Karen Dukess "Welcome to M**der Week" & Kerry Cullen "House of Beth" - Ptow

East End Books Ptown Presents: Karen Dukess "Welcome to M**der Week" & Kerry Cullen "House of Beth" author talk and book signing 7/26 at 6pm.

In this delightfully funny and heartfelt new novel from the author of the "bittersweet page-turner" (The New York Times) The Last Book Party, an American woman travels to the English countryside when she discovers tickets her late mother had purchased for a M**der mystery simulation in a small British town.

"Welcome to M**der Week"

When thirty-four-year-old Cath loses her mostly absentee mother, she is ambivalent. With days of quiet, unassuming routine in Buffalo, New York, Cath consciously avoids the impulsive, thrill-seeking lifestyle that her mother once led. But when she's forced to go through her mother's things one afternoon, Cath is perplexed to find tickets for an upcoming "M**der week" in England's Peak District: a whole town has come together to stage a fake M**der mystery to attract tourism to their quaint hamlet. Baffled but helplessly intrigued by her mother's secret purchase, Cath decides to go on the trip herself--and begins a journey she never could have anticipated.

Teaming up with her two cottage-mates, both ardent mystery lovers--Wyatt Green, forty, who works unhappily in his husband's birding store, and Amity Clark, fifty, a divorced romance writer struggling with her novels--Cath sets about solving the "crime" and begins to unravel shocking truths about her mother along the way. Amidst a fling--or something more--with the handsome local maker of artisanal gin, Cath and her irresistibly charming fellow sleuths will find this week of fake M**der may help them face up to a very real crossroads in their own lives.

Witty, wise, and deliciously escapist, Welcome to M**der Week is a fresh, inventive twist on the M**der mystery and a touching portrayal of one daughter's reckoning with her grief, her past--and her own budding sense of adventure.

Karen Dukess is the author of The Last Book Party and Welcome to M**der Week. Karen has been a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia, and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She has a degree in Russian studies from Brown University and a master's in journalism from Columbia University. She lives outside of New York City and in Truro on Cape Cod, where she interviews some of today's most acclaimed writers as host of the Castle Hill Author Talks for the Truro Center for the Arts. Find out more at KarenDukess.com.

"House of Beth"

A haunting and seductive tale of a young career woman who slides quickly into the role of stepmother, in a life that may still belong to someone else. "Vivid, addictive, and crackling with life (yes, even the ghost), House of Beth asks us to consider how and why we make the lives we make" (Lynn Steger Strong).

After a heart-wrenching breakup with her girlfriend and a shocking incident at her job, Cassie flees her life as an overworked assistant in New York for her hometown in New Jersey, along the Delaware. There, she reconnects with her high school best friend, Eli, now a widowed father of two. Their bond reignites, and within a few short months, Cassie is married to Eli, living in his house in the woods, homeschooling the kids, and getting to know her reserved neighbor, Joan.

But Cassie's fresh start is less idyllic than she'd hoped. She grapples with harm OCD, her mind haunted by gory, graphic images. And she's afraid that she'll never measure up to Eli's late spouse, who was a committed homemaker and traditional wife. No matter what Cassie does, Beth's shadow still permeates every corner of their home.

Soon, Cassie starts hearing a voice narrating the house's secrets. As she listens, the voice grows stronger, guiding Cassie down a path to uncover the truth about Beth's untimely death.

Kerry Cullen's fiction has been published in The Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, One Teen Story, and more. She earned her MFA at Columbia University, and she lives in New York.

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