Brigid Kildare is not your typical hard boiled private eye. But she doesn’t pretend to be. No matrimonial. No child custody. No bodyguard or surveillance work. No process serving. Brigid is strictly data. Asset searches, background searches, computer security, pre-employment screening, and basically any type of records research is what she deals in. And you really could not expect anything else. After all, your average five foot tall, blue eyed, blond (one friend describes her as looking like a Christmas tree angel) is rarely the person you would send out after a bail jumper. Oh, and there is that whole one leg thing – ADA aside, most people don’t think of an amputee as the go to person for a security job. But in SOCIAL INSECURITY, the first in the Brigid Kildare Mystery Series, professional PI, Brigid Kildare, turns amateur sleuth when old ladies in the Federal Hill area of Providence start to go missing and she can’t get the police to believe her. As her assistant and long time friend, Kevin, puts “Honey, if an old lady like Jessica Fletcher can do it, a one-legged PI and her gay PA can do it too!” Brigid solves the mystery, along with an odd cast of friends and family, but not before four old ladies have died, she has caught the eye of a handsome Providence detective, and she discovers that not everyone who is close to her is what they appear to be. NOTE FROM SERIES VS My first book, Social Insecurity, is the first in a series. Or is it? Not really. It is the beginning of a serial. Back in the day, long before even I was born, authors wrote serials. Some classics we still read today, began life as a multi part serial. So I am doing something new, that is actually very old. I belong to many readers and writers groups and there is one thing we all complain about in the genre we all love so well, cozy mysteries, and that is repetition. The reason for that is each book is supposed to stand alone. So if you come across volume seven in a cozy series you have never seen before, you can pick it up and read it, and know everything. You’ll hear everything about each character’s background, their relationships, their profession, their craft or hobby. And at the end, the story is wrapped up in a neat little bow. But the fact is, if you start a series at the beginning, by book three, you are skimming over those parts. You have heard it all before. Again and again. So I took a chainsaw to Social Insecurity. I took out about twenty thousand words. Because they weren’t needed. You may learn a lot about one character and his character, because he is a suspect, but little about another because in this particular story it is not important to the tale at hand. You will get a lot of description of the protagonist, Brigid’s, living arrangements for example. But you will never hear about it again in subsequent books. So picking up book seven, never having read one through six, you could be confused. And there is no neat bow at the end. Oh the mystery is solved. You know whodunit and why and how. But you have a cliff hanger which leads you right into book two, Meditated Murder. So this series is really a serial that must be read from the beginning, in order. It will say that in the front of book two onward. It will say it on Amazon. So The Brigid Kildare Mystery Series is something old that is new again. It is a serial.
