Marnie Schulenburg’s first novel was this amateur detective mystery, put out by Write Way Publishing. It’s the tale of a standoff between a fame-hungry killer demanding his slice of immortality, and a newspaper denying him that platform. All it has in common with A Test of Survival is its social-issue focus.

Murder Off the Record received about a dozen reviews; snippets from some of them are provided below, or click on the book cover for two complete reviews and three excerpts on Amazon.

Though she rarely does anything commercial with them, Marnie also writes short stories for fun. A mystery press in the UK picked up a story she wrote called Cages in the late nineties, and in October of 2004, she and her writing buddies entered a ’24-hour contest’ sponsored by The Capital Times and the Wisconsin Book Festival. The story’s common topic was released to contestants at noon one day in the form of a photo of a painting by Andrew Valko showing a couple locked in a full-body press of a kiss, standing inside a brightly lit booth at a drive-in theatre. All stories were due before noon the following day (ergo, the ’24-hour’ moniker.) A panel of judges headed by author C.J. Hribal awarded Marnie an Honorable Mention for her somewhat racy story – Tommy O Heaven – which you can read here.