{Guest Post} Camille Minichino

Thanks for hosting me today, in all my personas: Camille Minichino, Margaret Grace, Ada Madison, and Jean Flowers.

With four pen names and as many mystery series, I'm always looking for ways to bring things together, such as having all four protagonists meet for lunch! Gloria Lamerino, retired physicist (the Periodic Table Mysteries) enjoys meeting miniaturist Gerry Porter (the Miniature Mysteries), math teacher Ada Madison (the Professor Sophie Knowles Mysteries) and Cassie Miller (the Postmistress Mysteries) in several short pieces and blog postings.

Other meetings of the protagonists come about when I build the series settings in miniature. I've included a photos of one example.

Here, I've turned a bookcase into a funeral home with an apartment on the top floor. It's Gloria's residence in 8 novels and 2 short stories in the Periodic Table Mysteries.

On the lower floor is the embalming room—it's not easy to find embalming tables, trocars, or mortician's pins in miniatures catalogs, so I had to do some improvising. The laundry room is on that level, too (on the right in the photo). No wonder Gloria's laundry is backed up—she's afraid to go down there alone, or after dark. I felt this scene needed some comic relief, so I added the ruby slippers under the embalming table. See what you think.

The next floor up holds the parlor, where the mortuary's clients are laid out for viewing. The casket started life as a box of paperclips. How embarrassing—while taking this photo, I noticed that my dollhouse floor needs vacuuming as much as my real life living-room floor!

Gloria's apartment is on the third floor. It also needs dusting and vacuuming! (The scale is standard dollhouse scale: 1 inch = 1 foot.)

The latest in this series is "The Neon Ornaments," included in the exciting new anthology Happy Homicides: Thirteen Cozy Holiday Mysteries, available online on October 15.

For more on my series and a gallery of miniatures, visit http://www.minichino.com