How many characters do you need?

 I co-wrote "Whistling Librarian" with Anne Flagge, featuring the cast of characters from the previous books in the Whistling Pines series. To kick off our collaboration, Anne reread all of the earlier books in the series and created a list of the characters with a short bios. That resulted in an interesting text message, "Do you realize you've named over 250 (she had an exact number) characters in your previous books? There are five Peggy's and three Hazels. How big do you think Whistling Pines Senior Residence is?"

To be honest, I remember a core group of recurring residents' names. Beyond that, I added a new character, or three, in each book as I needed people to fill the plot. Armed with Anne's catalog of resident names, we forged ahead into "Whistling Librarian". Using only people who already exist in the series. 

With a plot molded from suggestions provided by my "Whistling Pines" muse, tuba playing Brian Johnson, Anne, and myself we dove into the draft. The plot opens with a car going over one of the many cliffs overlooking Lake Superior. What follows seems to be a ghostly library event, not unexpected in a one-hundred-year-old building. The event turns out to be someone prying open a long forgotten locked drawer in a library table. All that's left behind are splinters and some dusty evidence that something had been removed. Spin that together with a final reunion of a 1970s rock bank, originally from Two Harbors, but hitting the big time in Las Vegas and LA.

Anne and I spent a week pasting Post-it notes. One door showing the unfolding plot. The other door with the names of the characters. At one point, I drew a family tree to organize my thoughts about DNA evidence. Six months later, Viola! we had a book.

The next hurdle was the cover. We focused on the seminal event of the car over the cliff when communicating with the cover designer. She found the attached ominous nighttime depiction of a scary road. After we'd agreed on a design and forwarded it to the publisher (who has the final say on cover art). I got a humorous email reply. "You're really planning to release a book about a librarian without a picture of a book on the cover?" Well, I guess we are.

Not that the library, librarian, and staff don't play an important role in the book. The burglary occurs in the library and there's a library seance to contact the ghost of the original librarian. In the tradition of the zany Whistling Pines cozy series, we have the residents of the senior residence recalling events from the past and helping to link 1970s' events with the burglary.

***One other library connection: The winner of the Two Harbors Library 2025 summer reading challenge, Paula Pettit, is named as the assistant librarian!

Anne and I put on a program at the Two Harbors Library last month. At the end, we mentioned the theme of the next book will be Viking runes. To our amazement, one of the attendees announced that she was somewhat of a rune (Viking writing) expert, having grown up in Kensington, Minnesota. In the 1800s, a stone was unearthed. After untangling it from the roots of a tree, it was discovered that there were runes carved into the stone. The translation said "We are 8 Goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland to the west. We had camp by two skerries one day’s journey north from this stone. We were out to fish one day. After we came home, we found ten men red with blood and dead. Ave Maria, save us from evil. We have ten men by the sea to look after our ships, fourteen days’ travel from this island. Year 1362.".

Hmm. I wonder how that will show up in our next book?

Check out "Whistling Librarian" at the BWL site or from Amazon, or your own library.

Dean Hovey - Books We Love Publishing Inc.

Whistling Librarian: Whistling Pines Book 10, by Dean L. Hovey — Books We Love Publishing Inc.