About Five-Alarm Fire
“Are you the person who normally checks the kiln?”
I started. He’d pronounced it “kill,” like a lot of people do.
Normally, we didn’t have a kill to check.
Crabby is how detective-in-training Cat Caliban has felt ever since menopause hit. Her friends think she can work off her aggressions pounding clay in a beginners’ pottery class. But someone has mistaken Cat’s pot for a blunt instrument and they’re firing something besides clay in the art center kiln. Now that things are really heating up, Cat’s murder investigation leads to a legendary lost collection of vases once owned by an equally legendary madam from Cincinnati’s bygone red-light district. Can Cat catch a killer before the past goes up in flames?
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Author Bio:
D. B. Borton is the author of two mystery series—the Cat Caliban series and the Gilda Liberty series —as well as the standalone mysteries recent novels Smoke and Bayou City Burning and the humorous science fiction novel Second Coming. She is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Wesleyan University.
A native Texan, Borton became an ardent admirer of Nancy Drew at a young age. At the age of fourteen, she acquired her own blue roadster, trained on the freeways of Houston and the broad stretches of oil-endowed Texas highway, and began her travels. She also began a lifetime of political activism, working only for political candidates who lost. She left Texas at about the time everyone else arrived.
In graduate school, Borton converted a lifetime of passionate reading and late-night movie-watching into a doctorate in English. She discovered that people would pay her to discuss literature and writing, although not much. But because she found young people interesting and entertaining and challenging, she became a college teacher, and survived many generations of college students. Later, during a career crisis, she discovered that people would pay her to tell stories, although even less than they would pay her to discuss stories written by someone else.
Borton has lived in the Southwest and Midwest, and on the West Coast, where she has planted roses and collected three degrees in English without relinquishing her affection for the ways in which actual speakers constantly reinvent the language to meet their needs. In her spare time, she gardens, practices aikido, studies languages other than English, and, of course, watches movies and reads.