The lighthouse at Point Offbeat faced into the teeth of the storm. Banshees howled around the tower, screaming unintelligible threats, the light circled and flashed through the clouds, and lightning blazed. During the two and a half years Helen had lived here, she’d only seen this kind of storm once before. She had gloried in it. The wildness, the waves, the glory was in absolute opposition to everything in her carefully orchestrated and carefully preserved life. Tonight she thought hell had spat up the storm as a curse and a warning. She stood on the viewing platform, four stories off the ground and near the jutting edge of the cliff, facing into the slashing rain. At the base of the cliff, the Pacific Ocean roared and clawed, sending spray so high into the air she could taste salt before icy rain sluiced it away. Or maybe she tasted her own tears. Everything was black: sky, clouds, violence and nature’s indifference. And white: the froth of the waves, the blinding flashes of lightning, the electrical discharges that danced through the air. Standing out here, Helen was courting death. She deserved death. She had arranged to have a friend killed. But like…

1–What is the title of your latest release? When my editor and I were discussing a title for my upcoming suspense thriller, she pulled a phrase from my synopsis and said, “FORGET WHAT YOU KNOW is an interesting title!” Sure, interesting title except…it’s also a command, forget what you know, which to my brain means You are to forget your own book title! And I do. On a regular basis I try to say or write something about the upcoming book, and I can’t remember the title. It’s getting embarrassing. The book is, um, FORGET WHAT YOU KNOW. Pretty sure.   2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Car pulled from the bottom of lake! Driver shot in the back of the head! Priceless statue Dragon’s Heart found inside! Greedy collectors converge, and only flower-breeder and unknowing heir Zoey Phoenix stands in their way… Forget what you know…yet the past remembers.   3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? FORGET WHAT YOU KNOW is the second full-length suspense set in Gothic California, a small town on Big Sur known for its legend: “On stormy nights, Gothic is said to disappear, and, on its return,…

In your thriller POINT LAST SEEN, Elle has amnesia. Has that been a topic that has always interested you? I dunno. Maybe it’s that sense of, “Could you be the one who tried to kill me?” “Are you really my lover?” and of course, “When I look in the mirror, what am I seeing? A scholar? A parent? A murderer?” What inspired you to write POINT LAST SEEN? I always enjoy watching the documentaries on people who have seemingly disappeared. In one case, a woman disappeared, and was found a year or so later in a hospital and having amnesia. They were only able to identify her and reunite her with her family because of her distinctive tattoo. Are you ever inspired by real life cases? I imagined the opening of POINT LAST SEEN years and years ago as a start to a historical novel: a woman rolls in on an icy surf, seemingly dead, then comes to life and doesn’t know where she came from…or so she says. I never could find the story to fit that scenario, but like all great ideas, it hovered on the fringes of my mind. Then. :sigh: Then in early 2020 I was…