Listen here, on our new podcast website m2d2podcast.com, or wherever you get your podcasts!

ABOUT TG Wolff

Like you, I’m not one thing. I’m a writer, an engineer, a wife, and a mother. What is first on the list depends on the day. Beyond the title I claim, I’m a person who loves learning and thoroughly enjoys a good puzzle, is creative and gets bored easily. I hold a BS in Civil Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and an MS in Civil Engineering from Cleveland State University, which gives me absolutely no background in writing, but I do it anyway. Writing mysteries and engineering isn’t as different as you’d think. Both require using logic and process to get from a starting problem to a solution.

Find me at www.tgwolff.com

MEET Elena Taylor

www.ElenaTaylorAuthor.com

Elena Taylor spent several years working in theater as a playwright, director, designer, and educator before turning her storytelling skills to fiction. She writes the Sheriff Bet Rivers mysteries, featuring a female sheriff filling her late father’s rather big shoes in her small, mountain town. She also writes the quirky Eddie Shoes mysteries under the name Elena Hartwell. Elena is a senior editor with Allegory Editing, a boutique editing house, where she works one-on-one with writers to shape and polish manuscripts.  Elena’s favorite place to be is at Paradise, the property she and her hubby own south of Spokane, Washington. 

A note from the author: A Cold, Cold, World is available now in hardback, audio, and ebook. Paperback release is April 2025

A Cold, Cold World is promoted by Partners In Crime Tours, who represents a network of 300+ bloggers offering tailor-made virtual book tours and marketing options for crime, mystery and thriller writers from around the world. Founded in 2011, PICT offers services for well-established and best-selling authors, as well as those just starting out with their careers. PICT prides itself on its tailored packages for authors, with a personal touch from the tour coordinators. For more information, check out their website partnersincrimetours.com

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It’s 1895 and Payne McPherson has arrived at her professor’s home for a study session to find her hanging from her French doors. She turns to Cleveland police detective Cian Kelly for help and appoints herself his assistant. Their investigation takes a sinister twist when they find the remnants of a hangman game her professor lost. And she wasn’t the only one.

Listen here or wherever you get Mysteries to Die For podcast.

Lethal Standoff is an amateur sleuth mystery. A hostage standoff by a desperate man has innocent lives in the crossfire. After a hostage crisis ends with loss of life, Hostage negotiator Carrington Reed and reporter Levy Ehrlich follow through on promises to seek answers and protect a suspect’s family. But if solving problems were that easy, they would have been solved already.   

Bottom line: Lethal Standoff is for you if you like your mysteries and thrillers woven into the life and faith of your detectives.  

MEET DiAnn Mills

diannmills.com

DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She weaves memorable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels with threads of romance. DiAnn believes every breath of life is someone’s story, so why not capture those moments and create a thrilling adventure?

DiAnn is passionate about helping other writers be successful. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. She’s an avid reader, loves to cook, and believes her grandchildren are the smartest kids in the universe. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas.

ABOUT Sorry
The game Sorry was created in England in the late 1920s by William Henry Storey, who registered it as a trademark in the UK in 1920 and receive a US patent in Aug 1930. The patent link is in the show notes. The patents describes in detail the parts of the board, the men, the cards, and how to play. Mr. Storey went on to say “the above apparatus used as above described is calculated and has been proved by experience to be a prolific source of amusement and provides a game which calls for the exercise of a great deal of judgment while being dependent in a measure on an uncertain factor such as is calculated to add to the excitement of the game, though due to the choice of moves allowed when certain cards are turned up, the influence of the element of chance as a determining factor is much reduced in comparison with the skill exercised by a player in choosing his moves.”

Several sources cite the Indian game Pachisi as inspiration or basis for Sorry. The link to the Wikipedia page is in the shownotes. Rather than a square board, Pachisi uses a cross-shaped board. The goal is to move all of your pieces onto and around the board before the other players. The number of spaces moved is determined by throwing shells and counting how many land upright. There are several variations of the game, some dating back to 1100-800 BC.

Rabbit Hole Material:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US1903661.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry!_(game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachisi

ABOUT Kathleen Marple Kalb
https://kathleenmarplekalb.com
Kathleen Marple Kalb describes herself as an Author/Anchor/Mom…not in that order. An award-winning weekend anchor at New York’s 1010 WINS Radio, she writes short stories and novels including the Ella Shane and Old Stuff mysteries, both from Level Best Books. As Nikki Knight, she writes the Grace the Hit Mom and Vermont Radio mysteries. Her stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, online, and in anthologies, and been short-listed for Derringer and Black Orchid Novella Awards. She, her husband, and son live in a Connecticut house owned by their cat.

SORRY NOT SORRY is part of Kathleen’s Old Stuff Mystery series. When Hollywood comes to a small Connecticut town, it should be the stuff of dreams…but a fading movie star drops dead on-set and a whole different kind of stuff hits the fan. Historian Christian Shaw uses her knowledge of old things to track the killer in THE STUFF OF MURDER, Kathleen Marple Kalb’s new Old Stuff Mystery, out now from Level Best Books.

Strengths of the story. The greatest strength of this story is the expert detail presented in the development, testing, and augmentation of machine learning systems. In his day job, CJ Abazis runs a software company and his expertise shines through here. The Machine Murders isn’t the typical high-level use of IT common in television shows like NCIS or Criminal Minds. Instead, the program is a rich as character as any of the humans and the language is true to life.

Much of this story is set in the Emirates. I found it to be a new and fresh scene, with texture and depth that supplemented the mystery. The justaposition of the uber high-tech with the traditional Arab culture made for fascinating reading. I cannot comment on how accurate Abazis’ representation of the culture was, just that it was well developed and added to the story.

The Machine Murders is structured as an extended story told in two parts. The first, Island Buoys, kicks off the story of Dr. Manos Manu and the use of machine learning models to hunt for the killer. The second, this story called Desert Balloons, picks up shortly after the end of the first. I have not read the first. The author does introduce the continuing Interpol characters and software basics to new readers. I do wonder if the machine learning would have been easier to follow if I had read Island Buoys.      

As to how the logic stands up from the finish looking back, the result is fair. This is a mystery where the solution isn’t driven by testimony or evidence. The machine does the reasoning, using the additional information Manos identifies. We aren’t privy to actions or history of the suspects to be able to assess the logic of the solution and, as such, have the rely on the results from the computer system as correct. Manos confronts the killer, giving readers a satisfying end that the guilty party was found, but I was left with questions.

Overall, the pacing of the story did well to hold my attention. There were a few sections where I did not follow the change from one scene to another. While these ultimately did not affect the outcome of the story, I was pulled out of it as I went back to re-read. The thriller elements were written to align with a main character that was a chief data scientist, with Manos using his brains rather than fighting he way out of situations.

While the greatest strength of the story is the detail of machine learning, it is also the element that makes its less than accessible for some readers, including myself. Being an average technology end user at best, I simply could not follow the directions given to modify the code or or appreciate the results it generated.  

The Machine Murders: Desert Balloons is unique in the mystery world for making the software itself a main character and is a must read for lovers of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and systems programming.

The Machine Murders: Desert Balloons is promoted by Partners In Crime Tours and is available from AMAZON LINK and other book retailers.

About CJ Abazis

CJ Abazis manages a software company in Athens, Greece. His Machine Murders stories were written in Greek and translated to English. You can find out more about the stories on CJ’s website and social media outlets.

www.TheMachineMurders.com

According to Britannica.com, America writer and hostess Elsa Maxwell is credited with creating scavenger hunts as a party game. Maxwell was renown for your parties both for the A-list guests and for the novelties she created to amuse them. Maxwell was an interesting, self-made woman. Born in 1883, she supported herself as a theatre pianist and accompanist while in her teens. She worked with a Shakesperean troupe, in vaudeville, and in music halls, all without ever having been taught music. She published some 80 songs over her lifetime. By the end of World War I, she was a professional hostess and event organizer across Europe. It is certainly believable that a woman as talented as Elsa Maxwell was – both artistically and in managing events – that she could create a game that is both simple and endlessly creative.

Wikipedia notes that scavenger hunts are held at American universities and that Escape Manor, Inc. in Ottawa currently holds the Guiness World Record for the largest hunt with over 2,700 participants.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elsa-Maxwell#ref668963

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scavenger_hunt

ABOUT Nick Andreychuk

Nick Andreychuk is a Derringer Award-winning mystery writer. His stories, which range from classic whodunnits to hardboiled crime to suspense thrillers, have appeared in numerous publications, including Bullet, Hardboiled Crime Scene, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Plan B, Techno Noir, Who Died in Here? and Woman’s World. Reviewers have described Andreychuk’s work as “clever,” “fast-paced,” “action-packed,” “quirky,” and “bloody brilliant.”