Janet Dawson & Gigi Pandian: September 19 Literary Salon

Join Mystery Readers NorCal for an evening Literary Salon on September 19 at 7 p.m. in Berkeley with Bay Area Mystery Writers Janet Dawson and Gigi Pandian.

Janet Dawson 

Janet Dawson has written ten novels featuring Oakland private investigator Jeri Howard. Her first, Kindred Crimes, won the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers of America contest for best first private eye novel. It was nominated in the best first category for three mystery awards, the Shamus, the Macavity and the Anthony. Other Jeri Howard books include Till The Old Men Die, Take A Number, Don't Turn Your Back On The Ocean, Nobody's Child, A Credible Threat, Witness to Evil, Where The Bodies Are Buried and A Killing at the Track. A book of ten short stories, Scam and Eggs, was published in 2002. A new Jeri Howard novel, Bit Player, published by Perseverance Press in April 2011, was nominated for a Golden Nugget Award for the best mystery set in California. Her stand-alone suspense novel What You Wish For will be published by Perseverance in September 2012.

In the past, Dawson was a newspaper reporter in Colorado, and her stint as a U.S. Navy journalist took her to Guam and Florida. As an officer in the Navy, she was stationed in the San Francisco Bay Area. After leaving the Navy, Dawson worked in the legal field. She is now on the staff of the Physical Biosciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and resides in Alameda, California.

Read a Guest Post by Janet Dawson

Gigi Pandian

Gigi Pandian is a mystery writer, photographer, and graphic designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the child of two cultural anthropologists, one from the southern tip of India, the other from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

She graduated from Pitzer College and went on to graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Bath in England. Before completing her PhD, she realized she was much better suited to writing about the fictional adventures of academics than being one herself. She left academia for art school, and began writing the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Series. The first book in the series, Artifact, was released August 28, 2012.


Pandian was awarded the William F. Deeck Malice Domestic Grant for Artifact. The grant is given out every year at the Malice Domestic mystery convention to foster the next generation of traditional mystery writers.

A month after her 36th birthday, Gigi was diagnosed with breast cancer. To get through her treatments, she decided to throw herself into her mystery writing. She’s happy to report that she’s doing well. Life is still uncertain, though, so she plans to have a lot of fun in life as she travels the world with her husband, camera, and notebook for writing mysteries.

Read Gigi's Guest Post HERE.

Please RSVP for more information and location.  Potluck Sweets & Savories.

Treasure Hunting with Gigi Pandian

Gigi Pandian is a mystery writer, photographer, and graphic designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the child of two cultural anthropologists, one from the southern tip of India, the other from Albuquerque, New Mexico. After being dragged around the world during her childhood, she tried to escape her fate when she left a PhD program in favor of art school. But adventurous academic characters wouldn’t stay out of her head. Thus was born the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt mystery series. Gigi was awarded a Malice Domestic Grant for her debut mystery novel, Artifact, which was released August 28, 2012.

Gigi Pandian will appear at a Mystery Readers Literary Salon with Janet Dawson on September 19

GIGI PANDIAN: 

One of the reasons I love Janet’s Mystery Fanfare blog is that her posts short and sweet – a combination of intriguing photos with interesting tidbits she knows mystery lovers will appreciate. So when Janet asked me to contribute a post here, I thought I’d give you some background about my debut mystery novel, Artifact, in a style appropriate to this blog – through photos.

In Artifact, the first book in the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Series that came out August 28th, historian Jaya Jones travels from San Francisco to London to the Highlands of Scotland, piecing together the secrets of a lost Indian treasure hidden in a Scottish legend from the days of the British Raj.

I wanted to write a mystery that combined a puzzle plot of a traditional mystery with a treasure hunt adventure. I know treasure hunts are traditionally considered a guy genre, but why let guys have all the fun?

I’ve loved treasure hunts since I was a kid, and I never outgrew that fascination. I got a taste for treasure hunts firsthand when I tagged along with my anthropologist parents on their research trips. Dunnottar Castle in Scotland inspired the setting of Artifact.

Dunnottar Castle was once used as a hiding place for the Scottish Crown Jewels. How can you look at this view and *not* want to write a mystery involving a treasure that takes place along the dangerous cliffs of the Highlands of Scotland?

Traveling in India, I was overwhelmed by the living histories of so many different cultures. I’m more familiar with Scotland, but I knew I wanted to weave Indian history into the story, so I created historian Jaya Jones, whose historical expertise is the British East India Company.

I spent years having fun scribbling story ideas in notebooks, and I might never have gotten my act together to finish the novel had it not been for the Malice Domestic Grants Committee. They saw potential in the book and awarded me a William F. Deeck Malice Domestic Grant. I used the grant to travel to the UK to finish doing research for the novel at the British Library in London.

Suspense Magazine says “If Indiana Jones had a sister, it would definitely be historian Jaya Jones,” and I hope other readers will agree.