Join us on Thursday, September 5 at 5:30 pm to meet Maine mystery writers Maureen Milliken and Sandra Neily!
Sandra Neily has been a registered Maine guide and whitewater river outfitter. Maureen Milliken spent more than 30 years a journalist for northern New England newspapers, including in Maine. Both are mystery writers whose books focus on the Maine outdoors. They both have strong-willed female protagonists and, in each of their most recent books, horrible things happen to people in the woods. But there is where the similarities end. Find out how Maine and its northern outdoors informs the work of two mystery writers and how they came to their unique approach to mysteries in Maine’s outdoors.
About the Authors
SANDRA NEILY is a Maine native whose varied career has included working as a registered Maine guide as well as a whitewater river outfitter. An avid outdoorswoman who loves woods, waters, and wildlife, Sandra has paddled, fished, hiked, and skied all over the beautiful state of Maine, and enjoys transporting readers into the places she knows so well. Sandra is the winner of the Mystery Writers of America Helen McCloy National award, as well as a finalist for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association’s Rising Star Contest, and a finalist in the Maine Writers and Publishers’ 2018 Maine Literary Awards competition. Sandy lives in the Moosehead Lake region.
Sandra’s upcoming book, “Deadly Turn,” is due out this fall after being delayed by cancer and cancer treatment, and in a way informed it, Sandra says. As her most recent book, “Deadly Trespass,” opens, Cassandra Patton Conover is about to become an outlaw. Searching for her wayward dog in Maine’s dense woods, she finds her best friend Shannon crushed under a tree. Then she finds tracks larger than any animal she knows and a mystery only wild animals can help her solve .
MAUREEN MILLIKEN
is a long-time journalist both in Maine and northern New England, and returned to Maine, where she grew up, in 2011 because she didn’t want to live anywhere else. Her three-book Bernie O’Dea mystery series, which is set in Franklin County, Maine, is based both on her love of journalism and her love of Maine. Maureen lives in central Maine and the book she’s working on now is a stand-alone based in Piscataquis County.
In Maureen’s latest book, “Bad News Travels Fast,” Appalachian Trail thru-hiker Lydia Manzo becomes lost in the woods then is found dead, setting off a chain of events that upsets the fragile peace of Redimere, Maine. While state investigators are sure Lydia killed herself, some in Redimere are sure someone killed her. As newspaper editor Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea tries to sort out the truth, Police Chief Pete Novotny disappears, too.