Saturday I should have stayed home and cleaned my house especially since I’m leaving next Sunday for my first RWA (need I say how excited I am about this?). Did I play good domestic goddess and see to the needs of my family, no I didn’t! What did I do instead? I attended a book signing for Tess Gerritsen and Lisa Gardner. I arrived at the bookstore a tad later than I had really wanted to, and was worried about parking and how long the lines would be. I was pleasantly surprised to find easy parking, and shocked to see that the crowd was nowhere near what I had anticipated. Good for me, but what would the authors think? Both Tess and Lisa gave short speeches about their books in general and then their newest releases specifically. I don’t know about the other people in attendance, but it made me want to run home and read right away! I’m sure I say this a lot but both authors were really entertaining, and personable, and if I wasn’t already a fan I would be just from listening to them speak! After the signing those of us in attendance from the DFW…

As a thriller writer, I’m always searching for the idea that sends a chill slithering up my spine. A decade ago, I felt just such a chill when I came across a news article about an incident that had occurred thirty years earlier. The year was 1968, and it happened in mid-March, in a place called Skull Valley, Utah. It was chilly that afternoon, with patches of snow on the ground. While doing chores in his yard, Ray Peck developed an earache and decided to go to bed early. When he woke up the next morning and stepped outside, he was stunned by what he saw. His yard was littered with dead birds. It seemed as if they had dropped from the sky struck down in mid-flight. Not far away, a struggling rabbit was twitching in its last death throes. Over the next few days, the local university began receiving frantic calls from farmers across Skull Valley. Thousands of their sheep were lying dead in pastures, a death toll that eventually mounted to over six thousand animals. No one could explain it. No one admitted any wrongdoing. Thirty years later, the answers were finally revealed when the U.S. government declassified…