Martha (M.P.) Cooley launched her literary career with last year's Ice Shear, which introduced us to June Lyons, a police officer in the rust belt town of upstate New York. In its sequel, Flame Out, which went on sale a week ago, June faces long-held secrets and obsessions when she digs into a 30-year-old case.
Today we want to give a warm welcome Martha to LibraryLoveFest who's come to share her own love of libraries.
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I moved a lot as a child, living in thirteen houses in the first thirteen years. The moves involved new schools, new friends, new parks, and always, new libraries. My Dad was a person who slotted his library card right behind his license in his brown leather wallet, and he would take my sisters and I on weekly trips to pick up as many new books as we could carry, upping our visits to twice a week in the summer.
It was those trips that made me a reader—a compulsive one at that. When I started reading the Nancy Drew books I was a completest. No skipping from book seven, Clue in the Diary, to book nine, The Sign of the Twisted Candles—I needed to first read book eight, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter. We lived in Auburn, NY at the time, and the librarian at the Seymour Library kindly ordered the missing books from other branches within the regional network so I didn’t skip even one. When I began to push for bigger reading challenges, they let me check out books in the adult section despite the fact that I wasn’t yet thirteen. Reading Stephen King books might have been a questionable choice for an eleven-year-old—although it is a testament to his storytelling that Salem’s Lot scared me so much that I threw is across the room—but I also had the opportunity to read Steinbeck, Hemingway, Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie. Even today, when the internet means you can research a whole book without leaving the house, I have been enriched by libraries. While researching my most recent novel, Flame Out, I needed information about the life of Ukrainians in the 1930s and 40s. I was pointed to a collection of oral histories that gave me a sense of the horror of living in a place where millions of people died every year from starvation and genocide in a way that traditional histories could not.
But these libraries give the community so much more than books they lend. As a child, in a new place, the libraries give me a safe place to play. Even now, I’ve had fun talking with book groups at libraries around the Bay Area, and got to see so much that they do: movie nights for teens, story hours for toddlers, and even nutrition programs that combat food insecurity among kids during the summer.
At the end of my first novel, Ice Shear, Hale Bascom asks June for the hot spots in Hopewell Falls (a fictitious town based on the real city of Cohoes, NY). June points him to the only hot spot she knows—the library.
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Thank you, Martha! If you're planning on attending ALA Annual in San Francisco, make sure to stop by our booth 3101 on Saturday, June 27 at 2 to meet Martha—hailed by the BBC as “a writer to watch”—and pick up a copy of Flame Out, her latest June Lyons mystery.
-Amanda