Rosemary and Larry had just completed a series of mystery short stories for an online e-zine. They wound up publishing the collection as The Misadventures of Slim O. Wittz, Soft-Boiled Detective. Now, they were looking around for a new detective series. Honolulu, and the whole island of Oahu, was the natural choice for setting as…
Way, way, way back in the 1980s, when I was already a not-so-young adult, I read Martin Gardner’s Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. That book included an essay entitled “The Irrelevance of Arthur Conan Doyle.” In that essay, Gardner argued that Arthur could not have created Sherlock Holmes because the two personalities were so different.…
Hello everyone! I’ve been asked to write about the story behind the story, so here goes. First, please allow me a little background. Little Girl Gone is the second in the Claire Conover mysteries, and is the sequel to Little Lamb Lost. Claire is a child welfare social worker in Birmingham, Alabama. In Little Lamb…
White with Fish, Red with Murder is a noir-ish private eye tale. There’s a love triangle, tough guys, lying dames, a couple of murders, greed, lust, jealousy, and nefarious schemes. It’s the kind of stuff I like to read, and I thought I should write what I like. It started out with my 50th birthday.…
“A Darker Shore” was brewing in me ever since I finished the first draft of the previous book in the series, “A Poisonous Journey.” I had grown attached to the characters and to the rhythm of sitting down to write a novel. I knew that I wanted Evelyn, the protagonist, to have another adventure and…
The people at the Parliament House, a gay resort complex in Orlando, Florida, highly influenced the writing in Naked Alliances. The complex has seven bars with different themes, a full service restaurant, hotel suites, a pool, and the Footlight Theater. My husband and I attend the comedy shows and performances at the theater. My characters,…
I stepped up to the challenge of learning the craft of writing mysteries after I sent a manuscript for a mystery to a New York editor way too prematurely in my career. Lou Aronica sent back my critique and ended with these words, “I’m not sure you have the DNA to write a mystery.” Ouch! …
After dealing with a serial killer in Binary Witness and drug trafficking in Code Runner, I wanted to bring a different kind of crime to Cardiff in Captcha Thief. I had been fortunate enough to hold my wedding reception at the National Museum of Wales, and the stunning Impressionist collection had caught my eye. The…
I had an opportunity to travel to Dublin Ireland and even though I was writing another novel at the time, I was truly inspired by this beautiful country and the idea simple popped in my head. The antiquated cemeteries, the architecture and the overall history in Ireland was breathtaking. I ended up putting away the…
I was sitting at a light in the passenger seat of my boyfriend’s Xterra in Chandler, Arizona. We were driving around looking for garage sales, a huge addiction of mine that Dave, my beau, enables with his own lighter interest. He lived in Arizona, I lived in Michigan. We were enjoying just being together as…
The Story Behind the Book 