Find out as Nancy, her father, and boyfriend take a trip on Route 66, visiting several of its landmarks along the way, in search of a missing will.  Not only is “The Buried Treasure on Route 66” a tip of the hat to the Nancy Drew books, it’s also a romance novel about both young love and rekindled old love.

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Who is your audience? Pay Attention, You Writers Out There

A book publisher gave me one of the best pieces of advice I ever was asked, "Who is your audience?" My husband and I had just written a book about a teenager sleuth, modeled after Nancy Drew, but geared towards women babyboomers, not teenagers.  We almost got a book deal based upon a misunderstanding of how we were marketing it.  Our book, "The Ghost in the Plantation," is about a precocious 16 year old who gets involved in trying to track down the murder of a docent at Oak Alley Plantation.  The PG-rated scenes and jokes would never go over well with teenagers.  The opening scene of our book has Nancy and her girlfriends talking about, not Justin Beiber or One Direction, but about Don Draper from Mad Men and Vampire Bill from True Blood--men who women might find attractive, not my teenage nieces.

Our teenage sleuth has a very permissive aunt and father who both give her a lot of freedom as she goes about her search for the killer.  They are the opposite of "helicopter parents" and she gets in all sorts of dangerous situations. My husband and I have our Nancy running through Bourbon Street while being chased by a guy in a hoodie, and dodging into a gay bar, only to be rescued and brought home by The Lady Chablis from "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." Our humor is PG-rated--this is not your Grandmother's Nancy Drew.  We have Nancy trying to bond with her aunt by mixing up Hurricanes and serving them to her and her girlfriend.  Construction workers admire how well Nancy looks in her shorts and ask her aunt, "Who's the little cupcake?" "The Ghost in the Plantation" is a gumbo of a whodunit, not for the fathers of teenage daughters nor for teenage girls.  It's for the ladies--gentlemen, step aside.  We wrote this book with a deep love of the city of New Orleans and all of the wonderful experiences we've had there. I'm grateful to that publisher for teaching me a very valuable marketing lesson:  who is your audience?  Never forget to make that foremost in your mind when marketing your books--you writers out there.  The last thing we want is for our readers to be disappointed after they've bought our book, hoping for something entirely different.

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