About Elaine

It’s midnight on a moonless night in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From my office window I see boats with no running lights slipping down the Intracoastal Waterway. What illegal cargo are they carrying: drugs, guns, people? I’ve used them all in my Dead-End Job mysteries.

Across a canal, my window overlooks a million-dollar condo where mysterious neighbors hold parties in the dead of night. Everyone dresses in black evening clothes. They became the inspiration for my short story, “Vampire Hours.”

South Florida is the setting for my Dead-End Job mysteries and many short stories. It’s the inspiration that feeds my dark side.

My roots are in the Midwest, where I set my Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper series. St. Louis is very different from Fort Lauderdale. Its people have pasts, families and neighborhoods. If someone new moves into a community, a St. Louisan can make a few calls and find out where the newcomer went to school, if he has a drinking problem, if she’s divorced, and where the person works. It’s a big small town.

Not so in South Florida, where one of my snowbird neighbors turned out to be a drug dealer. I should have known that a pilot didn’t make enough money to own a Porsche, a Harley, a state-of-the-art sound system and a beachside condo unless he was flying in a very special cargo. Florida’s rootlessness and St. Louis’s structured life are important facets of my series.

These two locations drive my mysteries and occasional fictional forays into other worlds. My vampire short stories take place in Fort Lauderdale. My paranormal story, “The Bedroom Door,” is set in St. Louis and features a woman based on my Grandmother Vierling, who swore she had second sight.

Josie Marcus is a St. Louis woman. She’s connected to her community, the suburb of Maplewood. She has a mother, a daughter, and a job, where she fights for better treatment for the mythical Mrs. Minivan, the American shopper.

“Death on a Platter” is my seventh Josie Marcus mystery. The eleventh Dead-End Job mystery, “Final Sail,” will be out May 1, 2012. In a good series – and I hope mine fit that description – the characters grow and change.

Josie, a single mother with an eleven-year-old daughter, has a talent for friendship as well as solving mysteries. She tries to help her daughter develop into an independent young woman. She fights her own tendency to fall in love with the wrong men. As a member of the sandwich generation, Josie has to care for her mother as well as her daughter.

Helen Hawthorne is a St. Louis woman on the run in South Florida. After nine Dead-End Jobs, she changed the course of her life. Helen and I both worked those same awful jobs from salesclerk to telemarketer. In her tenth adventure, Helen and Phil, her new husband, open a private eye agency called Coronado Investigations and open new possibilities to keep the series fresh.

 Don’t worry, Dead-End Job fans. Helen is still working those low-paying jobs, only now she goes undercover as part of her private eye investigation.  I’m going to classes at private investigators conferences and asking private eyes I know for their help. I also took the Death Investigators course at St. Louis University to give the series authenticity.

I promise you that some things will not change. Both series will still be as entertaining as I can make them.

— Elaine Viets

 Solving Some Dead-End Job Mysteries

Meet Helen and Phil's cat, Thumbs

Librarian Anne Watts and Sarah Watts Casinger kindly loaned me Thumbs for this series.

This is Helen's new car, The Igloo

Helen is now driving a PT Cruiser.

Stuart Little is the new member of the Marcus family

Meet Stuart Little, adopted by Josie's Mom, Jane. In real life, Stuart Little belongs to Bill Lichtenberger of Palm City, Florida, who kindly donated money to the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast to have see Stuart's name in print.

Here's Harry, Amelia's cat

When he's not with Amelia, he's Elaine Viets' cat and helps her write these novels.