Signings and Sightings

Upcoming conventions and conferences include:

• Texas Library Association, Menger Hotel, San Antonio, TX, April 12, 2007
• Dying to Meet You: Speed Dating with Mystery Authors, April 12, 2007, 6:30 - 9:00 p.m.
• Lillian will be signing free ARCs of The Burning Glass at The Thomson/Gale booth in the Exhibitor's Hall, Gonzales Convention Center, April 13, 2007, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
• Malice Domestic XIX, Crystal Gateway Marriott, Arlington, VA, May 4-6, 2007
• Hardboiled Heroes and Cozy Cats, Radisson Hotel Central Dallas, Dallas, TX, June 15-16, 2007
• Armadillocon, Doubletree Hotel North, Austin, TX, August 10-12, 2007
• FenCon, Hotel To Be Announced, Dallas, TX, September 21-23, 2007
• World Fantasy Convention, Saratoga Hotel and Conference Center, Saratoga Springs, NY, November 1-4, 2007

Works in Progress

The Burning Glass (third book in the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron series) will be published in September 2007

In The Burning Glass, Alasdair and Jean are making a deliberate effort to put together a relationship.  Leaving Edinburgh to the crowds attending the annual Festival, they move into the caretaker's cottage of an old and spooky castle near Rosslyn Chapel. Rosslyn has been made so famous by The Da Vinci Code that only tour groups are admitted. It's a medieval church where the Holy Grail or the treasure of the Knights Templar is rumored to be hidden.

Ferniebank Castle includes a small chapel that's very similar and obviously related to Rosslyn, but is off the beaten path.  Or so they think.

Even before Jean meets Alasdair at Ferniebank, she hears that trouble is brewing there and in the nearby village of Stanelaw:  a local councillor has disappeared, a precious artifact has been stolen, and the castle's former caretaker has died under circumstances that make Alasdair's police-whiskers twitch.  It's a bad time for this sort of thing to be happening, since the owner of a popular New Age travel company has just bought the chapel and its healing well, intending to build a spa there, something that will revive the village economy.

As though Jean and Alasdair's plans aren't thrown enough of a curve when the New Age guru turns out to be his ex-wife, other crimes and then another death occur right on their doorstep.  And everything seems to track back to the former Mrs. Cameron.  Even though Alasdair is no longer a formal member of other police force, he and Jean must roll up their sleeves and wade in to yet another mystery.

A burning glass is a small lens used to focus the light of the sun and start a fire.

Blackness Tower, a romantic fantasy, will be published in October 2007.

For years Lauren Reay has experienced vivid dreams of a castle keep and a chapel overlooking the sea. Then, while waiting beside her grandfather's deathbed, she sees the exact scene in a calendar photo. It's in Caithness, on the otherworldly coast of northern Scotland, that Lauren finds the restored 16th century Blackness Tower and the ruined 12th century St. Bride's chapel of her dream.

She is armed with no more than a macabre silver-gilt skull watch, a souvenir of her grandfather's mysterious grandmother, only one of Lauren's ancestors who lived at the Tower. Still, Lauren starts asking questions of edgy Douglas Sutherland, who now owns and lives in the Tower, and of scholarly Ewan Calder, the archaeologist who is excavating the cemetery at the chapel. Soon Lauren begins to dream of a Spanish galleon crashing onto cliffs below the castle -- even as one of the men begins dreaming of her.

For Blackness Tower holds strange powers and elemental presences that cannot be rationally explained, but which will change Lauren's life forever.

"Sweep away the illusion of time; compress our threescore years into three minutes...Are we not spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away into air and invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure and are apparitions...Ghosts! there are a thousand million walking the earth...some half hundred have vanished from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once...we not only carry each a future ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!" —Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Lois McMaster Bujold

The Bujold Compansion, a retrospective on Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction work, co-edited with Martin H. Greenberg, will be published in 2008.