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| Downtown Westfield, NJ |
USA Today bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and non-fiction under her own name and her Emma Carlyle pen name. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” Learn more about Lois and her books at her website.
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| Downtown Westfield, NJ |
Anastasia’s
Westfield
The Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series is set
in Westfield, an actual New Jersey town. I chose a real town, rather than
making up a fictitious one, because I’ve learned that many readers enjoy being
able to make a connection between the settings in books and places they know.
If you’ve never been to New Jersey, you might have an
extremely negative and erroneous image of The Garden State, associating it more
with bumper-to-bumper traffic, industrial waste, crime-ridden cities, and
obnoxious reality TV stars. Yes, unfortunately we do have our share of those.
However, we also have beautiful rolling hills, mountains, beaches and the most
spectacular skyline in the world right outside our windows (for those of us
lucky enough to live on the western side of the Hudson River.)
We also have some very lovely, historical small towns
that date back to pre-Colonial times. Many have appeared in TV shows and movies
over the years. One such town is Westfield, home to Anastasia (and her author.)
Do you remember the NBC television series “Ed” from a few years ago? Most of
the exterior scenes were filmed in Westfield, including the opening sequence. “The
Perfect Holiday,” starring Queen Latifah, was also filmed in Westfield, and we
even had a Japanese romantic comedy shot in town.
Westfield was also the home of Charles Addams,
creator of the Addams Family cartoons,
which appeared in The New Yorker and were the basis for the television show of the
1960s and the subsequent movie and Broadway musical. Addams was inspired to
create his iconic cartoons by the Westfield Victorian home of his childhood.
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| Downtown Westfield, NJ |
Westfield was settled in 1720. It covers an area of
approximately 6-3/4 square miles and has a population of just over 30,000
residents, many of whom commute into New York each day by bus or on the train
that divides the town in half.
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| Westfield, NJ police station viewed from Mindowaskin Park |
Last year Westfield was named the 30th
safest place to live in the United States, but that was before A Stitch to Die For, the newest Anastasia
Pollack Crafting Mystery. Luckily, such surveys don’t include murders that are the
product of this author’s imagination.
A Stitch to Die For
An
Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, Book 5
The adventures of reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia
Pollack continue in A Stitch to Die For,
the 5th book in the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series by USA Today bestselling author Lois
Winston.
Ever since her husband died and left her in debt
equal to the gross national product of Uzbekistan, magazine crafts editor and
reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack has stumbled across one dead body
after another—but always in work-related settings. When a killer targets the
elderly nasty neighbor who lives across the street from her, murder strikes too
close to home. Couple that with a series of unsettling events days before
Halloween, and Anastasia begins to wonder if someone is sending her a deadly
message.
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