The Midas Murders - How the story emerged

As usual, one autographed copy of The Midas Murders will be given away. The winner will be announced on Monday especially it they leave me a way to reach them.

A number of years ago I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico with my husband and fell in love with the town. I spent hours wandering around the area near the motel. The conference was geared to learning and to visiting places of interest since all the lectures were in the morning and the afternoons left us free to explore. I gathered material from every source I could find and made a few purchases of odd and interesting things. I always thought I'd like to put the town in a book, but at the time nothing came to mind. I was working on other stories so all the material I'd collected remained in a folder.

Time came for another Katherine Miller mystery and I looked over the first two books and discovered her friend Lars lived part-time in Santa Fe. I'd sent him there before I made my visit. Had one of those aha moments and then began to think of how I could send Katherine ot Santa Fe. Lars came to the rescue by inviting her for New Year's Eve. She was feeling guilty bout the murders at St. Stephen's and wanted to get away. She accepted his invitation and took along a Maine Coon kitten for Lars' only granddaughter, a child who had lost her mother in an automobile accident not long before. To my surprise Katherine arrived in Santa Fe to find Lars missing. When he emerges the mystery began.

So how was Santa Fe woven into the mystery. Kars took her on a sight seeing expedition to visit some of the places I'd enjoyed and to stay at the hotel wher my husband and I stayed. As the mystery thickened Katherine must face Lars' only daughter who is possessive of her father. I was able to put in many of the places I'd seen and loved, houses I'd visited and several I'd made up. I was also able to move the relationship between Katherine and Lars toward a future marriage. Writing about Katherine is always fun and never knowing what murders she might encounter is always fun.

One thing I learned here is when visiting a new setting to gather material because you will never know when a story falls into that location.

How The Story Emerged -- Come Into The Light

To be given away an autographed print copy of Come Into The Light.

Authors often play the game of "what if." I know I do and that's how Come Into The Light began. There were stories in the local newspaper about the privatization of services at a local hospital. This started the motor running. I already had a character I wanted to feature in a book. She was the Director of Nursing at a hospital I'd used in another book. What if the CEO of the hospital was using this privatization to gain his own ends. Hospital politics are rather like politics elsewhere - convoluted to say the least. This heroine also fascinated me. She was past forty, had never been married, had a family background that had caused her to lose her first love. The next emergence was another what if. What if the first man returned to her life and what if he was ill. Sympathy would rattle her emotions, especially if she had also met a man who challenged her to step from the shadowy life she had been living.

The story unfolded with a lot of comments from my critique partners and was finally finished and published.

Now comes the fun part several of the situations I had dreamed up for the story had happened. Not at one hospital but at others in the area. I read with interest and decided sometimes playing what if can tune into something that's in the air. Hopefully you'll enjoy reading Come Into The Light and watch Johanna Gordon solve and dynamite the developing problems at her hospital. Also you'll learn how her decision about which man was taken.

How The Story Emerged - Obsessions

Still striving to create a title for this story and this is the latest. There will be a giveaway here of an autographed copy of Obsessions to a US or Canada person who makes a comment and leaves me a way to reach them.

Today Heart Throb is available for free on Amazon Kindle. http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Throb-ebook/dp/B0057AGQ4W/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1330001699&sr=1-3

Now for the story of Obsessions. Many years ago I read Michael Palmer's Sisterhood and really liked the book I thought perhaps I could write a medical suspense so I read many others in the subgenre and found that I couldn't write ones like those. Somehow I couldn't devise an evil mad scientist as the doctor of the piece so I put the idea aside. Then a series of events gave me the way to work this out, in my own way. I was still working as a nurse and trying to get in an hour or so a day writing. There was a Code and the patient didn't live. The family was hysterical. Then one of my colleagues who had a long standing relationship with one of the doctors found the affair had ended. A young nurse had just begun a flirtation with a doctor and during narcotics count one a pill seemed to be missing and we had a grand search to find where it had gone. Thus the seeds for Obsessions was found.

This is a story where the doctors and nurses are the ones who are being killed in what seem like accidents at first. Except, one of the nurses receives gifts after each death. Also those who die have obsessions with different things. The heroine is obsessed with not getting involved with a man who will want to control her life like her dead husband. Two of the victims are obsessed with a particular person. One is obsessed with drugs. The list of victims and the possible killers grow shorter. The heroine must face her own death on a winter night near Christmas and a chase through the streets of her tow,

The ending, and I won't tell you what it is freaked out many of my critique partners but I knew the heroine and stuck with the ending. So there you have the genesis of the story. The villain in the story remains as one of my favorites.