From the Booking Desk:

I will be in Barbara Ross territory next month for New England Crime Bake (followed by a vacation in Maine), so this seemed the perfect time to invite her to participate in our weekly Composite Sketch series. Barbara’s most popular series is the cozy Maine Clambake books, but Barbara also launched a new cozy series featuring a “professional” busybody earlier this year. Let’s find out some more about Barbara Ross with her answers to our weekly questions.

Name: Barbara Ross
Location: Portland, Maine

This person from my personal life is such an inspiration:

I have to go with my husband, Bill Carito. He has supported me in everything I’ve ever done, not just the writing thing, but the crazy job thing that came before it, the family thing. Everything in my life that has mattered.

One of the people I admire most in the crime fiction community is:

It says something about the crime fiction community that this was the hardest question to answer–there are so many fabulous candidates. But, as she finishes up her year as President of Sisters in Crime, I have to give a shout out to Sherry Harris, who took on this enormous and important job even while launching a second mystery series to follow her first highly successful one, and who provided tremendous leadership and was never impatient or petty or whiny or scolding in situations where I would have been all of them. In a recent Wicked Authors blog post, I described Sherry’s protagonist, Sarah Winston, as “a deeply loyal friend, open-minded and forgiving” and everyone who commented on the post said, “That’s Sherry!”

STALKER ALERT! If this fictional character were real, they would likely need to get a restraining order against me:

For this one I have to go with Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Reg Wexford who is my favorite series detective. In Wexford, who appeared in twenty-four books over nearly fifty years, Rendell created a fully-realized and complex character without relying on the over-used and cliched troubles of so many fictional sleuths. He was the primary inspiration to me to write a series character.

People are always surprised that I am a fan of this individual (singer, actor, or artist):

I watched multiple seasons of So You Think You Can Dance and went to a post-season tour performance at least five times.

My personal catch phrase is (or should be):

“You should be writing!”