What do you do when you find your grandfather dead half an hour before your cousin’s wedding? You hide him in his bed and tell everyone he didn’t feel like coming.
Delayed Death is an entertaining mystery set in Florence, Italy. When Carlina finds her grandfather dead on the day of her cousin’s wedding, she decides to hide the corpse until after the ceremony. However, her grandfather was poisoned, and she becomes the attractive Inspector’s prime suspect. On top of that, she has to manage her boisterous family and her luxurious lingerie store called Temptation, a juggling act that creates many hilarious situations.
Delayed Death is the first mystery in the series Temptation in Florence. The second, Charmer’s Death, and the third, Banker’s Death, are also available. http://amzn.to/VMeCUz
Auntie M asked me to write about strong women, and when I started out with that topic, I first wondered what defines a strong woman. Is it success? Is it the fact that she can live alone, without help from anybody? Is it, just to mention one particularly difficult task, being able to raise a family single-handedly?
I’m not so sure. 
She may not be successful because she may have turned her back on the stuff that she would have had to do to be traditionally successful. Maybe she wasn’t willing to sacrifice herself for that. That’s not a sign of a weak woman. Maybe she can’t live alone and needs help – and to a certain extent, we all do need help at certain points in our lives.
Nevertheless, I would not say that this makes us weak women. Raising a family single-handedly certainly is something that requests iron strength and great organizational capacities. Sometimes, however, this makes us more feel like a wreck than a strong woman.
No, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that to me, the most important feature of a strong woman is a woman who manages to be happy. Whatever you do and whoever you are, if you are happy with what you do, then you are strong.
You are strong because you have made the right choices for your personal happiness. You are strong because you held fast to your beliefs, no matter what others said. Being profoundly happy with your life is something that doesn’t drop from heaven above. It comes because you were willing to fight for the things you believe in and to see them through. It comes from getting over hurt feelings, of leaving the past behind you and of moving on.
The heroine in my cozy mystery series Temptation in Florence is a strong woman. She has her own little universe – a lingerie store in the historical center of Florence, Italy. It is tiny and her family is not always sure that this is a good profession, but she loves her job.
She once was engaged to a very rich man who owned a large estate / vineyard. However, when she realized that he expected her to give up her job and independence and to be the perfecting accessory in HIS universe, she broke off the engagement – much to the horror of her large family. But she is happy, and that’s what counts. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know her!
Beate Boeker is a traditionally published author since 2008 and has 11 novels and short stories online available. Some of them were shortlisted for the Golden Quill Contest, the National Readers’ Choice Award, and the “Best Indie Books of 2012” contest.
Beate is a marketing manager by day and a writer by night. She has a degree in International Business Administration and her daily experience in marketing continuously provides her with a wide range of fodder for her novels, be it hilarious or cynical.
Widely traveled, she speaks German (her mother language), English, French and Italian and lives in the North of Germany together with her husband and daughter.
While ‘Boeker’ means ‘books’ in a German dialect, her first name Beate can be translated as ‘Happy’ . . . and with a name that reads ‘Happy Books’, what else could she do but write novels with a happy end? 
Although being German, she has chosen to write in English because she appreciates the professional support and training opportunities a writer can find in the US.
Learn more about Beate at www.happybooks.de
Contact:
Beate Boeker
Mischief & Humor from Page 1
Website: www.happybooks.de
Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Beate-Boeker/153573758044433?ref=ts&fref=ts
Twitter: @BeateBoeker
Goodreads author page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1679907.Beate_Boeker
Book trailer: http://www.happybooks.de/104-0-the-question.html
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Beate-Boeker/e/B001JSC5DC
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Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff 