Sizzling Summer Reads

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An Interview with Author Deborah J. Ledford:

As a scenic artist for movies, theatre and industrial films, three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author Deborah J. Ledford was used to thinking in images. Then she began writing screenplays, what she calls "an extension of the visual form" and soon branched out into fiction, something she enjoyed even more. "As a novelist and short story author about 15 years, I’ve always been involved in the arts and can’t imagine a more gratifying occupation," she says.

Her second novel, SNARE, (Second Wind Publishing) was a nominee for the 2011 Hillerman Sky Award for a mystery best exemplifying the Southwest. That book continues the music subplot introduced in the debut novel of her Steven Hawk/Inola Walela series. In STACCATO, three classical pianists and two possible killers equals one dead woman. Who is her murderer and who will be next?

In SNARE, Native American pop singer/songwriter Katina Salvo’s career is about to take off. There’s one problem: someone wants to kill her. Katina and her bodyguard, Deputy Steven Hawk, are attacked during an altercation at her first live concert. Could the assailant be a mysterious, dangerous man from her youth? Or her estranged father recently released from prison for killing her mother?

Ledford, who is part Eastern Band Cherokee, decided that if she was going to write a series the location would be as important as she characters, so she set both books in a place she knew – the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina where she spent her summers growing up. In SNARE, she featured the people of and the Taos Pueblo New Mexico reservation itself which required doing some rewarding on-site research.

"For SNARE, Katina Salvo is Taos Pueblo and I didn’t have any experience with this tribe," she says. "I visited the location and accomplished a great deal of research there over several trips. Floyd 'Mountain Walking Cane' Gomez and the tribe elders worked closely with me in deciding what could and could not be introduced in the novel. Book three of the series will feature Inola Walela who is full-blood Cherokee."  www.DeborahJLedford.com/

* Excerpt from SNARE:
Hawk took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, I felt something. Kind of like when I think my dad’s visiting me. He died almost seven years ago, but sometimes I swear he’s in the room when I’m alone. I’ve got a wind chime hanging on the back porch. It’s just a little copper bell, but sometimes, when it’s real quiet, and not a leaf is stirring, that bell strikes a single ting.”

 

** Other Recent Releases:**

In Bernadette Pajer's A SPARK OF DEATH, the first in the Professor Bradshaw Mystery series, a puzzling electrocution in 1901 Seattle points to murder and UW Electrical Engineering Professor Benjamin Bradshaw is the chief suspect. He hunts for the true killer to protect himself, and his son, finding death lurking everywhere as accidents. Before it's too late, will he discover the circuit path that led to a spark of death? www.bernadettepajer.com/

 

In Victor J. Banis's A DEADLY KIND OF LOVE, (Dreamspinner Press, June 2011). A dead body in a friend's hotel room, a gangster's plot and a nasty green snake leave San Francisco detectives Ton Danzel and Stanley Korski having to rely on their skills, and each other, if they're going to survive this very deadly kind of love. www.vjbanis.com

 

In John R. Lindenmuth's historical Pennsylvania mystery FALLEN FROM GRACE (Wild Oaks/Oak Tree Press, March 2011), Sheriff Sylvester Tilghman of the small Pennsylvania town of Arahpot ponders his biggest problems: finding a new deputy and convincing his true love, Lydia, to marry him. When a stranger is fatally stabbed, the sheriff finds himself in danger investigating two murders and an abundance of motivated suspects. http://jrlindermuth.com

 

In Ed Lynskey's latest "Appalachian Noir" novel, LAKE CHARLES (Wildside Press, Feb. 2011; out in eBook), Brendan Fishback comes home from a rock concert and wakes the next morning with a corpse, his dead girlfriend. He has no idea how she died though he's targeted by the local sheriff as the prime suspect. Set in the Great Smoky Mountains, the book tells how a young man pushed to the extreme defends himself against overwhelming forces on both sides of the law—and wins, but on his own terms. http://crimespace.ning.com/profile/EdLynskey

 

PREY ON PATMOS, An Aegean Prophecy (Poisoned Pen Press US; Piatkus Books/Little Brown UK, Jan. 2011) is the latest in Jeffrey Siger's Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis series. When a revered monk from a thousand-year-old monastery is murdered during Easter Week in the town square of Greece’s holy island of Patmos where Saint John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, Kaldis must find the killer before all hell breaks loose…in a manner of speaking. www.jeffreysiger.com

 

In Melodie Campbell's comic suspense, ROWENA THROUGH THE WALL (Imajin Books, June 2011), Rowena falls through her classroom wall into an alternate world, not counting on ending up kidnapped—twice. Unwanted husbands keep piling up, she has 18-year-old Kendra to look out for and a war to prevent. Good thing she has the ability to go back through the wall. Or does she? www.melodiecampbell.com

 

In Jan Christensen's mystery, SARA'S SEARCH, (on Kindle and coming in other e-formats), after a two-year search, Sara Putnam finds her biological father—murdered. Starting her own investigation, she must wade through her adopted mother's roadblocks, family and friend's problems, and an assorted cast of suspects to find answers. www.janchristensen.com