‘You always have to follow your passion’
SF writer releases mystery novel
Peggy van Hulsteyn has a way with words. She’s had plenty of practice as a decades-long writer. And now the Santa Fe-based author has released her 10th book — “The Art of Murder.”
After years of writing autobiographically, van Hulsteyn always wanted to write a mystery.
“I love mysteries,” she says. “The way they are able to create a scene. Mysteries are a great vehicle for satire and it’s a challenge. Plotting is very difficult. It was a challenge to complete.”
Van Hulsteyn was diagnosed with Parkinson’s years ago and has since been an advocate. Though the disease has altered her speech, it doesn’t silence her voice. This is a reason she never really stops writing.
For the better part of 10 years, Van Hulsteyn continued to shape “The Art of Murder” during her spare time.
The novel takes the reader to many familiar sights in the city famous not only for its art, culture, history and architecture, but also for its long list of quirky, colorful individuals.
Van Hulsteyn added Los Alamos, the nearby secret city on the hill, and old mountain villages north of Santa Fe to the mystery.
The novel follows Micaela (Mickey) Moskowitz, a Santa Fe-born New York journalist, who returns home for the funeral of her sister who died under suspicious circumstances.
She is joined by Berg, her
physicist paramour, and fiery District Attorney Lupita, her closest friend, to help solve a growing number of crimes. An array of shady characters helps form the plot.
Van Hulsteyn and her husband, David, who worked for years as a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, have long enjoyed living amid — and being actively involved in — the eccentricity of Santa Fe, its art and cultural worlds, and studying its centuries of mysteries.
She has had a distinguished career in addition to her work in Santa Fe: Assistant Travel Editor at “Mademoiselle,” articles for “Cosmopolitan,” “Modern Bride,” “Country Living” and “American Way,” and newspaper pieces in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Examiner and USA Today.
She founded an award-winning advertising agency in Austin and served as a director of publicity for American International Pictures in Atlanta.
Through all of her experience, writing has been at the forefront.
“I’ve always loved the sounds of words and the way good writers can use them,” she says. “I’ve written about what I know. You always have to follow your passion.”