Mystery author writes stories with dash of humor
Leslie Budewitz won the 2013 Malace Agatha Award Winner. (Photo courtesy Deborah Lacy)
Heat up a sizzling mystery, stir in a couple of strong female characters, add a liberal dash of humor and you have all the ingredients of a Leslie Budewitz novel.
Montana author Budewitz creates a fusion of her favorite things — good food, light-hearted mysteries and her love of the Northwest in her two popular book series: the Spice Shop Mysteries, set in Seattle, and the Food Lover’s Village Mysteries, set in northwest Montana.
Budewitz is also a lawyer. She’s the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. In 2011, her guide for writers, “Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately about Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure,” won the Agatha Award for Nonfiction and two years later in 2013, her first novel in the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, “Death al Dente,” won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel.
“Books are the spice of life,” is what Budewitz says and what she writes when she signs her book “Assault & Pepper.”
She offers some advice for writers, “if you want to write, whether your goal is a novel, a short story, or nonfiction — read, read, read, write, revise, repeat.”
Budewitz’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, and elsewhere, and recognized in Best American Mystery Stories of 2009. She served as 2015-16 president of Sisters in Crime, and is currently the Montana representative to the board of the Rocky Mountain chapter of Mystery Writers of America. If it wasn’t already apparent, Budewitz keeps up with regular installments of her blog, she is a panelist and moderator of all the major mystery conventions, taught at various writer’s conferences such as the Colorado Gold conference in Denver, the Flathead River Writers Conference and the Writers’ Police Academy, and also makes herself available to speak or Skype for a discussion of any local book clubs.
A native Montanan, she lives outside Bigfork, at the foot of the Swan Mountains, with her husband, a musician and doctor of natural medicine, and their gray tuxedo cat, an avid birdwatcher.
Her next book, “As the Christmas Cookie Crumbles” comes out June 8 and she will hold a party at the Bigfork Art & Cultural Center from 4-6 p.m. on Saturday, June 9 to release the book.
Works by Budewitz are in the Montana section of the Whitefish Community Library. To learn more about other programs or events at the WCL, visit www.whitefishlibrary.org or like WCL on Facebook.