Gabriel Valjan and Connie Berry interviews Agatha Nominees

Gabriel Valjan lives in Boston’s South End where he enjoys the local restaurants. He is the author of two series, Roma and Company Files, with Winter Goose Publishing. The Naming Game, the second book in the Company Files series, was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Historical Mystery in 2019. Dirty Old Town is the first in the Shane Cleary series for Level Best Books. You can find Gabriel on Twitter (@GValjan) and Instagram (gabrielvaljan). He is a lifetime member of Sisters in Crime.

He is nominated for Best Historical Fiction for: The Company Files: The Naming Game (Book 2 )Jack Marshall, a CIA officer, was really hoping to enjoy his vacation from work in DC and to spend some time in Malibu with his family, but a call from the LAPD’s Chief William Parker changed everything. Not only was script writer Charles Loew murdered, Jack has reason to believe FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was somehow connected to the homicide.
In post-war Hollywood, everyone lies for a living but with Senator Joe McCarthy’s hunting for Communists, even one harmless secret has the power to destroy lives. With the help of his subordinates, Walker and Leslie, they investigate the case for Jack, and quickly enter the world of Hollywood scandals and blacklisted writers, which may prove more dangerous than fighting Nazis. When Jack’s own family is threatened, time is running out.

Like her protagonist, Connie Berry was raised in the high-end antiques trade. After teaching theology for twenty-five years, she began writing mysteries featuring
antiques and the legacy of the past. Connie loves history, cute animals, travel with a hint of adventure, and all things British. Her debut novel, A Dream of Death, has been nominated for an Agatha. She lives in Ohio with her husband and adorable dog, Millie. You can find her at www.connieberry.com.

Connie is nominated for Best First Mystery Novel for A Dream of Death
(Kate Hamilton Mysteries #1) On a remote Scottish island, American antique dealer Kate Hamilton sleuths a killing that eerily replicates a murder still unsolved after 200 years.

Autumn has come and gone on Scotland's Isle of Rothsay, and the locals gather for the Tartan Ball, the annual end-of-tourist-season gala. Among the invited guests is American antique dealer Kate Hamilton. Returning to the island where her husband died is brutal, but Kate is determined to repair her relationship with her sister-in-law, Elenor Spurgeon, the proprietor of Rothsay's deluxe country house hotel.

Kate has hardly unpacked when a body turns up, murdered in an eerie recreation of an infamous unsolved murder two hundred years before. And the only clue to the killer's identity lies in a curiously embellished antique casket. When Bo Duff, the gentle handyman who had tried to save Kate’s husband's life, is taken into custody, she teams up with vacationing Detective Inspector Tom Mallory to clear Bo’s name. To accomplish that, they’ll have to unmask a killer who seems bizarrely fixated on the past…because two hundred years is an awfully long time to hold a grudge in A Dream of Death, the tantalizing series debut by Connie Berry.