Vanishing Into the 100% Dark (Bean to Bar Mysteries)
by Amber Royer
I am delighted to welcome Amber Royer to Escape With Dollycas today!
Calicos in Japan, or Why Felicity Hangs out with a Cat in This Book
In each of my Bean to Bar Mysteries, my protagonist hangs out with a different animal. She has babysat an octopus, in a book focused on marine life. She unraveled the clues hidden in the cryptic phrases repeated by a cockatoo in a story that dealt with shipwreck treasure. She hung out with a tuxedo cat in A Study in Chocolate. So why is she spending time with a cat again in Vanishing into the 100% Dark?
The Bean to Bar Mysteries are set in Galveston. Felicity, my protagonist, is a bean to bar chocolate maker who loves to travel. We’re at the eighth book in the series and I decided it was finally time to show her traveling. In Book 7, I had a character invite her to a chocolate festival in Tokyo. One reason for this is that I’ve visited Tokyo a couple of times, and it felt like a place my characters would enjoy. I also try to highlight something about Galveston in each book in the series. And Galveston just so happens to have a sister city in Japan. It wasn’t practical to have the characters actually travel to Niigata, which is four hours from Tokyo by car. I had to settle for introducing a character from Niigata.
Calico cats are popular throughout Japan – and in Niigata Prefecture, there’s even a cat mascot for one of the villages. Nyankichi, a cat with a snake on his head, started out as the mascot for a local walking tour, but was eventually adopted as the official mascot for the village of Sekikawa.
In another town in the same prefecture, there was a fire in 1931 which destroyed much of Shirone City. There was a festival to help revive the city called the “Shironeko Koushinkyoku” (“Shironeko Parade“). Ko added to the end of the city name referred to the children of the city – but it turned the pronunciation into the same as, “shiro neko,” or “white cat,” so participants wore white cat masks in the parade. There have been some attempts to revive this festival in recent times.
When cats first arrived in Japan, only wealthy individuals were allowed to own cats, which are believed to have been imported from China. But cats proved too useful to limit. Cats have historically been important to the Japanese silk industry (alongside other businesses) for controlling rodents and other pests.
Even where it is less practical, cats are enjoyed for the stress reducing effect they provide. Today, cat cafes are popular for those who can’t have pets at home. (This trend has been around for a while. The first cat café in Japan opened in 2005, and there was a boom in openings through roughly 2010. An episode in the first season of Samourai Cat, which aired in 2014, reimagines history to allow for an explanation of the benefits of cat cafes.) 
February 22 is cat day, because in Japanese, cats say, “nyan,” instead of, “meow.” And the number two is pronounced “ni.” So when you say that date quickly, it kind of sounds like meowing. For the past several years, convenience stores including Family Mart and 7-11 have produced special cat-themed snacks available only for a couple of weeks at the end of February.
There are even roughly a dozen islands off the coast of Japan where significant feral cat populations exist. In Aoshima, the most famous of the cat islands, the cats are estimated to outnumber people 6 to 1. A recent influx of tourist visits to the island has overwhelmed the permanent residents (as there isn’t infrastructure to handle numerous visitors). Attempts have been made on Aoshima to spay and neuter all the feral cats to reign in the population.
Station Master Tama was a cat mascot for the then-failing Wakayama Electric Railway Co, a private railway that runs from Wakayama city to Kishi in Kinokawa. Not only did having a cat in an official hat draw enough people to the line to save the station, it also turned the area into a tourist destination. You can ride a train decorated with images of Tama and even visit with successor station master cats, Nitama and Yontama (Tama 2 and Tama 4).
Tama was, of course, a calico. If there is a cat in a folktale in Japan, chances are it too is a calico. Japanese sailors are said to have kept calicos as their ship cats because of a belief that they would bring good fortune. (Probably the same reason that the popular “beckoning cat” statues are also calicos.) Even the cat seen in the giant billboard in Shinjuku is a calico.
While in my books Felicity isn’t particularly superstitious, I introduced a calico because of their popularity in Japan. In Vanishing Into the 100% Dark, Honda the Calico belongs to the director of a movie being filmed across the street from where Felicity and her friends are exhibiting at the chocolate festival. When the studio is unexpectedly closed as a crime scene, Felicity winds up in charge of the cat. She gets to learn a few things about cat care and experience the stress-relieving factor of cat purring along the way.
Because the movie being filmed is a kaiju (giant monster) film, it seemed appropriate to name her Honda, after the guy who wrote the first Godzilla movie. It also gave me the opportunity to have one of the characters make a, “Like the car?” joke. (If you know my work at all, you know I’m always going to go for the joke.) I hope you check out Vanishing into the 100% Dark, and get to meet sweet little Honda yourself.
Thank you, Amber, for visiting today!
Keep reading for more information about Amber and her new book!
About Vanishing Into the 100% Dark
Vanishing Into the 100% Dark (Bean to Bar Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
8th in Series
Setting – Japan
Publisher : Golden Tip Press (March 4, 2025)
Print length : 324 pages
Digital ASIN : B0DT2DW97B
Bean to chocolate maker Felicity Koerber has been invited to be part of a chocolate festival in Tokyo. It’s a big deal for a Texas gal with a chocolate shop on Galveston’s historic Strand, so a whole group of her friends come along to support her. It’s intimidating enough to be giving a class on chocolate making with the help of a translator – she also stumbles across the scene of a murder, where a quirky group of international actors and stunt performers are making a monster movie. Felicity has already solved half a dozen murders back in Texas, so at this point her friends basically expect her to get involved – even before the young media influencer in Felicity’s group becomes the main suspect. Felicity has taken on the role of chaperone for Chloe, so she can’t imagine how she could explain what went wrong to the girl’s mother. Which gives her even more motivation to figure out the real killer.
In the meantime, things get complicated at the chocolate festival when a rival chocolate maker tries to get her disqualified from the awards competition – and claims that her amateur sleuth status is bringing undesirables into the festival. And things are even more complicated as the stress of being in an unfamiliar place brings out secrets about Felicity’s friends – and her fiancé.
About Amber Royer
Amber Royer writes the Chocoverse comic telenovela-style foodie-inspired space opera series, and the Bean to Bar Mysteries. She also teaches creative writing and is an author coach. Her workbook/textbook Story Like a Journalist and her Thoughtful Journal series allow her to connect with writers. Amber and her husband live in the DFW Area, where you can often find them at local coffee shops or taking landscape/architecture/wildlife photographs. They both love to travel, and Amber records her adventures on Instagram – along with pics of her pair of tuxedo cats. If you are very nice to Amber, she might make you cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes, of course! Amber blogs about creative writing technique and all things chocolate at www.amberroyer.com.
Author Links
Website: http://www.amberroyer.com
Blog: http://amberroyer.com/blog/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberroyerauthor/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Amber.Royer.Author/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoA_29HV2nPmRnox9LPVanw
Twitter: https://twitter.com/amber_royer
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Amber-Royer/e/B00PFV4CGM
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8144619.Amber_Royer
Purchase Links:
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I’ve been teasing a wedding in my 
, and it’s finally time for it to happen in the sixth book, 
. My protagonist, Felicity, is matron of honor for her BFF Autumn, who is getting married in a historic mansion on Galveston Island. Autumn is independently wealthy, so obviously her budget allows for her to pull out all the stops. And since I never had a giant seven-tiered wedding cake, planning the details of 
the scenes meant I got to live vicariously through her. And since I am a bit extra, I intentionally planned to release the wedding-themed installment in my series the week after my anniversary, to spend a little more time in the glow of all the romance. While the book is a cozy mystery, so obviously bad things do happen, this is the book that brings together so much of the character-building Felicity has done so far over the series. And now that she has moved on from grief, and figured out who she is, she’s given herself until the day of Autumn’s wedding to choose between her two love interests. Which means I finally got to write the scene that has been books in the making, where she confesses her love.
But as for researching the logistics of Autumn’s wedding itself – I had a bit of fun with it. Jake and I went to a bridal expo to get ideas, and at every table we approached, someone asked us if we’d chosen a date yet. I’d explain that we’d been married for many years – but that the characters in my book were getting married. This proved to be a good conversation starter. Wedding planners started to open up and tell us about the craziest things that had happened to them or their clients at weddings. We talked to a DJ who made me promise that the bad guy in my book wouldn’t be a DJ. I even met another writer, who gave me a bookmark for her historical fiction. But more importantly, I learned a few things about logistics that wound up going into the book. For instance, I found out that in Texas, if alcohol is going to be served at a venue, there has to be on-site security, which changed a number of things about the way I had to write the climactic scene. Because those guys weren’t going to just stand around and let heroes and villains play things out in front of them. Honestly, I think the way I wound up writing it was more interesting than what I had originally planned.
And the ideas that were sparked from visiting with vendors included the idea of the outdoor coffee and cocktail carts, which started out as just fun set dressing when Felicity was exploring the venue, but likewise came in handy for getting characters in the right place at the right time.
I love getting to do the kind of research where you get to see and taste and ask questions you might otherwise not have thought to ask. That’s one of the things I love about being a writer. You have a reason to travel and to go to events, and people talk to you about their passions and careers because you are asking specific questions. (Sometimes I’m even proposing scenarios – such as when I was doing research for one of the earlier books in the series and needed to know what artifact from a pirate ship my characters could potentially find.) Because of that, living through your characters, while true, can sometimes turn into just living and writing a version of that. And your lived experience helps feed the emotions on the page, whether the experience and the fiction line up 1 to 1 or not. I know what it’s like to be in love, though not in a love triangle. So I can write Felicity being nervous to share how she really feels. At the same time, I get the whole wish-fulfilment thing of having 
her throw a fancy party with all the things I would love to do if I could go back in time, because that’s where the conversation with the big emotional payoff is set. There’s that synergy sometimes in making art, where you get to feel braver than you really are because that’s what the character you are writing feels, or you’re able to come up with the witty comeback at just the right time because the scene pauses until you get it perfect. It’s a fine line between that and indulging in vicariously living through the characters in a way that brings the plot to a halt, gives the characters impenetrable plot armor, or bores readers as you meander. But I think honest art does require you to put something of yourself into the book, to some slight degree, in most of the characters, concerns and themes.
. She is also the author of
, which boils down her writing knowledge into an actionable plan involving over 100 worksheets to build a comprehensive story plan for your novel. She blogs about creative writing techniques and all things chocolate at 
It is my pleasure to shine my spotlight on
. She is also the author of STORY LIKE A JOURNALIST: A WORKBOOK FOR NOVELISTS, which boils down her writing knowledge into an actionable plan involving over 100 worksheets to build a comprehensive story plan for your novel. She blogs about creative writing techniques and all things chocolate at
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