Is there anything better than waking up one morning and getting to read about a friend in the New York Time Style section–and then also getting to see photos of her house?

I don’t think so.

My friend Mary used to live three miles away from me, but now she lives in Eastport, Maine, where, under the pseudonym Sarah Graves, she writes the most wonderful, funny, suspenseful and fascinating mysteries. (They’re called the “Home Repair is Homicide” mysteries, and here is her website so you can see them for yourself.) The heroine is Jake Tiptree, a transplanted Wall Street business type, who coincidentally also relocated to Eastport, Maine, and who, like Mary and her husband John, is constantly doing home repair.

As the New York Times put it, a lot of the details Sarah Graves’s novels tell the truth about Eastport–it’s just that the murder rate isn’t really so high.

These books will keep you on the edge of your seat, I promise you…and, in the process, you’ll also learn a lot about getting the squeaks out of your wooden floors, and even how to hang a window.

And, oh yeah, what to do when you find a corpse in your basement.

But first–if you want to read a fun story, check out “In Writing, As in Murder, A Hammer is So Handy.”