Murder and Motherhood

Five years after she completed a first draft of her novel about murder and motherhood, former Columbia Falls resident Marie Martin has listed the perfected manuscript on Amazon’s Kindle to resounding success.

Martin says “Maternal Harbor” had 911 downloads in the first week when it was launched on Kindle for free. In the next few days, she sold 31 electronic copies at $2.99 each.

Online comments from enthusiastic readers included “perfect balance of mystery, action and heart-racing tension” and “draws you in from the first well-written paragraph.”

One of Martin’s biggest fans is North Fork resident Marjorie Gravelle, who is proof-reading the Kindle version of “Maternal Harbor” so it can be issued in print form.

“It keeps you going,” Gravelle said. “A good page turner, easy to read, with lots of local color.”

The novel begins with four pregnant women who meet in an OB-Gyn clinic in Seattle. Within a few weeks, two mothers are dead and the third is chasing after Teagan O’Riley, who flees with the three babies to a cabin up the North Fork.

Growing up on a small farm on LaSalle Road south of Highway 40, one wouldn’t expect Marie Connor to be the author of six books since she started out with a typewriter in 1991. But she soon found herself surrounded by books after her mother, Edith Connor, became the Columbia Falls librarian.

“We didn’t have a TV in the house, and my mother read to us all the time,” Martin said.

Martin’s taste in reading was mostly mainstream — Nancy Drew and “Little House on the Prairie” when she was young, John Grisham later on, but she really likes historical fiction. She married Elmer Martin, a railroad engineer, when she was 16, and the job of raising four children took over her life after that.

Martin said she went back and got her GED, but the big change came in 1991 when her grandson in Miles City asked her to send some family stories for a school project.

“I started out writing short stories for him, but it soon turned into a book,” she said.

Soon after she finished “A Grandmother’s Story” in 1991, Martin sought sound guidance from Authors Of The Flathead, a group of local writers — published and unpublished — who provide advice on everything from grammar, style and voice to marketing.

“The big thing is marketing — it’s a hard thing to do,” she said. “I once had some New York agents tell me they were interested, but really I was at the bottom of the fish bowl.”

Over the next two decades, and several generations of computers and word processors, Martin turned out six novels.

She’s working on a new one, a literary novel about a woman building a home on an Eastern Montana prairie.

Martin said she took a course on novel writing from Dennis Foley and a Kindle seminar from Roxanne McHenry, both at Flathead Valley Community College.

She also stays active with an Authors Of The Flathead critique group that meets every other week.

The group currently has nine members, including four unpublished writers and one whose book is No. 4 on the Kindle list.

“It can be brutal at times,” she said. “You have to take it with a grain of salt. Sometimes it even keeps me awake at night. But they’re all good, honest writers.”

Martin enlisted the help of a tech-savvy friend to prepare “Maternal Harbor” for Kindle, who also helped her purchase cover art online for $30.

“Maternal Harbor” is available online at amazon.com as a Kindle e-book for $2.95 and as a print-on-demand paperback for $10.99.