Dating Death - A Guest Post by Randy Rawls

This month, Fabulous Florida Writers is pleased to welcome guest blogger Randy Rawls. Randy is the author of nine mystery/thrillers and several short stories. His latest novel, Dating Death, was released on April 5. Randy was our featured author on December 31, 2012.

I'd like to talk a bit about Dating Death, book 3 in my Beth Bowman series. Beth is a PI in South Florida and has a penchant for getting in trouble. It's not that she's "off the grid" or anything like that, it's that problems seem to find her. This story is an example of that.

   Alfred Elston, the Chief of Police of Coral Lakes, makes contact and asks her to attend a morning meeting in his office. He and Beth learned to respect one another in her previous case, Best Defense, so Beth reluctantly agrees. Not reluctant because of him, but because it's scheduled for nine a.m. There are things she'd rather be doing that morning.

   Anyway, Beth shows up and is introduced to Roger Adamson, a local politician who is often on the news. He's known as a playboy councilman and always appears with an attractive woman on his arm. The chief explains that Adamson is the classic dirty politician. His behind the scenes activities have him taking bribes from anyone who wants a project pushed through the city council. The police have enough on him to put him away for a few years, but the chief is holding out for more. He wants the crime boss who is believed to be financing Adamson.

 Facing ten to fifteen, Adamson has agreed to cooperate. However, in true character, he dictates the details of what is to be. Essentially, they are: 1) It will be on Adamson's timetable. He will release information as he sees fit. 2) During the period of cooperation, Adamson will continue to live his life as before and maintain his political position. 3) The police must protect him and keep him safe from any retribution.

The chief believes that the end will justify the means and agrees to Adamson's terms. That's why he called Beth. Adamson wants a bodyguard for his public appearances. It cannot be a police officer because it would give away his cooperation. It must be a beautiful woman who fits the mold of Adamson's previous girlfriends. Chief Elston asks Beth to take the job. The pay will be minimal, but her civic satisfaction will be high.

After weighing the pros and cons, Beth agrees. Her decision will have a major impact on her life and the lives of those around her. That story is Dating Death.

Dating Death is available from Amazon as both an ebook and "dead tree" book. It is published by White Bird Publications of Austin, Texas, a small but super-competent small press. IMO, Dating Death will keep you up late as crises after crises appears to imperil Beth. But, by the end . . . well, I won't tell you that.

Thanks, Jackie, for letting me talk. I love to write, and I love to talk about books, especially mine. 

For more information, visit Randy's website at www.randyrawls.com.

Steph Post - Florida Noir

If you like your stories on the gritty side with offbeat, unforgettable characters, there’s an author that you won’t want to miss. Tampa Bay writer Steph Post, combines lyrical writing with a dysfunctional yet vulnerable cast of players to take readers into a world they’ll like to visit but probably wouldn’t want to live in. Brian Panowich, author of the acclaimed Bull Mountain, heralds Post as “the official voice of working class literature in Florida, akin to what Daniel Woodrell has done for Missouri, or Ron Rash for the Carolinas.”

Born in St. Augustine, Post claims to be “a tried and true Florida native, not palm-tree-laden, fruity-tropical-shirt-and-sandals South Florida, but backwoods-on-a-creek-deer-flies-and-alligator-ridden North Florida.” She has also been a storyteller for as long as she can remember. “I used to drive my mom crazy telling stories,” she recalls. “I especially loved creating characters. Even as a kid, my stories always started with a character. It’s fun and surprising for me to see what my characters will say and do.”

    

Post worked on her high school literary magazine and went on to Davidson College in North Carolina on the Patricia Cornwell Scholarship for creative writing. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English and later earned her Master’s degree from the University of North Carolina. For the past five years, Post has been an English teacher/writing coach at Blake High School in Tampa during the week and a novelist on the weekends.

It was during these weekend writing sessions that Post completed her first novel, A Tree Born Crooked. She had just moved back from North Carolina and wanted to write about where she grew up. “The title actually came before the story,” she explains. “I was kicking around characters with my husband, and he came up with the title. It’s a line from a Tom Waits song. So I built a plot around a character who was born crooked but still had to keep growing.” Post describes the book as a combination of “Country Noir,” a genre that features hardboiled rural stories, and the literary but gritty genre known as “Grit Lit.”

  

Since characterization is such an integral part of Post’s writing, it isn’t surprising that the idea for A Tree Born Crooked grew out of a character concept.  A big fan of the FX-TV series “Justified” and Elmore Leonard’s novels, Post decided to center her tale around the stoic male hero who has to go home and confront his past. This was the inspiration for the book’s protagonist, James Hart, a character Post describes as “rugged yet broken.” After receiving news of his father’s death, James reluctantly returns to his backwater hometown of Crystal Springs where he is forced to revisit the demons he’s tried desperately to leave behind. Post calls the novel “a balance of hard and soft writing, juxtaposing gritty characters with lyrical, poetic description.” Leonard Chang, one of the writers of “Justified,” praised the book as “…compelling Florida grit with echoes of the late great Harry Crews…a wonderful debut.”

Last month, her second novel, Lightwood, was released by Polis Books. In the same genre as A Tree Born Crooked, this new book is a Southern literary crime thriller set in backwoods north-central Florida and featuring hardscrabble, often eccentric characters, who must navigate a world where right and easy rarely go hand in hand.  In Lightwood, these characters are part of one of three factions: the notorious Cannon crime family, the Scorpions outlaw motorcycle gang and the congregation of the Last Steps to Deliverance Church of God. Judah Cannon and Sister Tulah, as well as players from all sides, are tied together through a fateful heist of $150,000 that leaves only brutality and hard choices in the complicated web of its wake.

Post’s weekends will be busy well into the future. She will be doing book signings in bookstores across the state of North Carolina and will be speaking at the Virginia Festival of the Book in March. She hopes her readers will enjoy visiting a world very different from their own and will walk away thinking, “That was a really good story!”

For more information, visit the author’s website at www.stephpostfiction.com.

Carol J. Perry - Bewitching Mysteries

Sometimes a person’s future seems written in the stars. Such is the case of Seminole writer, Carol J. Perry. Born on Halloween Eve and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, Perry is the author of the Witch City Mysteries, an entertaining series of cozy mysteries with a paranormal twist.

Perry didn’t start out creating spooky stories. “I knew in 7^th grade I wanted to go into advertising,” she says. “My high school guidance counselor told me the only way I could do that was to become a secretary.” So Perry enrolled in Boston University’s College of Arts and Letters.  After her freshman year, she received a job offer from a local fuel company where she’d been a participant in an “Oilman for a Day” program. “I’d been assigned to the ad manager who was so impressed with me that she wanted to hire me as an assistant for a lot more money than my dad was making at the time,” Perry recalls. “So at the age of 19, I had a job writing ad copy.”

After marrying and having a child, Perry was offered a job as ad manager for a large department store. For the next 13 years, she wrote advertisements, radio commercials and catalogs. She even wrote some articles for trade papers. Perry thought of herself as a non-fiction writer until she moved to Florida.  She joined a writing class at the Madeira Beach Library, and after hearing a speaker talk about middle grade fiction, decided to give it a try.  She wrote a novel called Sandcastle Summer and was offered a publishing contract. Sandcastle Summer was followed by four more middle grade novels and two biographies.

After she joined a second writers group, Perry began toying with an idea for a mystery. She wrote the first chapter, submitted it to a contest, and won first prize. This led to a new publishing contract for Caught Dead Handed, the first in what would become the Witch City series. Set in Salem, the novel introduces Lee Barrett, a newly-widowed Salem native who returns home to interview for a job as a reporter with WICH-TV. After discovering the body of the station’s call-in psychic, Lee is offered her job. When she starts seeing strange apparitions reflected in an obsidian ball, Lee finds herself on the trail of a killer. According to Perry, Lee Barrett was inspired by real-life psychic Linda Bennett, the host of “Metaphysically Speaking,” a local television show, who “taught me all the psychic stuff.”

Caught Dead Handed was followed by Tails, You Lose where Lee takes a job as an instructor in an art academy housed in a haunted department store. When the handyman is found murdered, Lee begins seeing visions that lead her to the killer. The third book in the series, Look Both Ways, has Lee purchasing an antique bureau with secret compartments and an intriguing history. When she discovers the bludgeoned body of the antique dealer, Lee tries to unravel the bureau’s secrets and find the murderer. Look Both Ways was praised by RT Book Reviews as “…an entertaining paranormal cozy with plenty of secrets and "blond-haired, blue-eyed suspects to keep the readers guessing until the very end."

Perry’s fans will be happy to know that she has no plans to stop writing.  Book # 4, Murder Go Round was released at the end of January. New York Times best selling author Carolyn Hart calls it “Highly original and great fun. A triumph of imagination with twists and turns to delight readers.”  In this book Lee and boyfriend Detective Pete Mondello, with the aid of Lee’s Aunt Ibby and their very wise cat, O’Ryan, set off on another adventure in Salem—involving an antique carousel horse, a silver samovar, a long-dead Russian princess and of course, murder. Book #5, Grave Errors is due to release in August, and Carol is currently working on Book #6, It Takes A Coven. Fans will be happy to know, she has a contract for three more Witch City Mysteries. “The hardest thing about being a writer is finding the time to do all I want to do,” she says. “I’ll have to live to be over 120!” – something that might be in the cards for this bewitching writer.

For more information, visit the author’s website at www.caroljperry.com. You can meet Carol in person at her book signing/book talk at the Gulf Beaches Library, Madeira Beach, FL on Saturday February 4, from noon to 3:00.