MEDIA CLIPS - SASSCER HILL

Alexandra Amor's video interview with author Sasscer Hill.     

            










             Sasscer reads the first chapter of FLAMINGO ROAD

Criminal Element's Tomlinson Reviews FLAMINGO ROAD

Review: Flamingo Road 

      by Sasscer Hill

KATHERINE TOMLINSON

Flamingo Road by Sasscer Hill is the 1st book in the Fia McKee Mystery series (available April 18, 2017).

Sasscer Hill likes horses, and not in a “My Little Pony” kind of way. A horsewoman and horse breeder, it’s in her blood. As she explains on her blog:

I started galloping about the family farm on a stick horse when I was four years old. By the time, I was seven or eight, I was sneaking rides on the Belgian plow horses. I did this because my father didn't like horses and considered ponies dangerous. So instead, I drummed my heels on the sides of a 2,000-pound draft mare, while grasping whatever string or rope I managed to tie to her halter.

Her debut mystery series featured a young female jockey named Nikki Latrelle, and the books were atmospheric tales that brought the racing world to life more authentically than anyone had since Dick Francis died. (On her blog, Sasscer pays tribute to Dick Francis as her favorite author.)

The protagonist in Flamingo Road, the 1st in the Fia McKee series, is a cop whose solitary beat in the crime-ridden streets of Baltimore could not be further from the sunlit racetrack at Florida’s Gulf Stream Park if it was located on the moon. And yet, by saving the life of a terrified woman named Shyra Darnell, who works at Pimlico Race Track as a “hot walker,” Fia is thrown into a mystery that connects her past to her present in a most unexpected way.

Despite being under investigation by Internal Affairs, Fia can’t help but pick at the mystery surrounding Shyra and wonder what (or who) she is so afraid of. 

Then, a call from her estranged brother summons her to Florida, bringing her into contact with horse-butchering lunatics, cutting-edge performance-enhancing drugs, handsome animal activists, and Cuban gangs. Suddenly, things get very personal when her already troubled niece loses her beloved gelding Cody.

What was this? Kids on a joyride? Stealing tack or Patrick’s tools and equipment? Whatever it was, it wasn’t right.

I sped down the drive, my rubber shoes silent. The cart had headed to the right on the far side of the stable, and it looked like the fastest way to catch up would be to run straight down the center aisle and out the other side. Plunging into the murk of the barn, I smelled a horrible, familiar odor before skidding in what had to be blood. I wound up on my hands and knees, staring at a dark lump on the floor.

God, no. “You sons of bitches!” I yelled. I staggered up, skirted the slick, sticky pool and ran out the back. In the distance, I heard a couple of thumps. A truck engine started, but no lights came on. The sound of a motor rapidly faded into the distance.

Feeling helpless and sickened, I searched for a light switch and found it. Okay, Fia, get a grip. I flipped the switch.

Blood was everywhere. Cody’s black tail like a paintbrush dipped in blood looked. I fought a wave of nausea. They had butchered him in his own barn, removing the large cuts of meat. I wanted to kill them. I grabbed my phone and called 911.

Fia, whose horse-trainer father was murdered in a case as cold as Maryland in winter, knows this horsey world very well. And thanks to Hill, who teaches classes on how to craft settings that “saturate a story with mood, meaning, and thematic connotations,” we are immersed in that world as well. (Maybe a little too well as we learn the particulars of the trade in horse meat.)

“Your horse,” Zanin said, “was butchered by Cuban Americans who live in the C-Nine Basin. By now, they’ve delivered his meat to a specialty butcher shop in Miami.”

Patrick shook his head as if denying the whole thing. “That’s disgusting. It doesn’t make sense. There can’t be enough money to outweigh the risk.”

“I’m betting the horse was young,” Zanin said. “Maybe a little fat?”

Recalling Jilly’s conversation at dinner, I said, “Cody was only three.” An image struck me. Cody plump and happy in the paddock with Jilly that afternoon. “Oh, God. He was fat. Is that why they killed him?”

“Yeah,” Zanin said. “They like ’em young and well-marbled. Brings the highest price, like beef.”

I dropped my head into my hands. It was impossible to shut out the images. Glancing at him, I said, “Who are these people? And what’s the C-Nine Basin?”

“It’s the Wild West of Florida. Straddles the western edge of Broward and Miami-Dade counties, along one side of the Everglades. Mostly men live there, Cubans and Haitians and almost everything they do is outside the law—cockfights, horse slaughter, dogfights.”

“But Patrick’s right,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. Horse slaughter is legal in so many places now.”

Zanin gazed at me intently. “Think about it.”

I cringed as it hit me. “It doesn’t matter if it’s legal because if those animals are old and tough…”

Zanin nodded. “They bring less money. The men in the C-Nine, they’re renegades, squatters, really rough people. These guys build shacks and pilfer from electric lines. They don’t care about right and wrong, especially when money in the form of prime meat is available just down the road. Believe me, the police are afraid to go in there.”

Turns out, there’s a really good reason the cops are scared to go into the C-Nine, and before the story gallops to a conclusion (sorry), readers will be scared too. And they’ll know a lot more about the racing world than they did before they opened the book.

Click here to find FLAMINGO ROAD!

Katherine Tomlinson is a former reporter who prefers making things up. She was editor of Astonishing Adventures Magazine and the publisher of Dark Valentine Magazine.

FLAMINGO ROAD

So thrilled to receive this first and fabulous trade review from Kirkus on FLAMINGO ROAD. I am also very appreciative of the unnamed reviewer who read the story closely and got it right! Thank you Kirkus.

FLAMINGO ROAD 

Sasscer Hill

Review Issue Date: January 15, 2017
Online Publish Date: December 27, 2016
Publisher:Minotaur
Pages: 320
Price ( Hardcover ): $25.99
Publication Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-1-250-09691-3
Category: Fiction
Classification: Mystery

The dark and dirty underbelly of horse racing is exposed when a Baltimore cop goes to visit relatives in Florida.Internal Affairs has been very interested in Fia McKee ever since she shot and killed the man who was choking Shyra Darnell, a hot walker at Pimlico who's so afraid of someone that she refuses to answer any questions. When Fia's beloved father, a racehorse trainer, was murdered five years earlier, Fia joined the police and has never given up on his case, which has now turned very cold. Put on leave, she answers a call for help from her brother, Patrick, whose wife has walked out and left him with a horse-crazy teen. Someone's been slaughtering people's horses for meat, and when Cody, her niece Jilly's gelding, becomes a victim, Fia gets mad and plots to get even. The night of the gelding's death, she meets a man named Zanin who runs the Protect the Animals League and is trying to stop the carnage. Zanin is sure the guilty party is a Cuban-American who lives in the dangerous and lawless area known as the C-Nine Basin, but no one's been able to prove that he's involved. Meantime, Fia learns that her problems back home may go away if she agrees to go undercover for the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau at Florida's Gulfstream Park, where horses that shouldn't be winning are suddenly showing amazing talent. Fia eases into a job as an exercise rider for an honest trainer while trying to discover what new, so far undetectable, drug is turning ordinary horses into superstars. Hill (Racing from Evil, 2016, etc.) boasts a knowledge of horses and the very real problems in horse racing that fill this sound mystery with thrills and hair-raising action from first to last. 

ONE AUTHOR’S JOURNEY TO A NEW YORK PUBLISHING DEAL

Like many of my writer friends, the road I have traveled so far in the quest for a “big” publisher has been long and hard.

In 1994, I finished my first book, a novel of romantic suspense. I landed an agent with the manuscript. He sent it out to six major publishers. They rejected the book, and the agent immediately dropped me.

I was so devastated and naive, I crawled away to lick my wounds for five wasted years, before taking several courses at the Bethesda Writer’s center where I learned not just how to write mystery fiction, but the elements that must be included. Stuff I’d never heard of, like story arcs, plot points. I learned how to write a synopsis, how to market, network, and that I needed to join groups like Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. 

While taking these courses, I wrote the first book in the Nikki Latrelle series, FULL MORTALITY. With the novel finished some time in 2005, I queried 40 literary agents before securing one who believed FULL MORTALITY could attract a New York publisher. After months of this agent sending out and receiving rejections, I was disheartened to say the least. Of course, my agent avoided small publishers as the money was too meager for her.

In the meantime I wrote the second in the series, RACING FROM DEATH, which lingered at Bantam, New American Library and Berkeley for a total of 13 months before being rejected. Then, Marcia Markland at St. Martin’s Press requested an exclusive on RACING FROM DEATH before rejecting the manuscript nine months later. And so, another five years crawled by. 

I met John Betancourt, the publisher of the small DC area Wildside Press. He’d read parts of RACING FROM DEATH and offered to take it on, but I wanted to wait for the big NY deal. I waited on these NY publishers until the stock market crashed in 2008 and the Maryland horse market went down the drain right behind it.

In February of 2010, my favorite author Dick Francis passed away, I was diagnosed with lymphoma, and my horse farm was hit by the historic blizzard, Snowmageddon, the worst snow storm in the history of Maryland. 

The first hour of Snowmageddon

By now I was desperate and emailed Betancourt to ask if he’d look at the first in the series, FULL MORTALITY. He read the manuscript during the blizzard and accepted the book for publication the next day.

My agent informed me a NY publisher would no longer want to take on the rest of the series. We parted ways.

The treatment I underwent for my lymphoma was wonderfully successful, and miraculously, FULL MORTALITY was published in May of 2010, received rave reviews, and was nominated for both Agatha and Macavity Best First Book awards.

These nominations, and another big batch of query letters, helped secure a new, truly professional agent. But by the time I finished the third book, THE SEA HORSE TRADE, I knew my old agent had been right. New York publishers were not interested in a new book in a series already in the hands of another publisher–unless it had humongous sales. A word to the wise: you are unlikely to get humongous sales with a small press.

In the hopes of making some pocket change, I put a number of my short stories up on Kindle. I made a dollar here, a dollar there, almost enough to buy dog food.
My new agent told me if I wanted a bigger publisher that might provide me with a modest income, I had to start a new series. So I did, creating “Fia McKee,” a thirty-two-year old agent for the real life agency, Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau (TRPB.) I drove up to Fair Hill, Maryland, in the winter of 2012 and interviewed with the President and Vice President of the TRPB. The President asked me so many questions I felt almost like a criminal under investigation.

TRPB in Fair Hill, MD

I started the first book in the Fia Mckee series after I moved to Aiken in the fall of 2012, but lost most of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 to selling the farm that had been in my family for over two hundred years, my horses, moving to Aiken, and settling in. I finished the manuscript with the working title FLAMINGO ROAD  around August of 2014. I started the second in the series in October of 2014.

My agent began shopping FLAMINGO ROAD in December of 2014. An editor at St. Martins Minotaur showed interest in FLAMINGO ROAD, but with some reservations about the public’s interest in a horse racing novel. I immediately went to work. Phone calls and research provided me with statistics on the surprisingly strong popularity of horse racing. I cited things like NBC’s unprecedented ten-year extension agreement to broadcast rights to the Breeders Cup weekend races as well as the eleven qualifying races that precede that two-day, all-star  event. I noted how a recent ESPN poll showed horse racing is the most popular non-team sport, beating out tennis, boxing, and even NASCAR! I managed to dig up and write two pages of statistics, and my agent sent them to the St. Martins’ editor.

Happily, less than a week after this, the Carrie McCray committee announced that my in-progress novel, the second of the Fia McKee series, had won their Best First-Chapter of a Novel award. How did this happen? When I moved to Aiken, I joined the South Carolina Writer’s Workshop, the state writer’s association, and got involved with the group.

Amazingly, that same week, my previously published Nikki Latrelle horse racing trilogy received a glorious endorsement from Steve Haskin, the senior Correspondent for the Blood-Horse, and a former national correspondent for the Daily Racing Form. The recipient of eighteen awards for excellence in turf writing, Haskin wrote, “Sasscer, the honor comes in your accomplishments and talent, and you should take great pride in such a magnificent trifecta. Congratulations!!! Well done. Dick Francis lives!” 

Visit Sasscer's Amazon Page 

& Read First Chapters of Trilogy! 

http://tinyurl.com/n5gaavf

                      

How did I get this 20015 endorsement? I befriended Haskin on Facebook in 2009, reading and commenting on his excellent posts and articles in the “Blood Horse,” for five years.

But the brightest star to align that very same week was a racehorse named American Pharoah. Deep in my heart, I’d believed if the colt could pull off the historical and momentous feat of winning the first Triple Crown in 37 years, it might nudge a publishing offer from St. Martins my way. White knuckled, I watched the final race. When American Pharoah blasted around the Belmont track on the lead, rocketed down the stretch, pulling away from the Belmont field, I screamed, “My God, he’s going to win!” 

And when he opened up even more and won by daylight, I wept. I turned to my husband and said, “I think I’m going to get an offer.” I could feel the bright star that is my love for horses rising over me. Pharoah’s race drew 22 million television viewers, and the subsequent radio, television, and social media attention was phenomenal. Within a week, American Pharoah appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and a day later, I received a two-book offer from St. Martins Minotaur.

THE DEAL!

Inspectors McChickens inspect Hill's Trilogy and ten pages
 of  St. Martin's contracts for the new two-book deal!

YOUR TAKE AWAY FROM THIS STORY:
Never give up.
Learn your craft, but follow your heart.
Always be kind and gracious, you never know if the person sitting next to you, or posting on Facebook might be a key to unlock a door.
Know your market.
Join groups, but don’t let them take too much of your time.
Nothing is a important as writing.
Network, but do so within reason. See previous sentence.
When you go to meetings note (A) writers you like and admire. Now, note (B)writers you don’t like or admire. Tip: for heaven’s sake behave like the A writers!

Low Country Chapter of Romance Writers of America hosts author Sasscer Hill.

Incorporating Your Life Into Your Author’s World
Guest Speaker: Sasscer Hill
Location: Charleston, South Carolina
Coosaw Creek Country Club, Ashley Room
Times: Luncheon at 11:30 a.m.; Speaker at 1:00 pm

Are you trying to kick start your first novel? Your fifth novel? Find a story idea, or plot? Are you overwhelmed by the concept of platform and branding?
Sasscer Hill will address these questions. She wants to provide you with motivation, and arm you with a couple of obvious weapons you may not even know you have. Sasscer writes horse racing mysteries. Her brand and platform is that she was a race horse owner, breeder, and rider for years. What is your platform as it relates to what you write?
Now that Sasscer is retired from the hands on business of horse racing, how does she continue to strengthen that brand? How can you?
Come on February 28 and help Sasscer find the ammunition you can use to jump start or strengthen your writing career.

AFTER THE FALL

 "Leaves are falling all around. It's time I was on my way.” This Led Zepplin song, “Ramble On” so reflects my mood as I start to leave Maryland.

Pleasant Hills after the fall

And words like “Sometimes I grow so tired, but I know I've got one thing I got to do...  sing my song.”



My song is in my novels where characters chase the dream, fight the odds and help the helpless.  Writing connects me to the wild spirit in my heart and when I listen to Plant singing, “Gotta find the queen of all my dreams,” I know just what he means. When that queen, that wild heart drives my writing I know the work is good, that readers can share the emotion clear and simple. 

Plant sings, “Mine's a tale that can't be told, my freedom I hold dear.” I have always believed in personal freedom and rugged individualism. In today’s political environment I keep some of my beliefs to myself. But I want to be financially sound, debt free, and at least moderately successful as an author.

Wonderful events like the Washington Post’s August 29 Review of “Racing from Death” help me to believe. Accolades like, “If you miss the late Dick Francis’s racetrack thrillers, you’ll be intrigued by Sasscer Hill’s Racing From Death.” 

But the key to success is to be prolific. I must write well and plentifully. Having two herniated dics and an office in an attic up four flights of stairs do not lend themselves to this goal. Being constantly worried about my absurdly expensive homeowners policy, the huge utility bills caused by twelve foot ceilings, and the high Maryland property taxes just ain’t cutting it.


After the 2011 earthquake, the 2008 market crash, the gutting of Maryland horse racing in this state by the legislators in Annapolis who continue to raise taxes, it is time to be on my way. Staying in our beautiful historical home without the funds to keep Pleasant Hills going makes no sense. Time for hard choices that will lead to a less stressful life in a smaller town and smaller home where I can write novels that will give readers a quality place to visit when they want to step away from the hardships of life.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=sasscer+hill

Rough Sailing in the Kindle Sea, or Death By E-Publicide

“Other people do it, so why can’t I?” And with this brave premise I launched into the Kindle self-pub sea.

My short story, “Steamroller,” was written as an entry for the MWA Anthology previously called “Dark Justice.” They are calling it something else now, and since only ten stories out of hundreds of submissions were accepted, “Steamroller” didn’t get in. 

Okay, I thought.  I’ll sell in on Amazon.

My first problem: I am a Corel Word Perfect user and have never learned anything but the basics on Microsoft Word. And I have a bad attitude – I hate the way Microsoft keeps changing, forcing users to upgrade, face yet another learning curve, and spend their money. And what really amuses me is Kindle says they cannot take a Word 2010 file!

Rant finished.  I converted the story from Word Perfect to Microsoft Word and made sure I put manual Word page breaks where needed (after title page, reviews page, etc.) Still it took all day to get the text file up on Kindle.

The file I submitted on Tuesday was up on Amazon Wednesday morning. The Kindle "preview" looked fine Tuesday. But I ordered the book and opened it on my computer’s Kindle application to make sure it looked professional. The cover and front matter were fine. Actual story was a disaster. Some grafs had no indent, some had indents, still others were in block form. Shoot me. In the meantime people were buying the story. It went to #28K in sales rank. I had sold multiple copies of a story in a lousy format. Shoot me again.

I wrote Kindle, then “unpublished” the book as soon as my Kindle bookshelf page dropped the limbo "publishing" status listed next to the book. When your book is “publishing” you can’t unpublish or make any edits. The good thing about Kindle is that any time the drop down arrow next to the word “action” on your bookshelf page is working, you can click on edit, then reload a different copy of the book’s text. Happily, Kindle writes over what was there. 

Magically, I heard back from Kindle! Whoever wrote me even said they saw that I had most recently uploaded a PDF file, and kindly told me why that hadn’t worked either. Believe me, I feel like I have tried everything other than paying someone money I don’t have to do this for me.

Mr./Ms Responder said that I needed to take my word file and justify the text. I did. Mr./Ms. Responder said to save it as a “web page, Filtered (*.htm, *html).” This direction confused me because my Word offers save as “web page, Filtered” – nothing at all about “*.htm, *html.”   

Not knowing what else to do this morning, Friday, June 24, I saved the text as a “web page, Filtered,” reloaded it onto Kindle and looked at the preview, which, of course, looked fine. I republished. Now I wait to see what it really looks like when it comes out tomorrow and I spend another $0.99 to buy it again.

For what it’s worth all the rest of the stuff you fill out, title, rights, price, was easy to do. I was very lucky with the cover because the pro-photographer Rick Samuels let me have a picture he took of a horse named Stay Thirsty. The horse was ridden by an exercise girl that could surely be Nikki Latrelle. Sisters in Crime member Beth Hinshaw took the photo and made a terrific cover. All I had to do was give her the pixel size that Kindle asked for, none of which means anything to me, and she sent me a JPEG that looked great on the Amazon page when the story was up on Wednesday.

And now while I wait on Kindle, I am holding my nose and jumping into deep Nook waters. Wish me luck.

FULL MORTALITY Receives AGATHA NOMINATION!

Sasscer Hill’s horse racing mystery received an Agatha Nomination for Best First Mystery Novel written in 2010.


This is a huge honor.  I am surprised by my reacion which is one of contentment and a strong feeling of validation, rather than overwhelming excitement.  It was a long hard journey, and this nomination is like an oasis in the desert. There are five nominees for an Agatha in this category, and the winner will be chosen at the Agatha Convention on Saturday, April 30.


If I were to win, I would be agog and amazed. Gaga over the Agatha!

FROZEN IN TIMONIUM: An Author’s Recent Book Signing Experience

When I arrived in Timonium on Thursday afternoon for the Maryland Horse World Expo, the thermometer had dipped well below freezing, the forecast called for snow, and I was battling a nasty cold virus.   
In the lobby of my motel, the desk clerk watched me roll my suitcase up to the counter, where I’d reserved a room for the expo book signing of my novel, “Full Mortality.”
When I reached the counter, I didn’t like the expression on the clerk’s face.
“Our computers are down,” she said.“I can’t check you in.  You could try coming back in about four hours.”
I forced a smile, shrugged, and headed for the “Cow Palace” exhibit hall at the Maryland State Fairgrounds where, on Friday,  I would share part of a booth with a jewelry seller named Lynne Shpak.  Outside the state fair buildings, cars, trucks, horse trailers and expo attendees mobbed the parking lot. People mostly had their heads down, trailing white breath as they hurried to get indoors. 

    Inside, I found Lynne’s booth and was happy with the small spot she’d assigned me on an aisle near the entrance. Not so happy about the set of eight fire doors facing my table only twenty feet away.  Daylight showed plainly between each set of doors and through gaps at the bottom. My feet froze at the sight.
Suck it up, Sasscer.  How bad could it be? 
        After successfully checking into my hotel room that night, I crashed.  Friday morning, I peeked through the curtains and discovered both the parking lot and my car were covered in about two inches of snow and ice. It could be worse, I told myself. 
I put my outer-gear on over my pajamas and went out to warm up the car, only the doors were frozen shut.  With temperatures in the teens, I pounded with the sides of my fists until I broke the ice seal on one rear door, and yanked it open. Crawling inside, I poured myself upside down from the back seat into the front seat, twisted upright, and started the car.  After hammering the driver door open from the inside with my feet, I left the car idling, fans and heaters at full blast, white exhaust pluming in the frigid air. 
Back in my room, I loaded up on hot coffee, warm clothes and makeup, then proceeded to back my old Lincoln into a hydrant the Fire Department had thoughtfully left jutting out on a concrete peninsula. The hydrant looked okay, so I kept driving. 
After parking at the Horse Expo, I opened the trunk of my car and an avalanche of snow fell through the crack between the rear window and the open trunk lid. The whole mess landed on my open box of my books, and I might have used a bad word.  
Fortunately, it was so cold, the ice didn't melt onto the book covers. Using a towel, I dusted the crystals from each book, then dragged the carton and other supplies into the Cow Palace. After two hours, I’d sold one novel and was ready to commit bookacide. Hawking my book caused a sore throat, and my cold was blossoming like deadly nightshade. 
Though freezing, our booth location received plenty of traffic and sales picked up later that day. Two expo booksellers even agreed to buy copies of FULL MORTALITY and added the novel to their book shelves.  
The wind howled most of Friday, January 21, and sucked the heat from the overhead space heaters out through the fire doors, simultaneously pulling the biting cold in. The draft pierced my snow boots and gnawed at my feet. It could only get better right?
Saturday morning a large water main in Timonium burst, and at noon, the city shut off the water supply to the fair grounds. There were hundreds of horses at the expo, tons of people, food services and toilets that no longer worked.  
Water was trucked in for the horses, and rollbacks brought in a load of Porta Potties and dumped them outside the Cow Palace. By the time I used one, it was nineteen degrees outside, dark and the “potty” so dimly lit inside that I repeatedly bumped against the little plastic urinal sticking out on the side. This made me want a bath, but, of course, there was no water.
An additional problem I call “Firedoor Woman,” liked to use the big emergency-exit-only doors every time she snuck a cigarette. 
When I’d see her ready to bust out, I’d yell, “Don’t open those doors!” 
She ignored me totally, but the cold she let in didn’t ignore me at all. Previously suicidal feelings turned homicidal, but I restrained myself throughout the rest of Friday.
In my room that night, I carefully set a combination on the room safe, made sure it worked and locked my jewelry inside.   
        Saturday morning the combination wouldn’t work, and I had to wait for a maintenance man to unlock the safe. It only took him five seconds to open up, and my new plan is to hide the valuables safely beneath the mattress.
At the fair grounds, life improved.  The  water was on, and I had a serious talk with Firedoor Woman. Finding her in her booth, I said, “Are you the person who keeps darting out the fire doors?”  
“Yeah,” she said, not looking at me. 
Voice calm, I explained to her that it was cold outside and that it might be a good idea to use the main entrance doors instead.  I was spoiling for a fight, and she knew it. Though she refused to look me in the eye, she never busted out the fire doors again. At least not while I was there.
Later, a gal named Paige came by the booth to tell me she’d read FULL MORTALITY last summer, that she’d loved it, and couldn’t wait for the next in the series to come out. Moments like this keep me going against all odds.

Another gal stopped by with a Pomeranian she’d rescued.  When she let me hold the little dog, the day warmed up even more.  Later, I visited a man who hand-rolled roasted almonds into a hot butter and sugar sauce.  Yum, life is good.
By five on Saturday, I’d sold forty-seven books, met a lot of really nice people, and was beyond ready to head home.  I trucked everything out to the car only to discover someone had blocked me in.
In the end, I got home safely without committing a crime against the obstructive car owner, and finally got up the nerve to examine my car for fire hydrant damage. Wow! Just a smidgeon of red paint on the bumper. It could have been worse, right?

Chesapeake Crimes 3

"Chesapeake Crimes 3," containing my story, "Pretty Fraudulent," was the number one 2008 best selling trade paperback at Mystery Loves Company bookstores! This mystery anthology is part of an award winning series, and is filled with great mystery stories by both new and well-known authors. A great read, and a great gift!

"Pretty Fraudulent" follows wealthy but naive widow, Janet Simpson, as she steps into the glamorous arena of horse racing. In today’s world of email con-artists and identity thieves the unsuspecting can be separated from their dreams and their money in an instant.

Available directly from the publisher, Wildside Press, or Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble Books, here's a direct link: http://www.amazon.com/Chesapeake-Crimes-3-Clyde-Linsley/dp/1434402347/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237302291&sr=1-1