The Author: Donna Andrews
The Book: Owl be Home for Christmas (Minotaur Books, $25)
The Genre: Mystery
Lives In: Reston
The Story: Owl be Home for Christmas is the 26th mystery novel in the Meg Lansglow series. “In this book, Meg’s grandfather is hosting a conference on owls for ornithologists at a hotel in the small, fictitious Virginia town of Caerphilly,” Andrews says. “He hosts his conference the weekend before Christmas, and crippling amounts of snow falls during it. So, it looks like they might all be snowbound for Christmas.” One of the visiting ornithologists is also murdered, and Meg must help Chief Burke solve the case before they all return home for the holidays.
Author Inspiration: “To create Caerphilly, I looked at the map of Virginia and picked the biggest blank spot, which is south of Fredericksburg,” Andrews says. “It’s nice to be like an hour or two from DC. Northern Virginia is where the characters go when they want to go to the airport or see a specialist. But in Caerphilly, the traffic is only from when the farmers are coming to town with their wagons.”
This post originally appeared in our December 2019 issue. For more local stories, subscribe to our weekly newsletters.
