It’s done. All the Bo Bradley mysteries, including the latest, have new, matching covers, with crows! Yes, crows.
I didn’t realize until writer-pal Mary Lou Locke pointed out to me that there are crows in pretty much all the Bo novels. (A stranger at a booksigning years ago also had to inform me that “Bo Bradley” sounds an awful lot like “Boo Radley,” the reclusive and undoubtedly mentally ill character who only comes out of hiding to save threatened children – the mysterious figure who gives Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird its title. Of course! Except I had no idea.) Unconscious influences are afoot the second anybody sits down to write a novel and Bo-as-Boo makes sense, but why crows?
They don’t play roles in any of the plots; they’re just there. Bo is aware of them, watches and describes them through six perilous adventures as they watch her, but they don’t do anything. Except, I guess, reprise their own ancient symbolism as, with ravens, magpies and all corvids, the universal totem animal of mystery, intelligence and transformation, including death. Bo is Irish, and in Celtic cultures crows were so highly regarded as oracles that under Druidic law killing one was a felony, so there’s that. But I rather imagine Bo herself, with her quirky, fractious, bipolar mind, reflects crowness entire. And now all her book covers, thanks to the patient skill of cover designer Cheri Lasota, are embellished with those black feathers. Be sure to let me know which one you like best!
And also help me decide what to write next.
Seriously.
I’ve been dying to write the sequel to An Unremembered Grave, taking Danni and the vampire Grimaud one step further toward her mysterious past and their dangerous connection, but it’s time for Bo and Andrew to head for Louisiana and a Cajun wedding – omg, their own! (You know Bo is going to balk every inch of the way, so there may not even be a wedding. We’ll see.)
So which setting? The little-known limestone caves beneath the streets of St. Louis for Danni, or Spanish moss and crawdad étouffée in Louisiana for Bo?
abigail padgett 