Dear Burning Questions,

Recently I started reading Karen Robards and I found out after I read Vanished that there is another book that features the same people. I have asked around and nobody knows. I'm hoping you can help me.

Maggie Roso
Dewitt, Michigan

Since we didn't know the answer to your question, we checked with Karen Robards, who did. "The short answer is Beachcomber. The longer answer is that it features (in a much larger role) only one of the characters from Vanished, FBI Special Agent Gary Freeman. The question of which character in Vanished first appeared in one of my earlier books was asked on my website, as part of a contest, and may have given rise to fan speculation that Sarah Mason or Jake Hogan, the main characters, had appeared in an earlier book, which they haven't."

Robards says she has an idea for a series starring Sarah and Jake, "but there is nothing official in the works yet." Her next book is a stand-alone thriller, Guilty, due out in April. Robards describes the new book as "the story of a young prosecutor whose past comes back to bite her. It was an exciting book to write, and I hope it will be equally exciting to read."

DEAD RIGHT

Dear Burning Questions,

When can we expect another mystery from Robin Paige? It's been about a year since the last installment.

Joan Gutermuth
Troy, Ohio

Robin Paige no longer exists—at least, not as you might think. Paige is the penname for the husband and wife writing duo of Bill Albert and Susan Wittig Albert. Though Paige's 12-book Edwardian mystery series concluded last year with Death on the Lizard, you might be familiar with Susan's other work: the China Bayles herbal mysteries and the Beatrix Potter mysteries. Husband Bill has done writing of another kind—for computer programs—and, as a pair, they co-authored a couple of Hardy Boys books in the late 1980s.

"We probably won't go back to Robin Paige," Susan tells BQ. "It was great fun and we loved learning about the period, but life moves on."

If you're a Robin Paige fan, you'll likely be a Susan Wittig Albert fan as well. Spanish Dagger, the latest episode in the China Bayles series, was released in April. The fourth book in the Beatrix Potter series is The Tale of Hawthorn House, published in September.

NOT SO PLAIN JANE

Dear Burning Questions,

I've finished reading the nine Jane Austen Mysteries by Stephanie Barron, and was wondering if she has any more in the works? Loved all of them—especially since they really do sound like Jane Austen. Barron has it right!

Pat Dossett
Spotsylvania, Virginia

Jane Austen mania is raging, with the release of the movies Becoming Jane and The Jane Austen Book Club, not to mention PBS's Austen extravaganza coming up in January (when Masterpiece Theatre will begin airing adaptations of all six of her novels). But New England author Stephanie Barron has been writing books that give the beloved author a second role as an amateur detective since 1996. Austen, she says, "understood the power of motivation and the essence of the human heart. She delighted in the absurd, punctured the ridiculous, and demurred for no man. She was a heroine to die for."

Barron has a new mystery coming from Bantam in February—but it's not about Jane. She tells BQ, "I am hoping to continue the Jane series without question, but took the opportunity this past year to write a stand-alone historical suspense novel entitled A Flaw in the Blood. Set on the night of Prince Albert's death in 1861, it deals with Queen Victoria's childhood, her son Leopold, and the emerging science of medicine at the time. I hope Jane readers as well as others will find it of interest."

Book club talks send sales skyward

John Shors is a happily busy man. When his first novel, Beneath a Marble Sky, was published in paperback in 2006, he included a letter inviting book clubs to e-mail him (shors@aol.com) and arrange a personal chat. The letter generated publicity (in Newsweek and on the "CBS Evening News") and led to almost nightly talks with book clubs. Soon after, sales of Beneath a Marble Sky—which tells the story behind the creation of the Taj Mahal—took off.

"Right now," says Shors, "Beneath a Marble Sky is in something like its 10th printing, the film rights have been sold to Hollywood, and it's being published in 15 languages. For a first-time novelist, these are wonderful happenings, and I believe that all of them are mainly the result of book clubs talking up my novel."

Shors has made more than 100 in-person book club appearances in and around Denver and Boulder, Colorado, where he lives. He has also traveled to New York, Iowa and Florida. But, he says, 90 percent of his book club interactions occur by phone—he has counted about 1,000 speakerphone appearances to date. He has talked to book clubs all over the U.S. and in Hawaii, Canada, France and Zambia. "It's really become a somewhat international program," he says. "My thought was that if readers were going to support me by buying Beneath a Marble Sky, [then] it was important that I try and support them back. And I believe I've done that."

Though many publishing companies and authors now offer opportunties for authors and reading groups to connect, Shors says, "As far as I know, no one has done anything approaching the scale that I have. Because of the success of my program, I've had many authors ask me how to set up similar programs, and I've been happy to help. I think there is a huge need for this type of author/reader interaction."

Shors' next novel, a World War II love story tentatively titled The Poet Makers, is due out in September 2008. Because of the interest in his book club talks, he plans to continue them.