Carla Sinclair is the likeable TV sports anchor in Vancouver. She’s driven to do the best job she can and break stories before her competition. She does this well because she knows the Warriors inside and out. When defenseman Devin Miller gets traded to Vancouver, Carla isn’t impressed. She thinks the team is doing fine without him and his attitude. They first met when Devin was with a visiting team and Carla interviewed him. She didn’t like his cold personality and never forgot his cinnamon-colored eyes that made her stumble on her words. When Devin becomes a Warrior, Carla speaks her mind on-air about his extravagant paycheck. She wants an interview to find out more about his trade, and Devin is curious about Carla’s persistent behavior and why she cares about what team he plays for. As the two get acquainted, their chemistry builds and she can’t quite manage the fact that falling in love again isn’t in her future. After all, she’s still hung up about her divorce and the several miscarriages she had. She doesn’t think she’ll ever settle down again or be lucky to fall in love again. Devin is secretive about his upbringing. He hasn’t spoken…

Great news! The newest book in the Saxon Series will be out next year AND the first book’s adaptation, THE LOST KINGDOM, has already entered into production. BBC will air the Matthew MacFayden (PRIDE AND PREJUDICE) drama in 2015, but until then catch up with Bernard Cornwell, author of THE EMPTY THRONE, in a exciting new Q&A. THE EMPTY THRONE is out on e-book, print, and audio on Tuesday, January 6th. Q.: You have now written eight books in the Saxon Tales series. How many more are planned? What is next in store for the characters? I wish I knew! I can’t plan a book, let alone a series, so every new tale is an adventure. I’ve always thought the joy of reading a book is ‘to see what happens’, and that’s also the pleasure of writing one. I usually have no idea what will happen in the next chapter, and the only way to find out is to write it! That said, there are one or two obvious pointers in the books so far – Uhtred will regain Bebbanburg and a new country, called England, will emerge from the long wars. Essentially the Saxon series is about that; the…

Do you have any strange collections? Recently my husband cleaned out a cabinet under the sink and found that I’d been hoarding wet-ones without knowing. It wasn’t something I use excessively and I’m absolutely not an obsessive clean person. I think I just saw them in the grocery and thought “Oh, I probably need those”–about ten times or maybe twenty. My husband lined them up on the counter. These aren’t the little boxes of wet-ones. Nope, I seem to have an unknown fetish for the big round containers of Clorox Wet Wipes in various scents. Why had I felt it necessary to buy them over and over again? You’ll love this—because they kept disappearing. I would bring home bags of groceries which my family helped put away. Apparently the Wet Wipes belonged under the sink and hubby would stash them there without saying a word regarding the other boxes that were multiplying like crazy nor telling me where they were. I could never find them because I preferred to put them in another spot. My spot housed an empty container so I assumed someone in the family was burning through them like they were candy. Once I was informed of…

Most of the mysteries on my bookshelf, I confess, are cozy mysteries. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the genre, cozies are a subgenre of crime fiction where the crime and the detection takes place in a small town. Remember the old Murder She Wrote series? That’s a good example of a cozy. The detectives in such stories are nearly always amateurs (cue JB Fletcher) sometimes retired lawmen or women. The majority of the detectives are of the female persuasion, and often hold jobs that bring them into contact with the other residents of their town. More often than not they’ll have a contact on the local police force who’ll help them out with a clue or two. The killers aren’t usually hard-boiled serial killer types, and once unmasked, are most often taken into custody with little or no violence. If there is violence, it happens offscreen…no grisly murder scenes depicted in any cozies! Foul language is also kept to a minimum. The murders are generally members of or related to someone in the town wherein the murder occurs and the motives – greed, jealousy, revenge – often are deep rooted. Cozies frequently revolve around a theme –…

Drop from trees like overripe mangos, I should say! A couple of years ago, I began to plan my Key West mystery series. I had the idea for a food critic wannabe named Hayley Snow, but I needed other characters. As I wandered through the crowds at the Sunset Celebration at Mallory Square in Key West, I spotted a tarot card reader set up at a card table, wearing a deep blue turban with an enormous teardrop rhinestone bisecting his forehead. What if my protagonist, Hayley Snow, was addicted to having her cards read because she was insecure about her own decisions? And what if her tarot reader saw a card scary enough that even he got rattled? And what if she his reactions to dig herself into deeper trouble? And so Lorenzo the card reader was born as a character. Then, as I walked around the city, I noticed that homeless people were everywhere, including perched on the stone walls around Mallory Square watching the performers and the tourists. Though they blended into the scenery, they probably noticed all kinds of things that visitors wouldn’t see. And so Turtle and Tony became characters. And then I attended the Key…

Do you have a favorite fairy tale? Mine is Cinderella, but I am no Disney princess. While I love pumpkins, I’d rather turn one into a pie, cake, or muffin than a sparkly carriage. Unlike Snow White, I’ve cooked more birds than sung to them, and my snoring alone disqualifies me as Sleeping Beauty. My character Clare Cosi has the same suspicious view of perfect princesses. A single mom in her forties, Clare manages a thriving coffeehouse business and cherishes her grown daughter—the best thing to come out of her early, disastrous marriage. Now she’s struggling with a second-chance relationship. While NYPD Detective Mike Quinn is a very good man, he’s also a dedicated cop—maybe too dedicated. Between his career and Clare’s fear of going through the pain of a second marriage Fail, her happy ending is still a fairy tale. At the start of ONCE UPON A GRIND, Clare is living separately from Quinn, whose expertise in narcotics has landed him a temporary position with the US Justice Department in Washington. Missing him greatly, she throws herself into her work by helping her merry band of baristas give their shop’s coffee truck a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk makeover for a children’s festival…

One summer when I was about sixteen and out of books to read, I happened across a heavy brown paper bag full of books. I knew they were my mom’s romance novels and that she sat on the sofa reading them every night while the family watched television. Once, when I asked her if they were any good, she told me they were, but that I was too young to read them. With a sigh I’d gone back to reading the teen paperback novels that I constantly swapped with my friends. The problem was, I had read all of the books my friends gave me that summer. I’d also read through all of the books my grandma had on her little shelf, and to make matters worse, the school library was closed and our small rural town didn’t have a public one at that time. I was out of luck, or so it seemed. This was how the school break always went for me, but when I ran out of books that 16th summer, I thought of my mom’s bag of romance novels. I decided for myself that I was old enough to read them. Of course, I wasn’t brave…

  Guess what??? A. Martians have landed in my back yard and they’re pooping gold! B. My 3 year old niece has just created the formula for the cure for cancer in crayon! Or was that cancer in crayons? Not nearly as exciting. C. Her dog Molly insists on putting her nose in my suitcase and slobbering on my clothes. D. I turned in the manuscript for my Nov 2015 book on time!  Er…assuming you add 2 months to my deadline. Answer D!  And honestly a month ago the Martians were more likely. As for C, I managed to close the suitcase so poor doggie is foiled! So after this miracle created thru hard work and coffee was emailed to my editor, I celebrated by… A. Dusting my house from top to bottom. B. I took a shower. Believe me, I needed it. C. I went grocery shopping for something other than chips and chocolate. D. I watched a marathon of a new TV show called Get off your Couch, you fat slob. Answer: B. Yes, needed to bathe desperately. As for dusting? Hahahahahahaha. Grocery shopping? What do you mean? There’s nothing I ever eat except chips, chocolate, and coffee. And I…

Fresh Fiction is proud to participate in the blog tour for BREEDER by K.B. Hoyle. When asked to give one question to Hoyle, Fresh Fiction staff wanted to know: Why did you choose to write a character who transforms from an obedient society member into a rebel? I liked the idea of starting the story of BREEDER in an environment in which everything seems to be perfect, and having my main character, Pria (or B-Seventeen in the early chapters), operating under the assumption that her world is as good as it gets. I thought that moving Pria from a position of security to a position of uncertainty would also take the reader on the same journey, and that it would create great story tension as the world, and all of Pria’s assumptions about it, slowly unravels. The easiest way to do this from a plot perspective was to make her a character who transforms from someone obedient to society to someone who is eventually a rebel. This also allowed me to reveal the world as it really is through Pria’s eyes as she discovers it and changes her perspective on it. About BREEDER Everything about Seventeen’s life is perfect, from…

Photo courtesy of Laurie Durden Photo courtesy of Mary Turner Photo courtesy of Mary Turner Photo credit: Peggy Sirota, Outside Photo credit: Ronni Flannery Photo courtesy of Mary Turner Photo courtesy of Mary Turner