The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House

THIS WEEK’S OTHER FEATURED BOOKS, “A SPIDER SAT BESIDE HER,” BY K.E. LANNING AND “BLUE OR BLUE SKIES,” BY ROBIN STRATTON, CAN BE FOUND BY SCROLLING DOWN BELOW THIS POST, OR BY CLICKING THE AUTHOR’S NAME ON OUR AUTHOR PAGE.

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THE BOOK: The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House

PUBLISHED IN: 2015

THE AUTHOR: John Whittier Treat

THE PUBLISHER: Big Table Publishing Company

SUMMARY:  Seattle, 1983. Frightened by the growing epidemic that has stricken his friends, Jeff flees New York for the Pacific Northwest, only to realize AIDS has a foothold in his new home. As he distracts himself with alcohol and one-night stands, Jeff meets Henry, an alluring younger man with a weakness for heroin. Despite the jarring contrasts in their personalities and backgrounds, the two are drawn inexorably together. But as their love develops, so do numerous complications. In an effort to halt their freefall into addiction, Jeff and Henry move in with Nan, a middle-aged divorcee who has turned her home into a sanctuary for gay men in crisis. The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House revisits the early years of AIDS in the Northwest with vivid detail, unrelenting honesty, and a profound compassion for a generation lost to the plague.

THE BACK STORY: “Seattle, in the words of essayist Charles D’Ambrosio, is an ‘unwritten city.’ It is true: Fiction from and about the Pacific Northwest is a literature of dense forests, tall mountains, and craggy coastlines. Conversely, novels about AIDS are overwhelmingly set in cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, above all, New York. But there are other places where the epidemic descended as well, and in the far upper-left corner of the United States, that place was Seattle.”

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: This is a novel, based on a true story, about gay men in the Pacific Northwest in the first years of the AIDS crisis.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

Kirkus Reviews called it “a compassionate, engrossing novel of life in the early plague years, depicted here with authentic detail and a true heart.”

Lambda Literary said “Treat has given the world a great story, and a time capsule of a history that needs to be told.”

AUTHOR PROFILE:

John Whittier Treat lives in Seattle with his husband after growing up in the Northeast and living in Japan and Korea for many years. Treat has taught literature at the University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Texas and Yale. He has also spent time as faculty at universities in Australia and Norway. He has published short stories in Section 8, Jonathan, A&U Magazine and the QDA: Queer Disability Anthology. His work will also appear in an anthology of HIV/AIDS poetry now being edited by New York poet Michael Broder. In 2015 Big Table Publishing Company issued his novel, The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, about the early years of the HIV epidemic and drug addiction in the Pacific Northwest. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Award for Best Gay Fiction in 2016. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and Out magazine. Treat is now at work on a novel about a stutterer who saves the world, First Consonants, and the University of Chicago Press will publish his history of modern Japanese literature in 2018.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: “The writing took a toll on me. I was forced to mourn my losses all over again, but I discovered, at the end, an elegy that unexpectedly freed me from surrendering to any more grief. Nietzsche said, ‘We have art in order not to die from the truth.’”

SAMPLE CHAPTER: See Amazon page.

LOCAL OUTLETS: University Bookstore, Seattle

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon.com

PRICE: $17

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: http://www.johntreat.com

A Spider Sat Beside Her

THE BOOK: A Spider Sat Beside Her

PUBLISHED IN: 2017

THE AUTHOR: K.E. Lanning

THE EDITOR: Elizabeth Buege

THE PUBLISHER: Indie

SUMMARY: Lowry Walker escapes to the stars, taking a graduate position on the new International Space Station. Her dissertation includes gathering Landsat data over Antarctica, now exposed after global warming has melted the ice caps, but her mission is to heal herself after divorcing an abusive husband.

However, the danger is just beginning — a terrorist attack on the space station embroils her into a political nightmare. In a world drowned by rising seas, territorial battles erupt across the globe, with strong governments stealing land from the weak. Canada and America have merged into the United States of Amerada, with a corrupt political ring in control, and who utilize the assault for their own political purposes. And Lowry is the inconvenient witness…

A work of literary science fiction of 75,000 words, A Spider Sat Beside Her is a realistic yet allegorical tale of wounds to the heart, the body, the soul . . . and the Earth.

THE BACK STORY: I was interested in human migration and escape, and ultimately dovetailed that with global warming and political corruption. I was fascinated by the political and societal impacts of massive sea level change. I also used the opening of the West as a guide for what might happen if humans found themselves with not enough land, and for possible consequences of settling a new continent.

WHY THIS TITLE: A Spider Sat Beside Her came out of the thought of technology spinning a web around us, without us truly being aware of the consequences. It’s also a metaphor for the political web the MC Lowry becomes enmeshed into.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: It’s a thinking person’s read. A young woman snagged in a fight between political corruption and a clash of cultures, all set in a flooded future earth.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“The novel’s well-drawn characters, nicely paced plot, and satisfying conclusion will please sci-fi fans of every stripe. A tight, engaging sci-fi tale.” – Kirkus Reviews

“A captivating web of political and personal intrigue…a futuristic tale for our time.” – Sonja Yoerg, author of All the Best People

AUTHOR PROFILE: K.E. Lanning is a scientist and writer. Born in Texas in 1957, she grew up near Houston in the small town of Friendswood, laced with white oyster shell roads and open fields dotted with huge live oaks—riding horses rather than bikes. But nearby, NASA’s space program shepherded thoughts of astrophysics into her head.

Lanning received a bachelor’s degree in Physics in 1979 from Stephen F. Austin St. University in Nacogdoches, TX and a MBA in 1986 from the University of Houston. In her geophysics career, science met art—imaging landscapes beneath the surface of the earth. Lanning owned and directed an art gallery in Houston, fascinated with curating thought-provoking shows with new and proven artists.

A life-long fan of science fiction, Lanning has always been intrigued by the multi-dimensions of the genre, allowing the author to explore society, humanity, and our future—bringing the reader along for the ride. To reveal the inner workings of some of the best sci-fi authors in the business, she’s published a series of sci-fi author interviews in OMNI magazine, In the Author’s Universe: Sci-Fi Authors from a Writer’s Point of View, including authors Hugh Howey, Margaret Atwood, and Cixin Liu.

Her first novel is A Spider Sat Beside Her, a work of literary/speculative science fiction, with an eco-fiction emphasis, and will launch in late summer/early fall, 2017. Two additional novels, The Sting of the Bee and Listen to the Birds, are in the works and will complete the trilogy, though each will be standalone works.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: K.E. Lanning–author and scientist–intrigued with the sci-fi genre as a means to explore our humanity and future on Earth.

SAMPLE CHAPTER: (Provide link). You can do the ‘Look inside’ option:  https://www.amazon.com/Spider-Sat-Beside-Her-ebook/dp/B072QZZWYK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

WHERE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBook, Kobo, Google

PRICE: eBook $9.99, Paperback list is $12.99, but discounted to $8.66.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: kelanningauthor@gmail.com, www.kelanning.com

 

Blue or Blue Skies

THE BOOK: Blue or Blue Skies.

PUBLISHED IN: 2014.

THE AUTHOR: Robin Stratton.

THE PUBLISHER: Big Table Publishing.

SUMMARY: Life is a gas for a group of bohemians living in 1970’s Boston. But when dreams collide with reality and a love triangle shatters three hearts, betrayal, fame and buried memories threaten to destroy the friendship they all thought would last forever.

THE BACK STORY: I started this book in 1994, and rewrote it over and over and over. Every few years, I would drag it out and redo it, and even though I would like it a lot more, it still didn’t match the vision I had for it. I really wanted to show the dynamics of friendships that refuse to be romances, and the danger of being honest about it. There was such a sadness to some of the characters, and I was such a happy person, that I just couldn’t seem to get my own emotions to go there. But when both my parents died in 2013, I wrote out of a grief so deep that I finally knew I had written the book I’d been dreaming of for 20 years. I love all my novels, but this is the one I’m most proud of.

WHY THIS TITLE?: You can imagine how many titles I tried out over two decades! The first one, which every single person I told HATED, was Camus Never Worked in a Shoe Store. For a long, long time the title was Whole Lives (my mom called it that for the rest of her life!) but the final title, which I fell in love with as soon as I came up with it, comes from the lyrics of a song by one of the main characters, about the highs and lows of life.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Blue or Blue Skies takes place in the 1970s – when we watched Carson on The Tonight Show, and didn’t have cell phones, cable TV, or the internet. In a way, it was a simpler time.. but it’s the classic story of the man who has everything except the one thing he can’t live without. The main theme is friendship, and how we need to be there for each other, especially after a tragedy.. all set against a backdrop of rock ‘n’ roll, free love, and Bohemia.

REVIEWS:

“The characters in this fast-paced and engaging novel fascinate as we watch them struggle to succeed in life, career, and love. Demons are faced, hearts are crushed, and Stratton explores through her captivating characters–in ways that often hit close to home–what we do when we get what we need, not what we want. This alluring tale will keep you flipping pages through the myriad of twists and turns until the wee hours.” — Bonnie ZoBell, What Happened Here.

“Robin Stratton has once again demonstrated her ability to produce rock-solid writing in her new novel Blue or Blue Skies, a classy and intelligent story that will keep the reader glued to the chair and to Stratton’s immaculate text. This is a glorious book!” — Susan Tepper, The Merrill Diaries and From the Umberplatzen.

“In this absolutely un-put downable book, five friends struggle to survive love and success.” — Michael C. Keith, The Collector of Tears.

“Reading Blue or Blue Skies is like curling up with an intimate friend. The fluid writing and emotional insights draw the reader in and suspend the passage of time. A vivid portrait of heartbreak and redemption; nobody depicts relationship dynamics like Robin Stratton.” — Lascau x Review.

AUTHOR PROFILE: In addition to being an author, I am a publisher and magazine editor, and I run a writing center to inspire a sense of literary community. I love when other writers call me a cheerleader, and one of my all-time favorite compliments was when the author Michael Keith called me “the Sylvia Beach of Boston.”

SAMPLE CHAPTER: Chapter one of this novel and all my others can be read at my website, http://www.robinstratton.com . I would also love to have people check out the trailer on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aszOMLqiN_M&feature=youtu.be.

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Kindle, or a signed copy direct from me! 

PRICE: $17.00

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Would love to have people visit me at my website, or contact me at robinstrattonweb@aol.com

 

Weather Report, August 14

THIS WEEK’S FEATURED BOOKS, “LILY HARP,” BY STACY BARTON, “DANCING AT THE GOLD MONKEY,” BY ALLEN LEARST AND “BREAKDOWN,” BY DEBORAH TELLER SCOTT, CAN BE FOUND BY SCROLLING DOWN BELOW THIS POST, OR BY CLICKING THE AUTHOR’S NAME ON OUR “AUTHOR” PAGE.

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Seattle. 1983. The early days of the AIDs epidemic.

This week, John Whittier Treat will take us there with his novel “The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House,” a book written in a style that might be called “fictional memoir.” In other words, while personal recollections lend authenticity to the work, they have been filtered through a creative lens.

We often talk about books as vehicles for time travel, but they can also allow us to shift context. It was a very different thing to be a young gay man menaced by the AIDS scourge in the 1980s — before life-extending drugs, before decades of AIDS research, before a generally evolving spirit of community tolerance.

Moreover, “The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House” serves as a reminder that AIDS is still with us, and that we are still surrounded by people — gay and straight alike — whose lives have been forever changed by it.

As chance would have it, another member of this week’s grouping is Robin Stratton of Big Table Publishing, the company that accepted John Whittier Treat’s book. Robin’s offering, “Blue or Blue Skies,” is also a period piece, dating back to the connections between a group of friends in 1970s Boston.

Finally, we have am intriguing work of science fiction provided by K.E. Lanning, an author who is both a scientist and an artist.

“THE RISE AND FALL OF THE YELLOW HOUSE,” BY JOHN WHITTIER TREAT.

Frightened by the growing epidemic that has stricken his friends, Jeff flees New York for the Pacific Northwest, only to realize AIDS has a foothold in his new home. As he distracts himself with alcohol and one-night stands, Jeff meets Henry, an alluring younger man with a weakness for heroin. Despite the jarring contrasts in their personalities and backgrounds, the two are drawn inexorably together. But as their love develops, so do numerous complications. In an effort to halt their freefall into addiction, Jeff and Henry move in with Nan, a middle-aged divorcee who has turned her home into a sanctuary for gay men in crisis. The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House revisits the early years of AIDS in the Northwest with vivid detail, unrelenting honesty, and a profound compassion for a generation lost to the plague.

“BLUE OR BLUE SKIES,” BY ROBIN STRATTON.

Life is a gas for a group of bohemians living in 1970’s Boston. But when dreams collide with reality and a love triangle shatters three hearts, betrayal, fame and buried memories threaten to destroy the friendship they all thought would last forever.

“A SPIDER SAT BESIDE HER,” BY K.E. LANNING

Lowry Walker escapes to the stars, taking a graduate position on the new International Space Station. Her dissertation includes gathering Landsat data over Antarctica, now exposed after global warming has melted the ice caps, but her mission is to heal herself after divorcing an abusive husband.

However, the danger is just beginning — a terrorist attack on the space station embroils her into a political nightmare. In a world drowned by rising seas, territorial battles erupt across the globe, with strong governments stealing land from the weak. Canada and America have merged into the United States of Amerada, with a corrupt political ring in control, and who utilize the assault for their own political purposes. And Lowry is the inconvenient witness…

A work of literary science fiction of 75,000 words, A Spider Sat Beside Her is a realistic yet allegorical tale of wounds to the heart, the body, the soul . . . and the Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lily Harp

THIS WEEK’S OTHER FEATURED BOOKS, “DANCING AT THE GOLD MONKEY,” BY ALLEN LEARST AND “BREAKDOWN,” BY DEBORAH TELLER SCOTT, CAN BE FOUND BY SCROLLING DOWN BELOW THIS POST, OR BY CLICKING THE AUTHOR’S NAME ON OUR AUTHOR PAGE.

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THE BOOK: “Lily Harp & Other Stories.”

THE AUTHOR: Stacy Barton.

THE  EDITOR: Mark Eddy Smith (a fabulous developmental editor).

THE PUBLISHER: WordFarm, small INDY press specializing in literary fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry WordFarm.net.

SUMMARY: The year is 1976. The scene composed of clapboard marinas, bays, mangroves, stilt houses, sea grapes, and barrier islands reachable only by boat at the edge of the Florida Gulf. This has been Lily Harp’s world since before her mother’s suicide seven years ago. In Grandpa’s truck, rescued from art school, Lily’s journey begins. “I felt my belly swell my skirt and I thought about what was inside; the nurse at school said it had fingernails.” In the shadow of her mother, seventeen-year-old Lily’s choice unfolds. “I didn’t think I could give it away, but I didn’t know if I could keep it either.” This book reads like theater, with the poetic language of literature, and a cast of unforgettable characters. (video trailer at www.stacy barton.com). The short stories that follow, offer tragic and tender views of other confused minds and hearts. Many thanks to the journals in which they first appeared: Gargoyle, Best of Potomac Review, Real South, Relief Journal, Ruminate and others.

THE BACK STORY: See “Author Comments” below.

WHY THIS TITLE?: It was all about Lily.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? If you’ve every wondered about real florida life; if you are a part of a family who struggles and embraces the good, bad and ugly of its generations; if you love to step into someone’s emotional world; if you want to watch a young woman emerge from a struggle, independent and connected; if you like authentic people and real feelings; and if you like a little quirky, a little tragic, your senses perked…try this one….plus there are stand alone short stories in the end!

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“From the sweltering Florida mangroves to the dust storms of Oklahoma, Stacy Barton sculpts imagery and molds characters who traverse the complex terrain of the human heart.” — Beth Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Me.

“Stacy Barton knows her characters like she knows Florida’s Gulf coast, which is to say deeply. Lily Harp is a masterpiece of atmosphere and mood, of jasmine blooms and mangrove roots. — ”David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals (Florida Book Award Silver Medal).

“In the luscious novella at the center of this scrumptious new book, the pregnant, seventeen-year-old, eponymous Lily Harp struggles to be, as muddled as the Florida weather.”—Alan-Michael Parker, award-winning author of The Committee on Town Happiness.

“Barton has created a sacred space and populated it with unforgettable characters whose stories and struggles are at once evocative and eternal. We will ever keep them in our hearts.” — Cathleen Falsani, journalist and author of Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace.

AUTHOR PROFILE:Maybe it was the construction paper or the modeling clay. Maybe it was the picture books her mother read to her as a toddler, or the A. A. Milne her father read aloud once she started school. Maybe it was the dance classes or the macrame or the health food. Of course it could have been that her grandmother was a painter, her great-uncle a Juilliard pianist, her mother a dancer, and her father an unconventional minister. It could have been her brothers’ antics over kick-the-can, or their Hobbit drawings or guitar songs, or the dozen or so dogs they had, or the absurd number of places she lived growing up. Maybe it was the ADD that they didn’t have a name for in those days, or the manic depression that followed, or the struggle to find her own spirituality.

Whatever it was, Stacy was bound to end up as some kind of artist. She was performing professionally by the time she was nineteen and directing, writing and creating interactive theater by twenty-four. Her first published words appeared when she was twenty-five, but it wasn’t until her thirties that she took writing seriously. After four kids, the theater turned out to be rough on family life, and so she began to keep the poems she scratched on the envelope backs that floated around on the floor of her minivan. She was thirty-five when a Mack truck totaled her Caravan, forcing her to give up theater and dance because of migraines and herniated discs. She turned to writing and promptly won a small pack of awards for her poetry and scripts and within a few years landed a job as a free-lance scriptwriter for the Disney Company. Since then she has published an award-winning novella, two collections of short stories, dozens of poems, a few plays, children’s books, and animated short films.

Stacy lives with her husband, Todd—and whichever of their four kids happen to be in town—in Maitland, Florida, where they’ve made their home for over twenty years. When the house is quiet, she writes for Disney, or works on her new book or plays with construction paper for old time’s sake.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: Here’s an article I was commissioned to write for a literary magazine called Real South…it closed its online presence soon after:

Fictional Florida: Lily Harp & Stories.

I was an actress in experimental, improvisational theater before I became a writer. Story begins with voices in my head. Later, fully formed characters “step into their light” and offer me their first lines from the stage. But for my most recent book, Lily Harp  it was not character, but place, that first captured my heart and my attention: a barrier island off the southwest coast of Florida called Little Gasparilla. A mile long and a few blocks at its widest, you can only get to this finger of land by boat. On the bay side, the houses peek above the mangroves on wooden stilts—on the other, they perch in the sand of the Gulf.

Since the 1980s my husband and I have traveled from Orlando to Little Gasparilla Island, often in our red suburban, loading our tiny flats boat with coolers and black garbage bags of groceries and toiletries. As the years passed we added four kids and a dog. Until a fire consumed it a few years ago, we almost always stayed in the same stilt house.

One of our trips came not long after my first collection of short stories was contracted for publication by WordFarm. With Surviving Nashville “in the can” we took the kids down to the island for a week. I was between projects and flailing a bit, uncertain about what I wanted to write next. A few days into the trip, with kids running off to the beach or out on the boat with their dad or along the wood walk to poke and coax the crabs, I realized I wanted to set a story in this place; it was warm and filled with life and happy memories. And so I started taking notes—but true to my self-taught form I was not planning a story, I was listening to the soliloquy of the first character who had stepped into her light…Little Gasparilla Island.

It wasn’t difficult; the maternal mangroves that rose in a trio of roots on the inland side of the island surrounded our long dock and stilt house in magic and held secrets of beauty and pain. From that porch of chicken wire and screen I wrote pages and pages by hand of the way the light looked on the mangrove branches, of the smell of her estuary mud and the spirit of the trees.  I sat out on the dock wrapped in sun and wrote about the water, the silvery ripples and the grey undercurrent that held them up. I walked in the sandy mud puddles through the scruffy pines to the seaweed beach that sloped into a gentle green. There I wrote about the sunset and the sounds, the moods and the clouds, the shells and the way my feet looked, wavering but clear, through the pale Gulf.

When I got home, back to writing theme park shows and carpooling kids and checking homework, I read back over my scribbles while cooking supper and began to long for who might join me in this place of beauty and tears. Who’s story would I tell? Two voices began to emerge—a young girl who lost her mother to suicide and a pregnant teenager uncertain what to do with the child she carried. In the end, they both turned out to be Lily Harp, the main character of my novella. The young woman who stepped into the light to tell me her story—a story infused with her baby, her mother and her island—Little Gasparilla.

SAMPLE CHAPTER: You can read the first five chapters via a PDF link on the home page of my publishers website: WordFarm.net.

LOCAL OUTLETS: BookMarkItOrlando.com buy from them online if you can – support INDY presses, authors and booksellers whenever possible!

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, WordFarm.net.

PRICE: $17.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: E: words@stacybarton.com; FB: Stacy Barton, Author; IG: @bartonstacy; T: @stacybarton — I truly truly LOVE to interact with readers and ALWAYS respond to their inquiries (WAY faster than I got your assignment complete!!!) I am available for Skyped-in book clubs or email Q&A for book clubs – only charge is to buy/read my book, and if you like it encourage someone else to buy and read one!

 

Dancing at the Gold Monkey

THE BOOK: Dancing at the Gold Monkey

PUBLISHED IN: 2012

THE AUTHOR: Allen Learst

THE EDITOR: Lisa Graziano

THE PUBLISHER: Leapfrog Press

SUMMARY: Five veterans who suffer drastically from the invisible effects of PTSD also suffer from their lack of understanding about what happened to them. These men are victims of a society whose lack of concern for what they did for their country has deep and profound effects on their psyches.

THE BACK STORY: The stories are linked by the lives of five soldiers whose paths cross and whose destinies are interlinked.

WHY THIS TITLE: In part, the book revolves around a dark and questionable neighborhood.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: Provides a good insight to veterans recovering from PTSD and is relevant throughout time and what we are currently faced with regarding our returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Faith, mercy, grief, guilt—these are themes that inform all of Allen Learst’s work in the world. But he is also able to render transient moments of great beauty, to reveal the way we might transcend sorrow by our unwavering attention to exquisite detail and the mystery of creation.” —Melanie Rae Thon

AUTHOR PROFILE: Allen Learst won the 2011 Leapfrog Fiction Contest for his short story collection, Dancing at the Gold Monkey, judged by Marge Piercy. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appeared in War, Literature and the Arts, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chattahoochee Review, Hawaii Review, Passages North, Ascent, The Literary Review, Pisgah, and Water~Stone. The first chapter of his yet unpublished novel, Bonefish, was published in Crossborder Journal. His essay “The Blood of Children” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received a “Special Mention” in the 2008Pushcart Prize XXXII Best of the Small Presses, and a “Notable” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Colleges—Marinette, Wisconsin, and a Faculty Mentor for the Regis University Mile High MFA low-residency program in Denver, Colorado.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: A series of linked stories about dysfunctional Vietnam vets who attempt to adjust to civilian life after their experiences in war.

SAMPLE CHAPTER: On Amazon page. Also, hear live readings at http://www.allearst.com

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Leapfrog Press

PRICE: $14.95

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: allen.learst@gmail.com

Breakdown

THE BOOK: Breakdown.

PUBLISHED IN: 2016

THE AUTHOR: Deborah Teller Scott.

THE PUBLISHER: Amazon.

SUMMARY: When he’s sent to consult on a case half a globe away from New Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Michael Dachemont is eager to reconnect with Kate Winslow, the author of popular children’s books he’d met months before on a highly publicized investigation in the south of England. His original assignment in the Pacific Northwest turns out to be not nearly as challenging as the puzzles that await him when he travels to Oregon to spend what’s left of his busman’s holiday with Kate’s family.

In an environment as alien to Dachemont as any he’d ever experienced, there’s enough mystery to keep a squadron of detectives busy; but only one small-town country sheriff is on the job, and his objectivity is questionable. The trouble begins with a bit of graffiti, which turns out to be the deceptively innocent tip of a very deep and dark iceberg. Will Michael and Kate have time to see where their budding relationship leads? Or will the denouement come too late for them?

THE BACK STORY: Downfall needed a sequel. Readers wondered what the future held for Michael and Kate and so, for that matter, did I. Since I live in the Pacific Northwest, it was a logical place in which to reunite them. I had the outline in mind for months, so when I sat down at my computer, the story more or less wrote itself.

WHY THIS TITLE? Breakdown [breyk´-doun]: the failure of a relationship or of an effort to discuss something; a failure that prevents a system from working properly.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Modern cozy mysteries with interesting plots, wholesome dialogue, attractive characters, and a healthy dose of humor are rare, so I decided to write for those readers who long for the relatively good old days.

REVIEW: “Great read! Fun mystery!”

AUTHOR PROFILE: I still live contentedly in southern Oregon with a menagerie of rescue animals and a small circle of delightful friends. Besides keeping busy with a part-time job and satisfying, community-enriching activities, I enjoy writing stories that appeal to readers who miss the comfortable, satisfying style of story-telling that was common in simpler times. My period novel, The Bell Tower, will soon be republished. Available on Amazon now are my modern mystery novel in print, Deathbed of Roses, and two anthologies to which I contributed — “The Man Across the Table” in Gratitude With Attitude and “Lessons Grady Taught Me” in Pets Across America.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: Despite the difficulties facing writers who venture into the rough waters of independent e-publishing—primarily the challenge of promoting our books so that they sell to more than friends and family—those of us who think we have something to offer and a readership to reach keep trying. Besides, writing down the stories we have closeted in our brains is fun and great free therapy.

SAMPLE CHAPTER: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CC3X9PA

PRICE: $2.99.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: I appreciate hearing from readers and respond to every single one. Please contact me at DeborahTellerScott@gmail.com.