Today I'm joining 

Berkley Mystery

 in celebrating the release of  

DEATH ON THE 

NIGHT OF LOST LIZARDS

Book 3 in the Hungarian Tea House Mysteries

by Julia Buckley

Along with her mother and grandmother, Hana Keller has achieved renown serving tea and cakes with a European flair, but when a local professor is killed, she uncovers a serving of suspects instead…

Hana Keller is getting ready for a lovely holiday season. When she receives a rare tea set as a birthday gift, she decides to host a tea at her apartment for her closest friends. During the cozy get-together, one of Hana's friends gets word that a murderer is on the loose. Hana soon learns that the victim was Sandor Balog, a professor of Hungarian Studies at the local college.

With her growing psychic ability, Hana senses that she is going to be pulled into the investigation of  the professor's death somehow. With her sexy boyfriend Erik on the case, Hana finds the Tea House steeped in suspects. She studies the smiling faces celebrating the season, but the real killer is good at hiding the truth and putting Hana in the hot seat….

Growing Up A Writer

By Julia Buckley

I wanted to write from the time I was very small. When I was a tiny person in Catholic School, I wrote a poem for my mother in the awkward letters of someone just mastering the art of printing, called “God is in my Basket.” It detailed the way that God rode with me on my bicycle on the treacherous route to school, on which we had to pass the public school, and the students who made fun of our uniforms and occasionally called out insults.

As a child I loved everything about writing. Learning letters and words and then practicing them on that grade-school three-lined paper. I loved paper itself, and accumulated any old pads that my parents tossed my way. I had folders of filler paper and a wealth of journals, and I would sit in my room, where my father had made my sister and me a giant desk made out of an old door. I would flip on my lamp, tidy my writing area, and then pull a sheet of paper toward me with a sense of great anticipation. I would then proceed to write some very mundane thing—perhaps a journal entry about what my cat did that day, or what someone had said at school. By the time I was a teenager, I had mastered the art of writing complete dialogues as I remembered them (usually in an attempt to figure out boys and their mysterious motivations). I still love writing dialogue today, but now I have total control over what is said, on both sides of the exchange. Such is the power of the fiction writer.

I loved those “Write-your-own books” that they used to sell at every bookstore, in the days before the Internet. They would have racks and racks of them, and I’d find the one with the best, most imagination-inspiring cover, and purchase it for whatever they cost back then—five or six dollars. Then I would bring it home, dreaming of the book I would write. I loved writing “Chapter One” before a writing attempt, enamored with the trappings of being a novelist if not yet equipped to actually write a novel. I started attempting longer pieces of writing when I was in my early twenties—first a movie script which was quite ridiculous but had some good dialogue, and then a mystery, which had a fairly stupid plot but which helped me understand the discipline it would take to write an entire book. I didn’t try to write a novel again until I had a little baby, and I found myself with some extra time during his two and three hour naps. I pecked away at a mystery that eventually won me my first agent, although the book never sold.

Today I write regularly because I have deadlines, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have them. Writing has always been the dream, and now I can live it, from the comfort of my own chair, from which my imagination takes me wherever I want to go.

Julia Buckley is a Chicago author and teacher. A lover of mysteries herself, she spent her teen years absorbing the wonderful mystery and suspense fiction of the 20th Century, all of which helped to influence what she writes today. Her published series include the Writer's Apprentice mysteries, the Undercover Dish mysteries, the first in the Teddy Thurber series, and the Madeline Mann mysteries. She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime and the Chicago Writer's Association. Her third book in the Hungarian Tea House Mysteries, DEATH ON THE NIGHT OF LOST LIZARDS, is now on sale.

Julia lives with her husband, three cats and a big rambunctious Labrador. She has two grown sons. In her free time she likes to watch Netflix (on which she has discovered the joy of French cinema), tend to the potted plants on her deck, read great books, or take part in one of her two book groups.

Visit Julia at her website, JuliaBuckley.com or her Facebook page, Julia Buckley Mystery Novels, or see her on Twitter @juliabucks. You can also explore her inspirations for Blue Lake on her Pinterest page, or follow her on Instagram at jellenbuckley.

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