What:

I write small-town mysteries and suspense, featuring female amateur sleuths. Most of my stories grow out of family dramas and close relationships, where the tension between secrets and loyalties fuels the stories. I’ve always loved elegant old houses and mansions, and they often become characters in my books, but in Misery Cove, a rundown lakeside motel drives the action.

My novels are usually set in the present day, although one, a historical suspense set in 1942 and 1966, still haunts me, and I plan to rewrite it as soon as I finish my current WIP, a novel linked to Misery Cove.

Over the years I’ve completed three full novels and abandoned several half-finished ones. Misery Cove became my debut novel when it was published on February 4, 2026, proving that the writers’ mantra, Never Give Up, is true!

Why:

Like many writers, my love of writing began with a love of reading. As a child, I stayed inside devouring those hard, shiny-covered books: Trixie Belden, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew. I read so much my dad said I was escaping the world. Maybe I was.

I still read to escape, so I read mostly fiction, mixed with autobiographies and biographies. But as a writer, I’m able to create a world and live in it while I develop characters and the communities they inhabit. (I actually do go out a lot, though.)

How:

Inspiration often comes from details in news articles, Facebook posts, and my own experiences. More than one Misery Cove reader recognized the “real” town behind the setting, and a future novel–the one after the historical–will take place in a condo complex like mine, where a mansion sits on a nearby hilltop.

Once I develop a storyline, I choose names for the main characters, decide on the ending, and then plot the story through the midpoint.

Bio:

When Janice Rydzon was eleven, she spent the summer with her grandmother in her hundred-year-old mansion in a historic Los Angeles neighborhood. She wasn’t wealthy and took in boarders to make ends meet, but to Janice, the house felt like a castle, and she felt like a princess in it.

The staircase had panels Jan was convinced concealed a secret nook, a door with a frosted glass window on a landing that was always locked, and a once-elegant conservatory that looked like an ideal place for a murder. That summer, she read every Nancy Drew book she could find.

A few years later, Jan’s father built a cottage in a no-frills Michigan beach town. She spent many weekends there over the years and eventually wrote portions of Misery Cove in that cottage, drawing inspiration from the town’s faded charm and creepy cemeteries. Both the mansion and cottage helped shape her love of atmosphere-rich stories full of buried truths.

When she’s not writing, she’s reading a good mystery, working on a jigsaw puzzle, golfing, travelling with her husband Tom, or walking past the historic mansion near her home—which may just appear in a future novel.

When her estranged mother drowns under suspicious circumstances, Erin Brady is forced to confront a past she thought she escaped. But her return home sets off a cascade of unsettling events, including arson and more deaths. Besides her investigation, Erin must also heal fractured relationships and restore the family’s crumbling shorefront motel.

In Misery Cove, silence runs deeper than the waters of Lake Michigan. Everyone has secrets. Everything has a price. And the cost of coming home may be Erin’s life.

Links:

Website
Facebook author page
Buy Misery Cove from Amazon
Buy Misery Cove from Bookshop.org

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Linda K. Sienkiewicz’s upcoming novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, is about an anxious overthinker whose fixation on a stranger pulls her straight into chaos, heartbreak, and the inconvenient unraveling of her carefully constructed life.

Preorder Love and Other Incurable Ailments, and she’ll be forever grateful.
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