#TRAVEL TO WALES IN AUTHOR JUDY HOGAN'S PENNY WEAVER MYSTERY SERIES

Gower Peninsula near Swansea, Wales

Judy Hogan has published nine Penny Weaver mysteries, seven volumes of poetry, and three prose works. She edits creative writers and offers workshops. Learn more about her at her website and her Postmenopausalzest blog.

The Sands of Gower, my first mystery of the Penny Weaver series, was set on the Gower Peninsula near Swansea in Wales. I myself had visited Gower often from 1981. I could walk to many different historical places along footpaths: to a cave going back to before the ice age, to remnants of Norman castles, to cairns and graves going back 4000+ years. The Vikings had been there and left their names: Swansea (Swann’s Eye), Worm’s Head (dragon head), Archeologists are still learning what happened in earlier centuries on Gower.

I had sprained my ankle on a long walk at the end of the peninsula near Worm’s Head in the summer of 1990, and so couldn’t range around Gower as I had always done. My B&B landlady suggested I write a “murder,” and I began to plot The Sands of Gower then. I wrote it in 1991, but it wasn’t published until 2015.

After my novel Farm Fresh and Fatal (originally published in 2013), I took Penny and Kenneth back to Wales with their dear friends Sammie and Derek. Kenneth and Derek worked together in the Shagbark County Sheriff’s Dept. It occurred to me that I had never seen anyone black on Gower. I loved it there, the sea always close, the greens from all their rain, their beautiful flowers and so many footpaths to explore. But for Sammie and Derek, it meant racial discrimination and xenophobia.

Sammie, always so confident and cheerful, was soon depressed, and then Derek was falsely arrested, and Kenneth, who worked for the CID out of Swansea, could do nothing to help. When I realized that my black characters would suffer in a way Penny had never imagined, I explored that. Who did kill the pushy woman they shared time with in the B&B? Penny eventually gets Sammie to help her solve the crime.

The Sands of Gower

A Penny Weaver Mystery, Book 1

Poet Penny Weaver and her Welsh policeman husband Kenneth Morgan persuade their close friends Sammie and Derek Hargrave to accompany them to their beloved Gower peninsula in Wales, where they spend several months a year away from their home in Riverdell, a central North Carolina village. 

Even before they arrive at Kenneth’s sister Gwyn’s B&B in the village of Pwll du, Sammie panics at how her lively colors and exotic clothing is causing even the proper British to stare at her.  There are few African Americans on Gower. 

The next day the visit turns into a nightmare when an obnoxious woman guest dies after falling down the stairs. Derek, who was the only one awake in the house, is accused of pushing her and soon arrested.  Kenneth normally works for the Swansea CID when he and Penny are in Wales, but his chief is on holiday, and xenophobic substitute Chief Investigator Williams wants to pin the death on the visiting African American cop.  

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