Mystery author Carol Goodman discusses her long career and latest book "Our Marriage is Murder"
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For many readers of mystery and suspense, books by Carol Goodman are a must read. She's written 28 novels. And she's won the Mary Higgins Clark Award, which honors suspense authors, twice. Critics call her latest book, "Our Marriage is Murder," a "cunning mystery." Mary Calvi talked to Goodman about the novel and her long career.
"Our Marriage is Murder" takes readers inside the failing marriage of husband and wife coauthors. They are attending a convention for writers and fans of mysteries when people start dying in ways described in the couple's books.
Mary asked Goodman how long had she been planning to write the story.
"Probably since my first mystery convention that I went to 20-something years ago because it's just such a great atmosphere," Goodman replied. "I just love the mystery community. I think it's the best community in the world. And I've gone to quite a number of [conventions] and I've met people over the years. So I had great fun with this. I hope it's poking gentle fun sometimes at myself and my fellow mystery writers, but it's a funny group. We write about murder."
"Our Marriage is Murder" is set in Tuscany, Italy. Mary asked if Goodman traveled for research.
"I did a little bit of travel, a little bit of research," Goodman said. "I actually thought of this book on a trip to a different part of Italy. I was traveling with my husband, and we got into one of those little lovable marital spats about our trips in the past. And at some point, we both said to each other, have we ever taken a trip that wasn't about writing? And so, the book was born in that moment. I did go back."
Goodman is the author of more than two dozen previous novels, some set on Long Island, New York, where she lived, and in the Hudson Valley, where she lives now. Mary asked if she's inspired first by a place or is she thinking first of her characters.
"It really depends on the book," Goodman answered. "For this book, it was really the idea of a writing couple and what that would be like. So it really varies. But I do love setting, and I always make that a very important part of my books, because that's what I like to read."
Goodman has taught writing during her more than 25-year career. Mary asked if she had a few pointers she routinely told with students that she could share with aspiring authors.
"I think it's really about loving what you do, even though it can be really hard at times," Goodman said, "Just really being immersed in it and thinking of your characters as people, and also just to have the persistence to keep doing it. I think that ends up being the thing that really, you know, the people who stay in it are the ones who love it so much. It's hard to be persistent."
You can read an excerpt from "Our Marriage is Murder," and get the book below.
Club Calvi books may contain adult themes.
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"Our Marriage is Murder" by Carol Goodman
From the publisher: Fred and Thea Morgan-Lane are the envy of the mystery community, the perfect partners in life and in writing. Together they coauthor the wildly successful Death Takes a Holiday series, and they've been invited to the Italian castle where it all began for a mystery conference celebrating their first novel, Death Takes the Castle.
But their story isn't quite the fairytale it seems to outsiders. Twenty years and twenty books after they met, Thea wants out. Their marriage and partnership haven't been working for some time, and what better place to announce the end of the series than where it started?
Except shortly after their arrival at the beautiful Castellarosa, a shocking death takes place when the wrong person drinks a cocktail meant for Thea. The stunned conference-goers put it down to an unknown allergy, but Thea isn't so sure. Could someone be trying to kill her? Perhaps her loving husband isn't as ok with their series ending as he pretends, or maybe Nadine, the upstart young author who is vying to take Thea's place, wants her out of the way. Suddenly, it seems like everyone has a motive, and when a second death occurs, a disturbing pattern emerges—these deaths aren't random, they're following the murders in Death Takes a Castle exactly. Murders that Thea and Fred wrote.
In order to save the day—and maybe even their marriage—the unhappy couple will have to work together to figure out who is using their book as a blueprint for a killing spree. That is, if they can trust the person they've spent twenty years plotting murders with…
Carol Goodman lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.
"Our Marriage is Murder" by Carol Goodman (ThriftBooks) $16
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Excerpt: "Our Marriage is Murder" by Carol Goodman
Chapter One
We are 36,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean when my husband asks me to plan a murder.
"How about defenestration from the top of the belltower?"
"Didn't we do that already in Death Takes the Castle?" I counter.
He rolls his eyes and I notice that he looks tired. Usually by this point in the flight he'd have his footrest up, his eye mask on, and be out until landing, but something has him on edge. Hence the murder plotting, an activity that has always soothed him. "We'll be hard pressed to find a murder method we haven't used. We've littered the globe with our victims."
[Excerpt continues several pages later, still in flight.]
Maybe you've heard of us? Fred and Thea Morgan-Lane (it was Fred's idea to hyphenate our last names because he thought it made us sound like posh Brits, while I thought it made us sound like a law firm). Or maybe you know our alter egos Rick and Dora Charles, the detective duo in the Death Takes a Holiday series. Our first novel, Death Takes the Castle, set in the Italian medieval walled village of Castellarosa, introduced Rick and Dora to each other and to the world. It won Best Debut novel at the Edgars and Agathas that year and got us a lucrative five-book deal.
Castellarosa is also where Fred and I met. I was doing research for my doctoral thesis on 12th century female scribes and medieval love poetry. I'd gone there because there was a legend attached to the castle that I thought might have inspired a poem by an anonymous 12th Century poet. I'd been spending my days exploring the walled city, hiking in the surrounding forest of holm oaks and myrtle and hawthorn, picking violets and cyclamen and hellebore and pressing them into my notebook. After spending the last three years cloistered in a library researching my thesis, I felt like I had been let loose into a living medieval millefleur tapestry. In the evenings I sat at an old taverna built into the city walls filling my notebooks—only not with the scholarly work I was meant to be writing. Instead, I began a story about a young medieval girl named Bianca Rosa who had fallen in love with a knight on his way to the crusades and the modern woman who discovers her secret and sets her ghost free. A fairy tale. An indulgence, I thought. A warm-up for the academic book I was meant to be writing.
One night I realized I wasn't the only one writing at the taverna. There was a young man about my age, in jeans and a tattered denim shirt that perfectly matched his eyes, sitting at a little table in the corner, with his own notebook spread out in front of him. Only instead of writing he seemed to be spending most of his time staring into space—or, I realized one night when I lifted my gaze from my story to meet his denim-colored eyes—staring at me.
"Mi dispiace," he said in American-accented Italian, "I didn't mean to stare. It's just that I've never seen anyone so lost in their work. You must be writing a masterpiece."
"I have no idea what I'm writing," I admitted, "but it's certainly not the book I'm supposed to be writing."
"Ah," he said, tapping his forehead as if he saw deep into my head, "that's your secret. You're cheating on one book with another. No greater pleasure than the illicit."
I felt my face flame in the candlelight and thought about my thesis advisor, Fraser Halliday, with whom I'd been having an illicit affair. I wasn't blushing because of the shame of that affair, though, but because I suddenly knew, looking into those deep blue eyes, that it was over. And then, because I was such a nerd that I always resorted to other sources when rattled, I quoted (from Proverbs, no less): "Stolen water is sweeter and food eaten in secret tastes better."
He grinned back at me (he had one lopsided dimple, I noticed, and a slight gap between his front teeth). "Maybe that's what I need, too, to cheat on this book with another—" He raised his hand to one side of his mouth as if shielding his notebook from what he was saying, "—because this one seems to be dead in the water."
"Ouch," I said, side-eyeing his notebook. "What did it die of? I think my thesis has died of exposure to the sunlight like the bloodsucking vampire it is."
He laughed so hard he spit out his wine and thumped his hand on his notebook. "I wish someone would drive a stake through this monster's heart and put us both out of our misery."
He was writing a novel, I soon learned, and had been since dropping out of his M.F.A. program (Iowa, no less!) three years before and taking to the road to write the great ex-pat bildungsroman. His models were Hemingway and Cervantes. He'd written some 200,000 words but still didn't have a plot.
"What you need," I told him, realizing over our second carafe of wine that it was what I needed too, "is a murder."
Copyright © 2026 from OUR MARRIAGE IS MURDER by Carol Goodman. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow Paperbacks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers