LITERATURE + LECTURES

Blue Willow Bookshop presents  Lisa Lutz.  (pictured, photo by Morgan Dox).

Join us for a very fun evening out with Lisa Lutz, the author of The Spellman Files. This series is a laugh-out-loud look at one of the craziest families you'll ever meet. Lisa will be in town to discuss and sign her latest Spellman book, The Spellmans Strike Again. At the ripe old age of 32, former wild child Isabel "Izzy" Spellman has finally agreed to take over the family business. Let's just say the transition won't be a smooth one.

Her first priorities as head of Spellman Investigations are to dig up some dirt on the competition—slippery ex-cop Rick Harkey—and to track down a stolen screenplay called The Snowball Effect. Next, faced with a baffling missing-persons case at the home of an aging millionaire, Izzy hires an actor friend to infiltrate the mansion as an undercover butler. Only he enjoys the role a little too much.

Meanwhile, Izzy is being blackmailed by her mother, who threatens to distribute photographic evidence of Prom Night 1994 unless Izzy commits to regular blind dates with promising professionals—an arrangement that doesn't thrill Connor, an Irish bartender on the brink of becoming ex-boyfriend #12.

At Spellman headquarters, it's business as unusual. Doorknobs and light fixtures are disappearing every day, Mom's been spotted crying in the pantry, and a series of increasingly demanding Spellman Rules (Rule #27: No Speaking Today) can't quite hold the family together. Izzy also has to decipher weekly "phone calls from the edge" from her octogenarian lawyer Morty, as well as Henry Stone's mysterious interest in rekindling their relationsh ... well, whatever it was.

Just when it looks like things can't go more haywire, little sister Rae's internship, researching pro bono legal cases leads the youngest Spellman to launch a grass-roots campaign that could get an innocent man out of jail—or land her in it.

This installment in the bestselling, award-nominated series is hands-down the most hilarious, thrilling, and moving one yet. And it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Isabel Spellman, no matter how much she matures, will never be able to follow Rule #1: Act Normal.

Lisa Lutz grew up in Southern California. After graduating high school, she attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, University of Leeds in England and San Francisco State University, although she still does not have a bachelor's degree.

Lisa spent most of the 1990s hopping from a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting a mob comedy called Plan B. After it was made in 2000, Lisa vowed she would never write another screenplay. She began working on The Spellman Files in January of 2004. In the fall of that year, she drove across the country and moved into a 200-year-old house in the town of Westernville, New York (pop. 300). It was there Lisa shoveled snow and wrote the bulk of her first novel.

After her months in Westernville, Lisa returned to the west coast—and moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Seattle where she stayed for a while to write Curse of the Spellmans. She's recently returned to San Francisco and has promised her friends and family that they won't have to update her entry in their address books again for a long while.

Publisher's Weekly says, "Narrator Izzy's biting wit—mixed with a refreshing dose of humility and sadness—easily carries the story."