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Publication Date: December 2012

ISBN: 9781927454787

Genre: Humor/cozy mystery

Time Period: contemporary

Location: A beach town in Central Florida

Season: One Florida year

Author’s Name: Julie Eberhart Painter

About Medium Rare:

Penny, sequential character from Julie Eberhart Painter’s award-winning Kill Fee cozy, volunteers as a bereavement caller at a local hospice. She runs into a whole new set of nutty buddies. Hospice workers, subject to burnout, romp through the offices chased by a psychic medium, who uncovers their life secrets with eerie accuracy. The hapless humans become entangled in her predictions made in the mysterious Cassadaga, FL

Excerpt: Barney Allison, the preacher with a secret travels to Cassadaga, FL to meet Celeste the psych.

He parked in the old hotel parking lot so no one he knew would recognize his car. Holding Celeste’s address, he walked the three uneven blocks to her house. It occurred to him if she were really psychic he wouldn’t have needed to make an appointment; she’d have been expecting him. He’d given a false name, both to test her and to protect himself. She’d told him to enter by the porch. He looked at her shingle, an obtrusive piece of wood that made the street look like part of a gypsy camp. He walked to her porch door and knocked. A cardboard sign on the screen read, “If you do not have an appointment, please take a seat on the porch.”

Barney pulled open the screen door, stepped onto the porch and knocked on the inside door.

An older woman, not in the least scary looking, came to open it. “Come in, Henry.

The name he had given her unsettled him.

“Come this way, we’ll talk in the back.”

Her voice was soothing even though it cracked with age. He followed her through the house to a glassed-in porch with a view of myrtle trees. Spanish moss dipped toward the windows swinging in the breeze. He could smell the tinny odor of vegetable soup coming from the kitchen, unmistakably Campbell’s. The whole house reeked of canned tomatoes and decay.

She turned to face him, her clear blue eyes so much younger than her face. She smiled and took his hands in her seventy-year-old-palms. Their eyes locked as she reverently intoned: “God the Father, guide us and bless us

as we seek the truth.”

“Amen.” Barney whispered, automatically.The sound of his voice made him wince. He hoped he wasn’t giving anything away with that amen.

Author Bio:

Julie Eberhart Painter, a Pennsylvania transplant now living in Central Florida, is the Champagne Books author of Mortal Coil, Tangled Web, and the 2011 Book of the Year, Kill Fee, and Medium Rare.

Julie reviews books for a prestigious online romance review site, and is a regular contributor to Cocktails, Fiction and Gossip Magazine, an online slick. Bewildering Stories has published nine of her flash fictions tales

Julie swims, plays duplicate bridge, and reads—a lot. It was a duplicate bridge game in Central Florida that prompted the first book in this Three Penny (amateur sleuth) Mystery series.

Medium Rare is a peek inside a “wild and crazy” character-driven hospice office. Think of The Office on gallows humor. Bilgewater, the foul mouthed fowl from Kill Fee, has competition from a new mascot, Croakette, a Kermit like frog doll. Croakette dresses in appropriate attire for Florida’s climate, such as a wet T-shirt and biker babe leathers complete with a makeshift helmet for Bike Week in Daytona. When “working” she might show up in a nurse’s uniform. When left in the potted palm overnight, her golf balls drop off. She undergoes a breast reduction. Hersey’s kisses replace the originals. One never knows what she’ll be wearing, but it keeps the office laughing while the staff goes about their bizarre lives. Medical people: doctors, social workers, and nurses love this book.