Fourth-generation cattleman Ty Parker looks into his childless future and wonders what will become of the ranch he’s worked so hard to preserve.  His answer might be a five-year-old boy abandoned on DCF’s doorstep, but only if the rancher convinces a jaded social worker that he’s good father material on a two-week cattle drive through Florida’s version of the Old West. Wait a minute.  “Florida’s version of the Old West?”  Did I hear that correctly?  Why yes, yes you did.  While Florida is better known for its orange groves and theme parks, as a setting for a cattle drive, it’s more fitting than a lot of people might guess. Cattle ranching has been a staple of Florida’s economy for a long, long time.  We can blame Ponce de Leon for that.  He brought seven head of Andalusian cows with him on his second visit in 1521.  And, despite the mosquitoes and the floods and the heat, people have been ranching here ever since. Did you know that today Florida is the third-largest beef-producing state east of the Mississippi?  Or that 1.1 million head of cattle graze its pastures?  We use term “Florida Cracker” when we’re talking about someone who was…

No this isn’t a story about Christmas shopping gone horribly wrong. This blog is about research and the writer. Never in my life did I expect to get up close and personal with a handgun until I wrote TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT. But there came a point in the story when I realized my heroine, Joy, needed to learn how to use a gun, so in the name of research… Off I went (uncomfortably) to my local gun shop (filled with guns and ammo and other scary things) where I discovered they had a handgun gun safety class on Friday nights.  I was nervous about my first lesson and was sure I’d be out of place with the group. To my surprise, there was diversity in age greater than I’d expect in the class from young women and men to geezers and beyond. As the evening went on I felt a bit like Grandma-with-a-Gun as we handled many different types of guns and learned to shoot in front of each other. Turns out I preferred the Smith & Wesson 38 two inch revolver for the size and feel, and it suited my hand strength. Surprisingly, Joy in TOO CLOSE FOR…

“Pluck” is a word I usually associate with chickens. On the other hand, Booklist was kind enough to describe my amateur sleuth as having pluck (a valid observation because Clare Cosi may be many things, but she is no chicken). A divorced, single mom in her forties, Clare is a coffeehouse manager by day, a relentless snoop by night, and she displays quite a bit of pluck in HOLIDAY BUZZ, the brand new release in my Coffeehouse Mystery series, already an Amazon bestseller in mystery, a Barnes & Noble Holiday Mystery Pick, and a Mystery Guild Featured Alternate Selection. At the close of a glittering winter charity party—known as the Great New York Cookie Swap—Clare finds the bludgeoned body of a pretty baker’s assistant. The murder victim is an illegal Irish immigrant, a young woman Clare knew and liked. When the detectives in charge of the case pursue the wrong suspect, Clare begins to ask her own questions. In the course of her investigation, she must dodge a pair of reality show divas, hoodwink a randy hockey player, outwit a conniving Cajun cook, and butt heads with one of the biggest forensic freaks in the New York Police Department. Clare’s…

My debut novel, SHE CAN RUN, starred a police dog reject, Henry, who was originally intended to add a bit of humor to the storyline. But Henry evolved, as characters sometimes do, into much more than just a dog. He nearly stole the limelight from my hero. My kids were annoyed that I wrote a fictional dog into my book when we had two perfectly good dogs in our house. They demanded that I write one of our dogs into my next book. So, Bandit (photo) received a starring role in SHE CAN TELL (releasing December 4th). Bandit is a dog of many breeds we rescued from the local animal shelter two years ago. There’s a large dog trapped inside his small body, a Rottweiler crammed into a spaniel’s skeleton. At a mere 18 pounds, he would fight to the death to defend any member of his family. He might be small in stature, but his heart and soul are enormous. Bandit is devoted to his family and hates strangers with equal passion, just ask the USP man or those people who came to deliver a religious pamphlet last week. He scared the bejeesus out of them. I had a…

Lucky Harbor is one of the most favorite settings for Jill Shalvis‘s fans and she has a treat in store with her shorty holiday story, UNDER THE MISTLETOE. In the meantime, Jill stopped by with a Top Five list: the Most Interesting Gifts she Ever Received.. 1.   Once I asked Alpha Man for an overnight trip, just us.  I was thinking somewhere warm, maybe even with a beach, drinks, and room service.  What I got was tickets to the NCAA finals.  Note to self: be more specific 2.   Then there was the year my daughters got me a lizard.  Yes, you read that right.  I don’t know why.  But Lily the Lizard was sweet if not a bit challenging.  Rest in peace, Lily. 3.   Several years ago my mother bought me a house cleaning service for one month.  I’m pretty sure she was trying to tell me something… 4.   My favorite presents are always plants.  But unfortunately I kill them.  So one year my family bought me a huge, fake plant.  Only they didn’t tell me it was fake.  I watered that thing every day until it molded.  Yes, I’m still living down the fact that I killed a fake…

About fifteen years ago I was invited to my first white elephant gift exchange party. The first rule was that we had to bring something from home—we couldn’t spend any money. The second rule was that our gift had to be awful as possible. I can’t remember now what I took, but I do remember that what one person thought of as “trash,” another person saw as a “treasure.” The party was a blast. We had so much fun competing over gifts that at first glance wouldn’t seem that valuable. For instance, one woman brought a broken sewing machine. Another woman fought to get it because she wanted a sewing machine and knew her dad could fix anything. I “won” this kitchen utensil. Can you guess what it is? I couldn’t either. Turns out, it’s a tomato slicer, a quintessential white elephant gift. I wasn’t writing books at the time, but knew I wanted to attempt to write a mystery someday, so lots of my everyday experiences went in my mental “that’s interesting” file. The white elephant gift exchange party went in that file. Fast forward thirteen years or so. I had written six Ellie Avery mystery series by then…

If you’re not familiar with the Sinners on Tour series, it’s about a hard rock band called—you guessed it—Sinners. In each book of the series, one member of the band finds true love with a very lucky and self-confident woman. I think you have to be self-confident if you’re going to date a rock star. Do you agree? DOUBLE TIME, which will be released this November, is about Sinners’ sexier-than-sin rhythm guitarist, Trey Mills. I once had a reader comment in a review of the first book, BACKSTAGE PASS, that she had no idea what all the music technical terms meant. As a die-hard rock music fan, I thought the lingo was common knowledge and that most readers could figure it out from context, but I apparently assumed wrong. So if you don’t know a fret board from an amplifier, allow me to bring you up to speed on a few things. Sinners is made up of five members. While everyone knows that lead vocalists sing and drummers play drums, the roles of the guitarists might not be as readily apparent. In most metal bands there are three guitarists: lead, rhythm, and bass. Jace Seymour (hero of HOT TICKET—coming out…

That’s an intriguing question, one I believe has a long history of continuous development until it reached the position that it occupies today.  Let’s begin by describing a real cowboy was actually like. He was usually a young man between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six who wanted more adventure than his home in the East provided.  He was a cowhand, sometimes a foreman, and occasionally a rancher.  His job was unglamourous, the hours long, and he was too poorly paid to allow him a wife and family.  His constant companions were his horse (usually a mustang)  and the cows he tended.  His bed was a hard mattress in a bunkhouse or a bedroll under the stars.  He rarely saw women or a town.  When he did, he tended to drink up his wages or spend it on the ladies.  He often worked alone with only his wit and courage to protect him from danger.  As long as he took his boss’s pay, his loyalty was unwavering. As a group, these men opened the West, facing danger with only their ambition and their guns to back them up.  They fought for honor and justice – and profit.  When necessary, they…

One of my very favorite things in the whole word is the directions that country friends give you to their houses. It could be that in the city, directions are just as colorful, but my experience is that people rely heavily on road signs there. Out here, there may or may not be road signs, and maybe that’s the reason for the detail, or maybe the reason has everything with slowing down and enjoying the journey. Maybe it’s that we simply see the opportunity to interject well-intended but unsolicited advice. Let me tell you how to get to my house so you can see what I mean. Don’t take the exit with the big fruit stand, but do slow down there because the staties will nail you with their radar guns from the overpass if you don’t. Cha-ching. Now, take the next exit– the one with the smaller fruit stand that’s only open in the summer. Usually there is someone urinating on the shoulder of the off ramp. Honk at them. There’s a rest stop just a couple miles ahead, so there’s no excuse to be urinating there. Turn right at the stop sign. Turn right at the next stop…

Gage Chance wants to forget Christmas—for good. It used to be a favorite holiday. But that was before he lost his wife on one snowy Christmas Eve five years ago. This year he intends to skip Christmas by tracking down the family’s baby sister, kidnapped twenty years before.  The search takes him to a quaint ski resort town in the southern California mountains.  Bah humbug on quaint Christmas towns. That’s how Gage feels about the whole thing…until…he spots a woman who looks remarkably like his dead wife.  And it turns out this Christmas will change everything. Elana Kelly has been on the run so long, she has almost forgotten why. That is, until Gage Chance shows up and both her memory and her lonely heart return with a poignant thud.  It doesn’t take her long to remember that she is running to save both Gage and her child. I love writing reunion stories about troubled souls who were always meant to be together. And Christmas time is a wonderful time of year to rekindle romance.  So this story has turned into a special favorite of mine. CHRISTMAS CONFIDENTIAL is a two-book anthology with my Chance, Texas story called A CHANCE…