People ask me why I decided to set a new series in Montana. After all, I’ve pretty much settled into New Orleans. Well, the truth of the matter was that I wanted a new, fresh extremely different locale for LEFT TO DIE and the books that follow in the series. I figured a small podunk fictional town like Grizzly Falls was nearly a one-eighty in atmosphere from the French Quarter or Garden District of the Crescent City. I wanted away from the southern bayous and into the mountains of the west. What I didn’t expect was the new characters and how I’d come to love them. I’m a small town girl at heart–born and raised in a tiny timber town in Oregon–and so the back-woodsy rural part was natural. But the characters, wow. First of all the heroine, Jillian Rivers is on the warpath, trying to find out if her first husband, the one whom she thought died in the jungles of South American, the jerk who left her holding the bag when he disappeared and owed tons of investors money, might be alive. Then there’s the hero, Zane MacGregor, a loner’s loner, sexy as hell and once charged with…