She’s mastered the art of work-life balance—until murder tips the scales.Assistant professor Cara Knight juggles raising two preschoolers, teaching social work, and chasing tenure, with a dean intent on derailing her hopes. When one of her students is arrested for murdering Washington D.C.’s chief medical examiner, and Cara inserts herself into the investigation, she risks far more than her career. Convinced of her student’s innocence, Cara stumbles into a tangle of city politics, grieving families, and secrets someone would kill to keep buried.
Can she diagnose the cause of death before she too ends up in the morgue?
Murder at the Waterfront is Book Three in the Academic Mom Mysteries. If you like clever sleuths, dry humor, and twisty whodunits, then you’ll love Jacque Rosman’s well-plotted puzzle.
People often ask me this, and I never have a good answer, because the honest one is: I have no idea, and I'm not sure I could find out if I tried. The reason: I don't write one book at a time. I don't even write one genre at a time. At any given moment, I've got a couple of academic journal articles in progress, an academic book crawling along in the background, and fiction, which used to just mean the Academic Mom Mystery series, but lately I've gone and added a cozy mystery series and a paranormal romance series to the pile, because apparently, I didn’t have enough to do. So when someone asks how long a book takes, what they're really asking is how long it takes me to finish a project I started somewhere in a rotation of six, none of which have a clean beginning or end date, all of which I'm circling back to in whatever order my brain decides on any given morning. I genuinely cannot tell you when I started this book, or the one before it. I can barely tell you which one I technically "finished" most recently, since, for me, finishing usually means handing it off to an editor, who will then give me more items to fix.
If Cara Knight juggles crime-solving, academic life, and two small children, I suppose my version of that same juggling act is a rotating cast of manuscripts, deadlines, and genres. I don't have her plot, but I do have the challenge of keeping all these balls in the air at once.
Write what you know — I take this extremely literally
Cara is my alter ego, in the loosest, most flattering sense of that phrase. We're all complicated enough as people that showing even one true sliver of yourself through a character still counts as writing what you know. You don't have to hand over the whole self to be honest on the page. Where I really lean into this, though, is in the minor characters. I have a habit of writing people I've wanted to throttle into my books instead of actually throttling them, which I understand is a far more socially acceptable coping mechanism than the alternative.
Pantser, through and through
I am not a plotter. I've tried to be. I am, at best, a discovery writer, which is a nicer way of saying I stumble around in the dark until I've built out enough of the next scene to see where I'm supposed to go after it. When I haven't fleshed out a scene, I don't just slow down. get a full failure of imagination, like the story simply refuses to exist further than the light I'm currently standing in. It's an inefficient way to write a mystery, where clues technically need to line up in the end, but it's the only way that's ever worked for me.
I've thought, more than once, about building a spreadsheet, tracking which clues get introduced where, what suspects are doing what, when, and what Cara knows at any given time and is planning. I even open Excel sometimes with good intentions. Then I look at those tiny little boxes, all that rigid gridded certainty, and my creativity goes stone cold. It's not how my brain organizes a story. So instead, I keep almost everything in my head, which works right up until it doesn't — balls get dropped, a clue shows up two chapters later than it should have, a detail contradicts itself, and then I go back and rectify it in editing. It's messier than a spreadsheet. It's also the only version of this process that has ever actually produced a finished book.
What do I do when I get stuck?
I get stuck all the time, sitting there with no clear idea what happens next, the story just refusing to keep talking to me. This is where writing six things at once actually pays off, instead of just being a chaotic way to live. When I hit a wall on the fiction side, I don't sit and stare at it. I switch to the academic writing instead. There's something about the shift that resets me: with fiction, I'm pulling a story out of thin air, but with academic work, I'm studying something that already exists — data, literature, an argument I'm building from material that's actually there in front of me. It's a different kind of thinking, and more importantly, it's thinking I can do without the well running dry. By the time I circle back to the novel, I'm not staring at the same blank wall anymore. Something's usually shifted.
What people don't realize about writing
It's been said before, by better writers than me, but it bears repeating: most of the work isn't writing the words. It's editing them. That first draft, pulling a story out of nowhere — that's hard, don't get me wrong. But it's editing where I really get stuck, sometimes for what feels like forever. The plot has to hang together as a logical construction — every clue, every timeline, every alibi has to actually add up when you trace it backward. Then there's the craft side on top of it: the actual phrasing, the rhythm of a sentence, trying to get the writing itself to a level I can be proud of, not just serviceable. Getting there takes an enormous amount of work, more than people who aren't writers tend to assume. If I'm going to get more efficient anywhere in my process, this is the stage that needs it — not the drafting, the editing. That's the part that swallows the time.
Where I actually write
We have a study upstairs. It has a desk, better lighting, probably better posture outcomes for my back. I basically never use it. I write in the same chair where I do everything else — academic writing, emails, the Zoom calls casual enough not to require the better camera angle upstairs. I don't like a desk, and I don't like the idea of being tied to one spot for the whole day. My chair works day or night.
So, how long does it take me to write a book? However long it takes to circle back to it often enough, between everything else, to eventually call it done. I wouldn't recommend my system to anyone. It's the only one I've got.
Jacque Rosman writes the Academic Mom Mystery series, featuring Cara Knight, a social work professor whose research instincts keep pulling her into investigations that are decidedly off-syllabus. With wry humor, Jacque mines the absurdity of academia and motherhood for a series that’s equal parts twisty and true-to-life, set in the nation’s capital. When she’s not plotting murders, Jacque can be found juggling her own version of the academic mom life. Join the newsletter for updates on Cara’s next case and the meals that she can get all her family to eat.
If you're a busy mom juggling work, family, and everything in between, I know exactly how overwhelming it can be to put a home-cooked meal on the table.That's why I've put together this collection of quick and delicious recipes, straight from the pages of my Academic Mom Mysteries series.
Thank you so much for hosting me and for giving me the opportunity to write about my writing process! I hope your readers enjoy Murder at the Waterfront!
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