Mainers pen book of murder, love, lavishness

Julia Bayly of Fort Kent and Penney Gray, who lives in the Rumford area but works at her family’s Harraseeket Inn in Freeport, have been friends for years.

Dogs and mushing brought them together. Gray was mushing in the annual Can-Am Crown International Sled Dog Race in the early years of the 14-year tradition when they met. Gray brought Bayly into dog sledding.

Now, they have another connection – one that involves a 296-page police romance-mystery. Together, under the pen name of Julia Penney, they have written and published “Her Sister’s Keeper” with Harlequin Super Romance.

OK. I’m not one to read Harlequin Romances either, but when it was dropped off on my office desk, I believed there was an obligation there. Not just because there is a nearly two-decade friendship with Bayly, and that we have worked together over the years, but because the authors took the time to bring the book around.

It came with a cryptic note: “This is what happens when a reporter has too much time on her hands,” Bayly wrote on a note left with the book on the office desk.

Reading the book was a pleasant surprise. I liked it.

While Bayly has written for newspapers and magazines for years, a book was a new, albeit novel, experience.

Gray, on the other hand, has done six books for Harlequin. Her first book, “Across A Thousand Miles,” was published in 2002 under the pen name of Nadia Nichols. It’s about a female musher competing in the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race.

“She said I could do this,” Bayly remembers of the first time they talked about a book. “We got together two years ago, and 18 months later, we had a book.

“They wrote alternate chapters. The only rule they had was that one could not change what the other had written,” Bayly said. “We each wrote chapters, directions changed, and we finished a book.”

Bayly said they wrote after brainstorming a plot for a “mystery kind of thing.”

Harlequin wrote back that they wanted it, and they were published.

“We had fun doing it,” Bayly said. “Getting published was a bonus.”

The two share a birthday, both love dogs and both live out of the way – Gray in the mountains of western Maine and Bayly in a rustic house mostly built by her and her husband on a back, out-of-the-way road in Fort Kent.

Their 18 months of work was published earlier this year. They are working on a sequel.

In “Her Sister’s Keeper” Melanie Harris and Kent Mattson, a psychologist and forensic police investigator, are thrown together when two people are murdered. Harris’ estranged actress sister and her young baby go missing. Harris looks to Mattson, reluctantly, for help to face a major crisis in her life.

On the day Harris is to be wed to Mitch Carson in a Beverly Hills ceremony, she finds out her sister, Ariel, is pregnant with Carson’s baby. The sisters naturally become estranged. It is just months later, after her initial visit with Mattson, that Harris’ best friend, Stephanie, is murdered. Carson is murdered as well, and Ariel and the baby go missing.

Harris and Mattson meet again the same day of her initial appointment with him at an apartment where her sister is supposed to be living. Stephanie was murdered there. Carson had died previously, and now his death looks suspicious.

The setting involves the glitz of Beverly Hills, including movie types and lives of excess. The ending, naturally, brings in an entirely different person as the murderer and lovers who ride off into the sunset for a better life together. After all, it is a romance and perhaps that’s the reason it was published by Harlequin Super Romance.