Berkeley Heights' Homegrown Author

Roberta Isleib, a clinical psychologist and the author of Advice Column mysteries and Golf Lover's mysteries, will be coming by the blog on September 9 for an interview about her newest mystery, Asking for Murder. Roberta is originally from Berkeley Heights and in a strange twist of fate her books are published by Berkley. There's even a story on her web site, Paying the Piper, that is set at Governor Livingston.


The Advice Column mysteries are set in Connecticut, where Dr. Rebecca Butterman counsels her patients and is an adjunct psychology professor at Yale. In her free time she solves murders, naturally, and also writes an advice column for an online women's magazine. If you'd like to catch up on the series, the first two installments are Deadly Advice and Preaching to the Corpse (available in the large print section at BHPL under ISL).

I enjoyed all the little bits of information about psychology that you pick up as the story unfolds (like never sit between a patient and the door!). There is also a very funny part in Deadly Advice in which Dr. Butterman can predict what her own psychoanalyst will say during their sessions (which she needs because her own personal life and history is not neat and tidy).