Bliss book signing set Friday

Author and retired Southeast Missourian reporter Mark H. Bliss will sign copies of his inaugural mystery novel, “Foul Rising,” at a book signing Friday at the historic Glenn House, 325 S. Spanish St., in Cape Girardeau.

Mark Bliss

The book signing is part of the Moonlight at the Glenn festivities, which follows Tunes at Twilight, starting at 7:30 p.m.

“Foul Rising” is Bliss’s first novel and is centered in the fictitious, present-day, Southeast Missouri, Mississippi River town of Elmwood. As floodwaters rise in the city, which has many similarities to Cape Girardeau, so do tensions between city dwellers there and rural residents across the Big Muddy, where homes and farmland are being flooded. A recent murder, believed to be linked to this conflict, puts newspaper reporter Connor Tate and fellow reporter Rachel Short on a whodunit trail to find the murderer.

Bliss is already at work on his second Elmwood Mystery novel, which will feature many of the same cast of characters.

Bliss is an award-winning journalist who spent more than three decades in the newspaper business, most of that time as a reporter for the Southeast Missourian newspaper in Cape Girardeau. Over the years, he covered numerous floods in Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois, and interviewed both proponents and opponents of floodwalls, which fueled his desire to write this novel.

For more information, visit www.facebook.com/markhbliss15 or www.mbliss3901.wixsite.com/elmwoodmysteries.