How does Schmitt keep her busy career going? I think she keeps a list of left-handed readers in Vermont,” he jokes. “Not only does Gerry write good books, she does an amazing amount of promotional work. Like others in Schmitt’s life, he’s awed by her work ethic. Schmitt’s editor at Berkley Prime Crime, Tom Colgan, says it’s rare for an author to write three series, much less five. “I learned the architecture of this genre by outlining and deconstructing every book written by John Sandford.” (Sandford is the pen name of John Camp, who began writing his Lucas Davenport crime series in Minnesota.) “This is a departure for me, but it’s the kind of complex book I’ve always wanted to write,” Schmitt says of the Tangler series. The protagonist, Afton Tangler, is a single mom, rock climber and liaison officer for the Minneapolis Police Department. The other is a hard-edged thriller set in the Twin Cities that Schmitt will write under her own name.

The first is a “thrillzy” set at the fictional Hummingbird Inn in Carmel, Calif., an area where Schmitt and her husband have rented beach homes for 20 years. Schmitt lives in Plymouth with her husband, Robert Poor, who taught art history at the University of Minnesota for 45 years. When Theo walks through Charleston, I want readers to feel the heat and humidity, sense the rain dripping off live oaks, hear the pounding of the Atlantic.”

“I learned to use ‘picture words’ that make the reader see it, hear it, smell it. “Working 30 years in advertising was perfect training for writing murder mysteries,” Schmitt says. Carmela Bertrand is proprietor of Memory Mine scrapbooking shop in New Orleans, and Suzanne, Petra and Toni own the Cackleberry Club cafe in a small Midwestern town. Schmitt’s sleuths are business women: Theodosia Browning owns the Indigo Tea Shop in Charleston, S.C. Her books in three series together have sold more than a million copies.

“I call my books ‘thrillzys’ because they’re a cross between a cozy and a thriller,” said Schmitt, who writes as Laura Childs. Now she puts sizzle in her bestselling mysteries known as “cozies,” in which the murder happens off-stage and is solved by an amateur sleuth. Gerry Schmitt learned that slogan as a junior advertising writer at Target Corp.

Death by Darjeeling by Laura Childs