#Handbag Monday's guest - Cori Arnold What's a Queen Bee? #Mondayblog #RssosSisters #MFRWorg #mysteries

 Handbag Monday's guest is author

Cori Lynn Arnold

who grew up in the town of North Pole, Alaska. She has worked as a hotel housekeeper, handy woman, laundry attendant, radio disc jockey, library clerk, historical photographic archivist, mathematics tutor, teaching assistant, art work framer, photo lab junky, portrait and wedding photographer, high school algebra teacher, internet security researcher, security analyst, computer programmer and ethical hacker. She currently knits, quilts, and writes novels in her attic in Connecticut.

I'm a no-nonsense kind of handbag girl, but I still like it to be pretty. I found this bag while on a trip to Portland, Oregon for the Left Coast Crime conference last year. It fits my iPad, but isn't too bulky and has a long strap to wrap around my shoulders like a messenger bag.

I travel quite a bit, and I've found that the handbag gets noticed too! "Isn't that a Queen Bee?" a woman asked me in the Dulles Airport a few months ago. That doesn't happen for my no-nonsense purses too often.

Cori - is Queen Been a specific brand of handbag? Do tell!

Cori just told me that this is the link to the handbags: Queen Bee

Angry over being kicked off a case in Rochester, New York, Detective Louis Baker makes a rash decision to fly to Alaska when her partner, Detective Bert Hicks, calls from North Pole, Alaska to bail him out of jail.

 

Louis stepped off the plane into a tiny “International” airport. She felt like a walking zombie as she rode the escalator down to the main level. The hallways were playing an instrumental version of “Santa Baby.” For a moment she thought she was hallucinating a giant polar bear standing in front of her, but as she approached she realized it was stuffed. She’d never seen a polar bear before, stuffed or otherwise, and didn’t imagine they were so immense. The fact that it was not pure white, but yellowed like a shirt that has been washed in hard water a few times too many, was also surprising.

Ed walked up to her at the luggage carrousel, “Nice one isn’t it?”

“Are there polar bears here?” Louis asked.

“Nah, you have to go a few hundred miles north to run into a polar bear. They used to have one in Anchorage at the zoo, ‘Binky.’ He was famous in the nineties for biting a woman and stealing her shoe. He kept that shoe for three days.”

Louis was confused. “How was a bear at the zoo able to bite a woman?”

“She wanted a good picture, so she climbed over three fences to get to him,” he said. “She was Australian. You’d think they’d know about dangerous animals.”

Louis laughed. “There’s nothing in Rochester so dangerous, except people.”

“Yeah, people can be pretty bad around here, too,” he said with a sigh. “Cabin fever, you know?”

Find Northern Deceit at: Amazon

Find Cori Arnold at: Facebook

Thank you, Cori, for being with me today. I love the cover of your book! North Pole, Alaska sounds incredibly cold.