This is a slick and clever mystery cloaked in the paranormal. Not all that ‘woo-woo’ stuff but rather heightened senses; something that we can all relate to.
Deja vu, intuition, and sometimes just ‘a feeling.’
But in this story our protagonists and antagonists….well no… just about everybody in the town of Fogg Lake has the gift. The unique part of this story is for a short while, the author makes believers out of most of us. To write more about the story would give away too much. I highly recommend it and fans of Krentz won’t be disappointed.
Jayne Ann Krentz (also writes under the pseudonym, Amanda Quick) is an excellent writer. And reliable. Whether she is writing historic romances or modern-day tales, her writing is always consistent and excellent. The Vanishing delivers.
Did you miss my Interview with Jayne Ann Krentz?
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Every time I read the newest release in the Sullivan’s Crossroads series I think to myself, ‘This is the best book in the series’. Nothing has changed.
The Country Guesthouseis deliciously good. All the reoccurring characters from previous books in the series appear again. As the reader returns to the campground and country store once more, we pick up where we left off in the last book. Like I said, ‘delicious!’ There is a wonderful love story between a woman, a man, a boy and a dog. And who doesn’t love a love story with a few bumps in the road?
Lots of twists and turns in this story, which I won’t elaborate on since I don’t write spoilers. But suffice it to say, you will be rooting for the new lovers and the newly forged family all along the way.
I highly recommend this book to my readers!
Did you miss my Interview with Robyn Carr?
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I’ll end the year with a little poetry about the love from dogs and affection from cats. Don’t groan….ewww, poetry...I think you’ll find the poetry funny if you have either cats or dogs. I’m blessed with both. Rescued of course.
Molly & Barcode
Cat Love
Don’t ruffle my fur that direction! You’re doing it all wrong! I’ve got it looking just the way I want.
I love you but I’m very busy today.
Don’t move, this is my lap time and I’m very comfy.
Scratch right there, no a little more to the left, a little higher, to the right.
Petey & Barcode
Look what I’ve brought you–isn’t it beautiful? I killed it in the garden.
That’s what we’re having for dinner?
You need to work on how you pick your friends. I don’t like that one and besides he had the nerve to sit in my chair!
I could find a better human, you know, if I put in some effort…
But I guess you’ll do…for now.
Dog Love
Stack Dogs
Pet me, pet me, pet me! Oh boy! A butt rub!
I love you to the ends of the earth and beyond!
I’ll just lay here quietly, I won’t bother you, as long as I can touch you.
In memory….Gus
Throw the ball! Throw the ball!
Again! Again!
I love my dinner, you’re such a good mommy!
‘Walkie’, ‘go outside’, ‘go for a walk’, ‘let’s go pee-pee’. Yippee! Where’s my leash?
In remembrance, Sam
I love your friends. That one scratched my ears and told me I was a good dog.
You’re home! You’re home! Why were you gone so long….it doesn’t matter now…You’re home!
The Lost are the Last to Die by Larry D. Sweazy is a new, old west tale.
Fans of westerns are going to love this story. Set in the early 1900’s, the horse is being replaced by the automobile, the Great War has just ended and the lawlessness of the ‘old west’ is being rooted out.
Ranging from 1911 (flashbacks) to 1934 (present time for this story) Sweazy’s hero, Sonny Burton has enjoyed a stellar career in law enforcement. Surviving fighting in the Great War, he comes home and joins the Texas Rangers. But life has served up a couple of career changing setbacks and Sonny must find new meaning in what seems like a meaningless life.
The writing is superb. Larry leads the reader on an exciting chase with many twists and turns in the plot. Sonny Burton gives the reader someone worthy of rooting for. We want him to win even when it seems most unlikely.
My Review of other Sweazy books.
Did you miss my interview with Larry Sweazy?
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MY BLOG features INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS! December: Dervla McTiernan – January: David Poyer To receive my posts sign up for my
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Q. and the all-important: What does the process of going from “no book” to “finished book” look like for you?
DM. It has been different with every book, honestly, and I expect (hope!) that this will continue. For the last few books the first draft has been fast and it is getting faster. I think about a book for months before I start writing so I have a pretty good understanding of the key characters and situation before I start. And I always outline. But as I become more experienced I am also trusting my instincts much more, making decisions faster and leaning on my emotional responses to things. I think (hope!) that that is making for stronger books. Then my book goes off to my editors and I get very detailed structural editorial notes back. I really like to go to town with a structural edit. I take at least two months, sometimes three, to take a book apart, down into the sum of its parts, and rebuild it into something stronger. It’s ferociously hard sometimes, but very worth it. Sometimes a book doesn’t need that much work, of course. With The Good Turn only one storyline needed a significant rewrite, but I can always find something to do to make the story stronger. I try to put as much effort and energy and creativity into the edit as I did into the early drafts. It takes staying power, honestly, because the more you work a book the harder it gets…but it’s worth it.
My tiny desk
After that we have copy-editing, which is much easier, and then a proof-read. I keep tweaking right up to final pages, and I always do one final read-through where I read the book out loud, trying to work on the rhythm of the lines. When it’s finally done I never want to see the book as long as I live! And then I see the cover and I remember why I loved it in the first place.
Q. How has your life experiences influenced your writing?
DM. In every possible way. I’ve drawn on elements of my life for every single book I’ve written.
Q. What’s your down time look like?
DM. Down time for me is mostly not really down time! The wonderful thing about being a writer is that you have maximum flexibility. But I’ve written at least a book a year over the past few years, sometimes a book and a novella, and that’s really a full time job if you want to produce quality books. Until a year ago I had a part-time day job too. And I have primary school aged kids. So I choose to arrange my writing day around the children – I write when they are at school, but I also have to do the usually household tasks during that time, which cuts into precious writing time. I spend most of my afternoons with the kids (and believe me, I know how lucky I am that I have that choice!) but it does mean that I usually still have work to do when then are asleep. For a long time I started my day at 6 am and finished work for the day at around 10 p.m. These days I usually get at least three nights off a week and I love to curl up on the couch with my husband and catch up on TV. This year’s favourites so far – Chernobyl, Morning Wars and His Dark Materials. TV is so extraordinarily good right now and the writing is very inspirational.
Q. Have you or do you want to write in another genre`?
DM. I have a couple of long running stories that I write for the kids when I have time, and I would love to try my hand at properly writing a middle grade fiction some time. I do have a story in mind. But there are so many other stories I want to write first that I never seem to get around to it. Not that there’s any guarantee that I would be any good at it…but I’d really like to try!
Q. Note to Self: (a life lesson you’ve learned.)
DM. There have been so many. But the need for balance, maybe, has been the hardest lesson to learn and the most rewarding. When I was younger I saw hard work as the answer to every problem. That worked for a while…until I hit a few walls that were tougher than I was and paid the price. Now instead of throwing myself up against things in mad bursts of energy and effort, I try to do smaller things but very, very consistently. I rely on routine, I try to go easier on myself and take some time for relaxation and honestly, I am more productive and far happier.
Did you miss Part 1 or 2 of this wonderful interview? Click here
The exclusive Club that only faultless writers belong to is, in my view, a small membership. John Steinbeck, Robert Service, Dean Koontz, Charles Bukowski , Jane Austen, and most certainly, Catherine Ryan Hyde.
Does Hyde even know how to write a bad sentence? Are the first drafts as lovely as the final product? Or does she scourer her work until it’s perfect? Doesn’t matter. Stay is perfection. And after I read Have You Seen Luis Velez? I didn’t think it could get any better. I know, I know, I sound as though I must be Hyde’s sister-in-law or something. I promise I’m not. What I am is a very discerning reader and lover of books and stories.
Lately I had written a post for my blog, (about writing) and the need to always have conflict in your story. A complex story line (which you should always strive for as a writer) has a lot of loose threads to ‘tie up’. Hyde is a master at both. Multifaceted tales with every loose thread tied. In the last ten pages of the book I had a meltdown because she hadn’t revealed what had happened to the two dogs. And then there it was.
As my readers know, I don’t write spoilers so you will never get a synopsis of the story in my reviews. What I will tell you is Stay is a compelling, heartbreaking, shocking (at times) story full of friendship and hope. While I was reading it, the song ‘Amazing Grace’ would flitter through the auditory cortices of my brain. Because sometimes human beings can be full of amazing grace. Buy this book, read it and tell me I’m wrong.
Available at all book stores.
Did you miss my Interview with Catherine Ryan Hyde?
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Continuing with my Interview with Irish-born author, Dervla McTiernan
Q. What first inspired you to write?
DM. I’ve been an obsessive reader since I was three years old, and at a certain point reading became less satisfying to me, which was awful. I still read constantly, but it felt like something was missing. It took me a long time to realise what was missing was writing my own stories. As soon as a realized that I could experience the same joy and pain, the same highs and lows in writing my own stories I was utterly hooked and I knew I would never stop, whether or not I was ever published.
Q. What comes first to you? The Characters or the Situation?
DM. Character first usually, then situation.
Q. Do you ‘get lost’ in your writing?
DM. Yes. Absolutely. Usually when I am deep into a first draft – maybe after the forty/fifty thousand word mark. Characters come alive and the story really takes off and I just want to stay in it all of the time.
Q. Are you working on something now? If so tell us about it.
Musha
DM. Yes…but I’m not allowed to talk about it! Which is a pain because I am VERY excited about this story.
Q. When did you begin to write seriously?
DM. 2014. That was when I gave myself permission to really take it seriously. I had been playing with the idea of doing an MBA, because I wasn’t particularly happy in my job. An MBA would have taken five years part-time, and when I really thought about it I realized I had absolutely no urge to go back and study again, nor had I any real interest in studying business. What I had always wanted to do, and never ever thought I could do, was write. Given the massive changes we’d already made in our lives (moving to Australia from Ireland in 2011) committing myself to writing didn’t seem all that crazy! So I kept working part-time, and when the kids were in bed I would write for two hours, every night, except Thursdays (wine-night – very important).
Q. How long after that were you published?
DM. I signed my contract with Harper Collins in October 2016, and The Ruin was published in Australia in February 2018, and shortly after that in the US (Penguin) and the UK/Ireland (Little Brown) and then a few other territories followed. Then The Scholar came out in 2019, and The Good Turn will be out in 2020.
Q. Do you think we will see, in our lifetime, the total demise of paper books?
DM. No, genuinely, no. I think with the absolute ubiquity of smart phones, we’ll continue to see growth in audiobooks. People still love story; they’re just so time pinched that they have to try to fit them around everyday life. But for me personally, there’s something that switches off in my brain on those occasions when I get to lie down on the couch with a paper book in my hand, screens and phones off or away from me. It’s such a release from the constant connectedness of my daily life. I think there’s a reason that the growth in ebooks has pretty much stopped and paperback sales are stable. We all want that release. That moment of indulgence.
Q. What makes a writer great?
DM. To me it is a writer is great if they can create characters who feel genuinely real to me. Characters I care deeply about.
Musha
Characters I want to spend time with. Everything is secondary to character for me. I absolutely love the Robert Galbraith crime novels, which are just getting better and better I think (Lethal White was awesome) because I love Cormoran and Robin and I want to be in their world. I love to disappear into a book the same way I used to when I was a kid, and that happens so rarely now but it’s no less intensely joyful when it does.
Q. and the all-important: What does the process of going from “no book” to “finished book” look like for you?
To find out, don’t miss Part 3 of this fascinating Interview ~~ January 27th
Did you miss Part I? Click here
Robert B. Parker’s voice remains strong and his stories continue thanks to writers like Ace Atkins. Ace has written most of the ‘Spenser’ series since Parker’s death in 2010.
Angel Eyes incorporates character favorites like Chollo, Victor Del Rio, Bobby Horse (from Spenser’s L.A. days) Sixkill, Susan Silverman, and while not featured in this book, Pearl, the Wonder Dog is referred to with love and warmth.
It’s a good story about cults and people who are chewed up and spit out by them. The bottomless corruption of the soul just to “Make It” infects many citizens of Hollywood and L.A. The new characters are well drawn and this review still wonders how another writer, no matter how accomplished (and Ace Atkins is that is spades), can duplicate the flavor and style of one such as Robert B. Parker. All I can say, is I am glad Ace has that added talent so that Parker’s stories can continue.
These stories are so well drawn that it’s just a tiny bit creepy while reading, when all along the reader knows that Robert Parker has passed. These writers are that good! I highly recommend this latest offering.
Darvla was born and raised Irish. But moved to Perth, Western Australia in 2011 with her husband, their two-year-old little girl …and was 36 weeks pregnant the day they landed. She was a lawyer in Ireland but very burned out by the time they emigrated, and says she was, “keen never to practice law again”. When she went back to work, it was part-time, and eventually she started writing. Her first book, The Ruin, was published in 2018, with The Scholar following in 2019. My third book, The Good Turn, is out next year.
New study
Q. Where do you write? Do you have a special room, shed, barn, special space for your writing? Or tell us about your ‘dream’ work space.
DM. I have a tiny study off the kitchen of our home, and most of the time that’s where I write. It’s small, but to me, just perfect and we just did a mini-renovation and now I really love it! Writing so close to where the kids spend a lot of their time is probably not ideal, but I have some excellent noise blocking headphones that take care of that!
When I started out we were living in a very small rental home with dodgy electrics – we couldn’t have the oven and the air con on at the same time or the whole system would trip. I used to write at a tidy corner of the kitchen table when the kids were in bed. The house was way too small for us so the detritus of the day inevitably surrounded me. I just had to learn to close my eyes to it all!
Q. Do you have any special rituals or quirks when you sit down to write? (a neat work space, sharpened #2 pencils, legal pad, cup of tea, glass of brandy, favorite pajamas, etc.)
DM. I am ridiculously picky about notebooks. I go through different phases but at the moment I like the A4 sized Clairefontaine notebooks and gel pens– I change colour when I start a new book. I usually write free hand for at least half an hour before I move to my computer. I write notes about the scene I’m planning on writing that day. Thoughts about the characters and setting. What the characters know going into the scene, their mind-set, snippets of dialogue, all of that kind of thing. By the time I get started properly with fingers on the keyboard I usually have a pretty clear idea of where I’m going, which leaves me free to think about how I want to get there.
Before…
Q. Could you tell us something about yourself that we might not already know?
DM. Hmm. Tricky one! There are lots of things but it’s hard to think of something people might be interested in! I have a golden retriever, who lies outside my bedroom door every morning to guilt me into take her for a walk. She loves a good walk because she is ridiculously social and wants to chat with every human in the park and be generally admired. What she does not like to do is run. I’ve started running again for the first time in years (for running read *gentle stagger*) and she objects by lying down or dawdling along two hundred metres behind me. If I put her on the lead I have to tow her around like a little tow truck, and everyone in the park looks at me like I am cruelly punishing her. Then I let her off the lead and she spots a dog she likes and she’s off running like a crazy thing. It’s all very frustrating.
Q. Do you have a set time each day (or night) to write?
DM. I used to have a very strict routine – 8pm to 10pm every night, because I was working around kids and a day job. Now that I’m writing full time I generally write between 9.30am and 2 pm, and then again at night from 8pm for an hour or two. Not all of that will be active writing time. I have emails to deal with, of course, and the usual admin stuff that somehow manages to creep into my day despite my best efforts! And household tasks. But I will try to get a minimum of two hours active writing time a day and ideally that will be closer to four or five.
Q. What’s your best advice to other writers for overcoming procrastination?
DM. Respect the story and respect your instincts. If it feels wrong then maybe it’s time to backtrack and see if you lost the organic thread of the story somewhere. Or if your story is fine and your procrastination is just coming from that fear/avoidance place we all have, I think it can be useful to trick yourself into it. Make a really nice cup of tea, find some chocolate, sit down and tell yourself you’re just going to have fun for a while. Write in a notebook rather than on your computer. Write some random scene from later in your book. Do an exercise where you write your character first person if your book is usually third. Basically anything at all that feels more interesting than scary. Usually I find that within half an hour the fear is in my rearview mirror and I am writing again.
Q. Where/when do you first discover your characters?
DM. Everywhere and anywhere! Only one character ever came to me fully formed, and that was Maude Blake from my first book, The Ruin. I had this very clear picture in my head – two children, sitting on a stairs in a crumbling Georgian mansion deep in the Irish countryside. Maude was fifteen, and Jack only five. They were holding hands. The house is very, very cold, all the lights are off, and it’s getting dark outside. I knew that they were afraid. I knew that Maude loved her brother so much, that she had protected him from the moment he was born and that now she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to protect him from what was coming next. And that was it. I knew Maude from the top of her head to the bottom of her feet but I didn’t know anything else, not what had brought them to that place nor where they would go next. I had to write the story to find out.
Q. What first inspired you to write?
Join us for Part 2 of this interview with Australian author, Dervla McTiernan
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MY BLOG features INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS! December: Dervla McTiernan ~~ January: David Poyer To receive my posts sign up for my
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Susan Mallery always delivers a solid story. The Summer of Sunshine and Margot was no exception. I found the main characters (Sunshine & Declan, Margot and Alec) empathetic and charming. I had a little trouble with Margot’s career and the services her company offered. Was she a life coach? A therapist? A baby sitter for adults? It was never made clear.
And that leads me to write about one character, in her story. Bianca. She was an aging film star who evidently had been indulged her entire life. The result was an implausible, spoiled brat. Immature, thoughtless, reckless and a bully. I worked in Hollywood many years ago and her antics would have led her to be, at the worst, blackballed. Or at best, she would have been considered a ‘difficult’ actress when casting a film and to be avoided. Difficult actors cost money. I found her outrageous behavior tiresome and unbelievable.
The character of Bianca was the reason I couldn’t give this book my highest rating.
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MY BLOG features INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS! December: Dervla McTiernan ~~ January: David Poyer To receive my posts sign up for my
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something that we can all relate to.
