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The Cadieux Murders, by R.J. Coreto

Guest Post + Series & Author Info!

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The Cadieux Murders

The ink is still wet on the contract, but Wren Fontaine is already running into trouble as she renovates Cadieux House, a modernist masterpiece on Long Island’s exclusive Gold Coast. The home’s architect was the brilliant and eccentric Marius Cadieux, her father’s mentor, and Ezra doesn’t want Wren to change as much as a doorknob.

And the home itself comes with a dark past: In 1955, it was the site of the never-solved murder of its owner, Dennis Blaine. Cadieux himself was alleged to be having an affair with Dennis’s wife, the stunningly beautiful Rebecca. It seems like yesterday’s headlines, but then someone starts killing people with a connection to the house. The home’s new owner—bestselling novelist Bronwyn Merrick—may be using the house to launch a fictionalized account of the 1955 crime. But someone may not want to her to. Just how far will Bronwyn’s armed bodyguard go to protect her?

As Wren untangles the threads, she finds they all lead back to the house. Rebecca apparently inspired the strange, yet alluring residence, and both the home and its mistress may have caused uncontrolled emotions that led to tragedy. Wren uses all her architectural skills to decipher the hidden message Cadieux cunningly wove into the home’s design. She must think back 20 years to when, as a little girl, she met Cadieux. Deeply impressed with Wren, he gave her a clue about the house—and his unusual friendship with Rebecca. With her girlfriend Hadley at her side, Wren eventually solves the mysteries of the home and the people who lived there, develops a grudging respect for modernist architecture—and learns something about the difference between love and obsession.

Genre: Cozy Mystery
Published by: Level Best Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Number of Pages: 237
Series: The Historic Homes Mysteries, 3

To purchase your copy of The Cadieux Murders, click any of the following links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Audible | Goodreads | Level Best Books

Guest Post by R.J. Koreto

Readers seem to like to guess which real life people book characters are based on. To be fair, there is a long tradition of this: Charles Dickens was alleged to have based Uriah Heep on Hans Christian Andersen, who visited Dickens and drove him to distraction. John Le Carré borrowed from a secret service colleague to create the brilliant spymaster George Smiley.

So I’m in good company when I admit that Wren Fontaine, the protagonist/sleuth of my Historic Homes series, is also based on a real person.

She’s based on me.

This isn’t immediately obvious, I confess. Wren is a woman, and I’m a man. She is in her early thirties, and I’m on the far side of sixty. She is gay, and I am straight. As an architect, Wren has an extraordinary sense of space, while I still regularly get lost in the county I’ve lived in more than a quarter-century.

However, Wren and I approach the world in the same way. This wasn’t intentional. I had decided to create a mystery series featuring an architect who specializes in restoring historic homes. I found it made sense to create a character who felt a greater connection to houses than to people. Wren has trouble understanding people and how to communicate with them. That proved surprisingly easy, because I often don’t understand people either. I understand them in books, but that’s a lot easier. Mark Twain supposedly said that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction has to make sense.

In “The Turnbull Murders,” Wren is delighted to have uncovered the fascinating history of the 200-year-old mansion her client had just hired her to restore. Her father, a world-renowned architect and her boss, had advised her to become more talkative with her clients, to build a connection with them. So she polishes her historical researches into an engaging anecdote, only to have her client’s young girlfriend burst into tears and cry her heart out on Wren’s shoulder. “What did I say?” wonders Wren. “Why is she doing this?”

I’ve been there, Wren.

In “The Greenleaf Murders,” Wren gets herself a girlfriend, but it starts slowly. She meets the beautiful, outgoing Hadley Vanderwerf while researching a Gilded Age mansion once owned by Hadley’s ancestors. Hadley is a chef and event planner who quickly deduces Wren has always been a “good girl.” She tells Wren she is going to change that, promising to take her to the performance of a band she’s working with: “second-wave emocore—plenty of chance for you to be a ‘bad girl.'”

Wren has no idea how to be a bad girl. She has no idea what emocore is. What she does know is that at age 30, she still finds herself terrified that—like she was at 16—she’ll have no idea how to behave at one of the cool kids’ parties. Once again, she wonders, how did I even end up in this conversation?

BTW: I had to look up “emocore” on Wikipedia.

The good news is that Wren and Hadley do manage to get together, and Wren realizes that even the extroverted Hadley has issues she’s uncomfortable discussing.

In her most recent book, “The Cadieux Murders,” Wren manages to grasp the complex love relationships among a group of people who died before she was even born. Hadley gently upbraids her, telling Wren that she understands people better than she realizes. Wren modestly says she still doesn’t understand people all that well, but she does understand houses, and the way people interact with them. Still, maybe that’s just as good. Wren thinks back to a legendary architect who gave her some advice when she was 10 years old, and only now is she realizing the tight connection between people and their homes: “I had to figure out the owners and give them the homes I knew they wanted, even if they didn’t know themselves.”

As an author, I like to think Wren grows over the books I’ve written. As a person, I like to think I have grown as well.

Don’t Miss The Previous Historic Homes Mysteries

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads

The Greenleaf Murders

Book 1

Young architect Wren Fontaine lands her dream job: restoring Greenleaf House, New York’s finest Gilded-Age mansion, to its glory days. But old homes have old secrets: Stephen Greenleaf—heir to what’s left of his family’s legacy—refuses to reveal what his plans are once the renovation is completed. And still living in a corner of the home is Stephen’s 90-year-old Aunt Agnes who’s lost in the past, brooding over a long-forgotten scandal while watching Wren with mistrust.
Wren’s job becomes more complex when a shady developer who was trying to acquire Greenleaf House is found murdered. And after breaking into a sealed attic, Wren finds a skeleton stuffed in a trunk. She soon realizes the two deaths, a century apart, are strangely related. Meanwhile, a distraction of a different kind appears in the form of her client’s niece, the beautiful and seductive Hadley Vanderwerf. As Wren gingerly approaches a romance, she finds that Hadley has her own secrets.
Then a third murder occurs, and the introverted architect is forced to think about people, and about how ill-fated love affairs and obsessions continue to haunt the Greenleafs. In the end, Wren risks her own life to uncover a pair of murderers, separated by a century but connected by motive. She reveals an odd twist in the family tree that forever changes the lives of the Greenleafs, the people who served them, the mansion they all called home—and even Wren herself.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads

The Turnbull Murders

Book 2

Movie star Nicky Tallon selects architect Wren Fontaine to renovate Turnbull House, where he’ll be filming his next movie. Even to Wren, used to old homes, this one is special: a 200-year-old federal-style home on a private island in New York harbor, designed by the most celebrated architect of the day. But Turnbull House hides many secrets, such as the disappearance of the sea captain who built it. That’s just a historical curiosity, until a studio executive no one likes is killed.
Wren just wants to keep her worksite safe, but then another murder occurs, and she starts noting eerie connections between the mysteries surrounding the Turnbull family and Nicky and his entourage. The handsome star seems to have two girlfriends, a childlike folk singer and a cynical fashion model. Meanwhile, renowned actress Veronica Selwyn renews a friendship with Wren’s father, which Wren finds more disturbing than she wants to admit. She concludes it’s time she and her girlfriend Hadley take the next step and find a place together, an exciting but stressful change.
As the attacks continue, Wren realizes she will have to solve the mysteries surrounding Captain Turnbull and Nicky Tallon. Turnbull House speaks of order and harmony, and Wren must dig deep to see how the house has affected its owners, old and new. Fortunately for her, the eminently practical Hadley is by her side, pepper spray at the ready—because a frighteningly clever killer is about to find that Wren is getting too close to the horrific truth.

R.J. Koreto — Author of The Cadieux Murders

Over the years, R.J. Koreto has been a magazine writer, website manager, textbook editor, novelist and merchant seaman. He was born and raised in New York City, graduated from Vassar College, and has wanted to be a writer since reading The Naked and the Dead. In addition to his novels, he has published short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the 2020 Bouchercon Anthology and Paranoia Blues: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon.

His current series features Wren Fontaine, an architect who finds mysteries in the historic homes she renovates. He and his wife have two grown daughters, and they divide their time between Rockland County, N.Y., and Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

To learn more about R.J., click any of the following links: www.RJKoreto.com, Goodreads, BookBub – @rkoreto1, Instagram – @RJKoreto, Threads – @RJKoreto, Twitter/X – @RJKoreto & Facebook – @RJKoreto

Visit all the Stops on the Tour!

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11/06 Literary Gold Author Interview and THE CADIEUX MURDERS feature
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11/11 Guatemala Paula Loves to Read THE CADIEUX MURDERS Review
11/12 Celticladys Reviews THE CADIEUX MURDERS Showcase
11/13 bookwormbecky1969 THE CADIEUX MURDERS Review
11/14 The AR Critique THE CADIEUX MURDERS Review
11/15 Binge Reading Books THE CADIEUX MURDERS Guest post
11/18 Book Talk with Fran Lewis Radio Interview of R. J. Koreto featuring THE CADIEUX MURDERS
11/18 Ink. Readsalot THE CADIEUX MURDERS Review
11/18 Just Reviews THE CADIEUX MURDERS Review
11/21 Novels Alive THE CADIEUX MURDERS Review
11/22 Books, Ramblings, and Tea THE CADIEUX MURDERS Showcase
11/23 The Mystery of Writing THE CADIEUX MURDERS Guest post
11/26 Dogs, Mysteries, & More THE CADIEUX MURDERS Review
11/27 Books R Us THE CADIEUX MURDERS Showcase

Elena Taylor/Elena Hartwell