Aaron Lazar is available for literary events - seminars, book clubs, library functions, radio shows, etc. Contact him at aaron.lazar@yahoo.com for dates and fees.
Following is a bio/blurb with topics of potential interest.
Aaron Paul Lazar wasn’t always a mystery writer. It wasn’t until eight members of his family and friends died within five years that the urge to write became overwhelming. “When my father died, I lost it. I needed an outlet, and writing provided the kind of solace I couldn’t find elsewhere.”
Lazar created the Gus LeGarde mystery series, with the founding novel, DOUBLE FORTÉ (2004), a chilling winter mystery set in the Genesee Valley of upstate New York. Like Lazar’s father, protagonist Gus LeGarde is a classical music professor. Gus, a grandfather, gardener, chef, and nature lover, plays Chopin etudes to feed his soul and thinks of himself as a “Renaissance man caught in the 21st century.”
The creation of the series lent Lazar the comfort he sought, yet in the process, a new passion was unleashed. Obsessed with his parallel universe, he now lives, breathes, and dreams about his characters, and has written nine LeGarde mysteries in seven years. (UPSTAGED – 2005; TREMOLO:CRY OF THE LOON – 2007 Twilight Times Books; MAZURKA – 2008 Twilight Times Books, with more to come.)
One day while rototilling his gardens, Lazar unearthed a green cat’s eye marble, which prompted the new paranormal mystery series featuring Sam Moore, retired country doctor and zealous gardener. The green marble, a powerful talisman, connects all three of the books in the series, whisking Sam back in time to uncover his brother’s dreadful fate fifty years earlier. (HEALEY’S CAVE: A GREEN MARBLE MYSTERY, 2008; ONE POTATO, BLUE POTATO, 2009; FOR KEEPS, 2010) Lazar intends to continue both series.
Lazar’s books feature breathless chase scenes, nasty villains, and taut suspense, but are also intensely human stories, replete with kids, dogs, horses, food, romance, and humor. The author calls them, “country mysteries,” although reviewers have dubbed them “literary mysteries.”
“It seems as though every image ever impressed upon my brain finds its way into my work. Whether it’s the light dancing through stained-glass windows in a Parisian chapel, curly slate-green lichen covering a boulder at the edge of a pond in Maine, or hoarfrost dangling from a cherry tree branch in mid-winter, these images burrow into my memory cells. In time they bubble back, persistently itching, until they are poured out on the page.”
The author lives on a ridge overlooking the Genesee Valley in upstate New York with his wife, mother-in-law, and pugapoo, Sadie. Recent empty nesters, he and his wife are fixing up their 1811 antique home after twenty-five years of kid and puppy wear. He works as an electrophotographic engineer at the Eastman Kodak Company, in Rochester, New York, and plans to eventually retire to write full time.
Lazar maintains several websites and blogs, is the Gather Saturday Writing Essential host, writes his monthly “Seedlings” columns for the Voice in the Dark literary journal and the Future Mystery Anthology Magazine. He has been published in Absolute Write as well as The Great Mystery and Suspense Magazine. See excerpts and reviews here:
Contact him at aaron.lazar@yahoo.com.
Aaron is comfortable discussing:
- Gus LeGarde Mysteries
- Moore Mysteries (green marble mysteries)
- Finding time to write
- Character development
- Commonalities between engineering and writing
- Benefits of print books versus ebooks
- Writing for therapy and stress relief
- Word Painting, literary writing
- Links between writing and photography
- Selling books at wineries
- Writing series books that span decades
- etc.