All I want is to hunker under the covers and read 'The Girl on the Train'

Never mind washing the dog, if we had a dog.
Never mind feeding the cat, if we had a cat.
Never mind stuffing the pillows with water fowl feathers, if we had water fowl feathers.

Never mind the blackberry pie I promised I'd bake.

Never mind. Never mind.

All I really want is to hunker under the covers today and read Paula Hawkins' smash hit, "The Woman on the Train."

Even Stephen King tweeted that it kept him up all night. "The alcoholic narrator is dead perfect," he wrote.

Critics are calling the bestseller by the UK author "compulsively readable," a "Hitchccokian thriller" and comparing it to "Gone Girl" and "The Silent Wife."

The hardcover is in its 10th printing and DreamWorks has optioned it for a movie, according to USA Today .

What's it about? Rachel, the woman on a train, is alcoholic and obsessed with a couple she sees from the window on her commute to London. They seem the perfect couple to her until the morning she sees something that draws her into a possible murder investigation.

Who's Paula Hawkins? A Londoner who admits to a darker side of her personality. She worked as a journalist for 15 years before publishing three novels under a pseudonym -- "chick-lit," she calls them. And, without being told, we know -- and celebrate -- that she's now remarkably wealthy.
    

Amy Butcher: 'A Memoir of Friendship and Murder' due in April

Amy Butcher by Carmen Machado

You have a treat (of sorts) in store for spring. A treat, that is, if you like a tautly-written memoir about something almost unthinkable. Amy Butcher, the author and a graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Program, and Kevin were friends as undergraduates at Gettysburg College. Nothing romantic. But best buds. Then, a few weeks before graduation, Kevin walks Amy home and an hour later, murders his ex-girlfriend. He is arrested, sentenced to prison. That's when Amy becomes obsessed with him. Her memoir, "Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder," will be out from Penguin in April. I am reading an advance review copy. I am mesmerized. Here's an excerpt.  
 

Kevin followed me first from that Pennsylvania town to a larger town in Iowa. Then New York; New Hampshire; Ohio. He lived at first inside my heart and then my mind and then my closet. I wrote to Kevin as if he were merely away at camp, or boarding school, or a semester at sea, and while my intention, early on, was pure, somehow, over time, our letters became a testament to my life. They were an official record of my vitality, proof that I was still thinking and breathing and existing, moving from one town to the next, one lifestyle to another, living the life not taken from me. What began as a loving communication—Do you remember playing video games on projectors? Do you remember drinking sake with that famous poet?—had become an act of retribution.

'I Love You More' author Jennifer Murphy says 'dreams do come true'

Former Charlottean Jennifer Murphy has concocted a doozy of a plot in her debut novel, "I Love You More" (Doubleday, $24.95). Lawyer Oliver Lane is shot to death in his Outer Banks rental cottage, and the prime suspects are his three wives, who are each unaware of the other but all sport the same haircut.
The star of the book is 12-year-old Picasso, Oliver's precocious and dictionary-reading daughter, who tries to make sense of what she knows and doesn't know.

Murphy

Kirkus Review calls this "a thoughtfully written, original and entertaining exploration of events ignited by love and lies."
Murphy, who now lives in Seattle, emailed me that her biggest dream was always to write and publish a novel. But as a former single working mom, a writing schedule was a luxury. She got serious after she went to the Wild Acres Writers Conference in Little Switzerland, N.C., and studied with novelist Ann Hood, who encouraged her.
At Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, she met an agent, who offered to represent her. In 2011, Hood invited her to a conference in Tuscany, Italy. Murphy took 50 pages of her novel-in-progress, "I Love You More." Hood liked it so much, she advised her to dump the novel she'd been working on and stick with this one.
Nine months later, she completed "I Love You," and in a few more months, her agent sold it to Doubleday.
"It took awhile," she writes, "and there were a lot of rejections along the way. But ultimately I believe it was the stick-with-it-ness that made it happen."

Murphy, who served as executive director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Art Commission, will read from  "I Love You More" at 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 7, at Park Road Books in Charlotte.

Ruth Moose Gives Two Readings Saturday: Charlotte and Cornelius

Ruth Moose

Oh, winning is such sweet revenge, especially when you hear a story like former Charlottean Ruth Moose's. Moose wrote the first draft of  a mystery novel, "Doing It at the Dixie Dew," 25 years ago on a Kaypro computer in a house she and her late husband built deep in the woods of  the Uwharrie

Mountains. Each summer, free from her job as a reference librarian at Pfeiffer College in Meisenheimer, she tinkered with the manuscript, then submitted it to the first Malice Domestic Competition. She didn't win, but she was named a finalist, and an editor there suggested revisions.

But Moose was too busy, and she shoved the manuscript into a drawer.
Meanwhile, she won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and went on to publish three collections of short stories and six of poetry.
Years later, retired from 15 years of teaching creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill, she tackled the novel again and submitted it once more to the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition. Bingo. This time she won.
Over the years, Moose had been bringing  the manuscript to the monthly sessions of a writers' group that met at the old Poplar Street Books in Charlotte's Fourth Ward. In her acknowledgments at the back of "Dixie Dew," she doesn't forget that group: "This is not to thank the members of my long-ago Charlotte writers' group who disliked this manuscript from word one."
"Doing It at the Dixie Dew" is a cozy mystery set in the fictional town of Littleboro, N.C., where Beth McKenzie attempts to turn an old Southern mansion into a bed-and-breakfast. Her first guest is murdered, and three days later a young priest is found strangled in his chapel.
She'll read from her novel at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday at the Cornelius Public Library, 21105 Catawba Avenue, Cornelius, and again at 2 p.m. Saturday at Park Road Books, Park Road Shopping Center, Charlotte.
Moose will also appear on D.G. Martin's "Book Watch" at noon on UNC-TV on June 15.