Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Top 10 Bits of Trivia about COWBOY ALIBI

While I'm waiting for my new books to come out in 2010, I suppose it doesn't hurt to talk about my last book, COWBOY ALIBI. So here's my Top 10 Bits of Trivia about my September 2008 Intrigue:

10. It's the first of my books that takes place entirely outside the state of Alabama. (The epilogue of FORBIDDEN TOUCH took place in Alabama, though the story was set in the Caribbean).

9. It's the first of my books with a cowboy hero.

8. The town of Trinity, Idaho, is loosely based on the small town of Stanley, Idaho, located near the Sawtooth Mountains.

7. While the hero, Joe, turns out to be a whiz at Blackjack, I'm not a gambler and I had to do a little research to find out how a good Blackjack player might react to the hands Joe was dealt.

6. I'm endlessly fascinated by con artists and how they work, so it was fun to incorporate a con artist into the heroine's background.

5. I deliberately wrote a rain scene into the book, despite the notoriously arid climate of the Idaho/Wyoming area, in order to keep my streak of rain covers going.

4. The original working title of the book was TARGET: JANE DOE.

3. I didn't know that Joe's best friend, Riley, was going to be a widower whose wife had been murdered until I actually got to the scene near the end where Joe and Jane meet up with him. His backstory just popped into my head as I was writing the scene. I went back and worked his backstory into previous chapters before I turned the manuscript in.

2. The horse Jazz is actually named after my friend and critique partner, Jenn, whose nickname in college was Jazzy Jenn (because of her affinity for hip hop music).

1. COWBOY ALIBI is still available for purchase at Amazon.com. If you haven't purchased a copy, I hope you'll consider it, especially if you're planning to read my January 2010 book, CASE FILE: CANYON CREEK, WYOMING, which takes us back to Wyoming to give Riley Patterson his own happy ending. You can read CASE FILE: CANYON CREEK, WYOMING without reading COWBOY ALIBI, but it's a lot more fun if you know how Jane and Joe got to where they are by the time Riley's story rolls around.

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