Bio:

Sara Hoskinson Frommer, author of Death Climbs a Tree, Witness in Bishop Hill, The Vanishing Violinist, Murder & Sullivan, Buried in Quilts, and Murder in C Major, lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband, Gabe, a retired professor of psychology at Indiana University. They have two adult sons, Charles and Joe.

Her seventh Joan Spencer mystery, Her Brother’s Keeper, will be published in Spring 2013 by Perseverance Press www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance.

Beginning on Halloween 2011, she’s occasionally participating with other Perseverance Press authors in a group blog: http://getitwriteblog.wordpress.com/

A charter member of the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra 's viola section, Sara also has played for Gilbert & Sullivan productions in Bloomington and is a self-taught quilter. These days she tutors an adult new reader in the Volunteers in Tutoring Adult Learners (VITAL) program of the Monroe County Public Library. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and has served on the board of directors of Mystery Writers of America.

Born in Chicago to Hoosier parents, she grew up in Hawaii and northern Illinois. She went to high school in Kewanee, Illinois, a few miles from Bishop Hill, which in those days was little more than a wide spot in the road. She had no idea of its history, much less its potential as a site for a mystery.

With friends, the Frommers own woods in beautiful Owen County, Indiana, but it was local coverage of tree sits in Bloomington and in Yellowwood State Forest that suggested a tree-sitting mystery.

Sara earned degrees in German from Oberlin College and Brown University, and studied briefly at the university in Tübingen, Germany. She taught German as a graduate teaching assistant at Brown. She has worked with a transportation economist, ethnologists, and foreign exchange students (having been an AFS exchange student to Germany herself). She was a writer and later senior editor at the Agency for Instructional Technology in Bloomington.

In addition to her mystery novels, she is the author ofKaleidoscope: A Collection of Stories, 16 very short, easy-to-read books of fiction for adult new readers, published by Laubach Literacy International's New Readers Press. Five of them are mysteries.

Joan Spencer, the viola-playing sleuth in Sara's novels, doesn't go looking for trouble, but it keeps falling in her lap, like the oboist who collapses next to her in Murder in C Major and the woman found Buried in Quilts when the orchestra plays an all-American concert for a quilt show.  In Murder & Sullivan, the amateur musicians of Oliver, Indiana take on Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera Ruddigore. Joan witnesses the onstage murder of one of the "ghosts" from her spot in the pit orchestra. That's after she's rescued a child from a tornado.

In The Vanishing Violinist, Joan becomes involved with a missing Stradivarius, a disappearing violinist, and the  International Violin Competition of Indianapolis--the "Olympics of the violin."  

In Witness in Bishop Hill, Joan visits the tiny Swedish-Americanvillage, Bishop Hill, Illinois, where Fred Lundquist grew up, little expecting that Fred's mother will witness a brutal murder or that they will have to protect her until they find the killer she can't tell them about.  And all around them Bishop Hill is celebrating Lucia Day, with its own delightful variations on Sweden's traditions.

In Death Climbs a Tree, Sylvia, the tree-sitting violinist from the Oliver Civic Symphony, crashes to the ground, right at the feet of Joan and her son, Andrew. And when Joan discovers evidence that points to murder, she's afraid for Andrew, who has taken Sylvia's place.

And now it’s time to marry off Joan’s daughter, Rebecca.  But nothing is simple in Joan’s life.  You’ll see when Her Brother’s Keeper finally appears in 2013.

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Last updated November 07, 2011