Matt reports on Saint's dirt-road girlfriend Millie, and the morning the two dogs swapped houses and each ate the other's breakfast.

BJ's ginger cat, Dr. Watson, plays fetch with a toy mouse, on his own terms.

Jim's cat Tuppy has a kitchen "launch pad" for leaping at tossed ice cubes, while his other cat, Boko, would rather bully Tuppy and fear the doorbell. Both are shelter adoptees, or as Jim puts it, "used cats."

Leon turns up in all seven Ellie Stone mysteries, always with a different owner and always on his way to or from doing his business. He plays no part in the plot, just a running Easter egg for faithful readers.

Only once, in Heart of Stone, do we learn how he got his name: his owner named him after Trotsky.

Jim's favorite pet from crime fiction: Asta from The Thin Man.

Ellie is a small-town newspaper reporter and photographer in upstate New York in the early 1960s, and, as Jim says, usually the smartest person in the room, especially when men underestimate her.

Jim talks about the challenge of writing a woman's point of view as a man, and how beta readers, the distance in time, and the many strong women in his life helped.

With a Dante-scholar father for Ellie, Jim drew on his own love of Italian: Styx & Stone opens the series, and the seventh book, Turn to Stone, echoes Boccaccio's Decameron with ten guests telling stories in a villa above Florence.

Jim says there are maybe three good "stone" titles left, but for now he's enjoying writing standalones. Matt shares that he's self-publishing the seventh book in his Mainely Mystery series in December.

Jim wrote about 80,000 words of the first draft in roughly 40 days over a summer, then spent a couple of years polishing it while his agent shopped it around.

He describes it as psychological suspense rather than a mystery: the reader knows the secrets up front, and the tension comes from two characters who don't.

It opens with a prank that turns deadly, and follows what happens next, a story about bad judgment and a growing danger.

Matt and BJ are both pantsers, and Matt explains why that makes revision a bit like writing the mystery in reverse.

Jim's cautionary tale: when you fix one detail, check what else you just broke, from weekday dates to how many bottles of wine are in the apartment.

Cyanide is a fast-acting respiratory poison that hits oxygen-hungry organs like the brain and heart.

It also occurs naturally in the pits and seeds of fruits like peaches, plums, apricots and apples, and in cassava.

BJ shares the history of the 1982 Chicago-area Tylenol poisonings, which led to today's tamper-resistant packaging.

Read more on BJ's Poison Blog.

Jim blogs every other week at Seven Criminal Minds, and he'll be at Bouchercon in Calgary, Alberta, October 21–25, and at New England Crime Bake in Dedham, Massachusetts, November 6–8.

James W. Ziskin's Website, Instagram and Facebook

BJ Magnani's Big Blend Expert Page and her website

Matt Cost's Big Blend Expert Page and his website