Paula Munier's "Home at Night"

Paula Munier is a literary agent and the USA TODAY bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mysteries. A Borrowing of Bones, the first in the series, was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. The sequel Blind Search, inspired by the real-life rescue of a little boy with autism who got lost in the woods, was followed by The Hiding Place in 2021 and The Wedding Plot in 2022.

Here Munier dreamcasts an adaptation of her new Mercy Carr mystery, Home at Night:

In my Mercy Carr series, former MP Mercy and her bomb-sniffing dog Elvis team up with game warden Troy Warner and his search-and-rescue dog Susie Bear to solve mysteries in the Vermont wilderness. My heroine Mercy is a smart, fierce redhead; Rose Leslie, who played Ygritte on Game of Thrones, would be perfect. My hero Troy Warner is the stand-up guy you can count on in every emergency, the boy next door who’s more at home in the woods than in town, protector of forest and family alike. Luke Grimes (Yellowstone, American Sniper) has the right look; he’d wear the uniform of a game warden well.

In Home at Night, it’s Halloween and Mercy needs a bigger place to accommodate her growing menagerie of two- and four-legged friends before winter comes. Grackle Tree Farm seems perfect, with its thirty acres of woods and wetlands and a Victorian manor to die for—even when they tell her it’s haunted and Elvis finds a dead body in the library. Setting a book at Halloween allowed me to introduce a lively supporting cast of characters, including lost poets and missing children and Druids and ghost witches. I’d cast as Sir Patrick Stewart as the head Druid, a wise if eccentric leader. The ethereal Anya Taylor-Joy would make the perfect ghost witch, who's an apparition…or is she more?

Lee Child once described my writing as “a compelling mix of hard edges and easy charm” and if that’s true—and I’d like to think that it is—then I think the perfect director for Home at Night would be Patty Jenkins, who’s directed such amazing female-driven films as Wonder Woman and Monster, not to mention the pilot for one of my favorite shows of all time The Killing. She would understand Mercy Carr and make the most of the Ghost Witch of Grackle Tree.

Visit Paula Munier's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Paula Munier & Bear.

My Book, The Movie: A Borrowing of Bones.

The Page 69 Test: A Borrowing of Bones.

My Book, The Movie: Blind Search.

The Page 69 Test: Blind Search.

My Book, The Movie: The Hiding Place.

The Page 69 Test: The Hiding Place.

Q&A with Paula Munier.

My Book, The Movie: The Wedding Plot.

The Page 69 Test: The Wedding Plot.

Writers Read: Paula Munier.

--Marshal Zeringue