A few years back I heard a newstory about a man who had spent half his life in prison for murder before DNA set him free. Since then, thousands of prisoners have been exonerated because of the improvement in DNA testing. The story gave me the idea for my book, Murder Déjà Vu , in which a man spends fifteen years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He's released not on DNA evidence but on a botched crime scene technicality. A TV story about an artisan who created rock fireplaces filled out my character's profile. Wealthy Harvard-educated architect, Reese Daughtry, has spent the last six years living an almost hermit-like existence in the mountains of North Carolina after his release from prison, building artistic rock fireplaces for a waiting list of clients. When author Dana Minette, newly divorced from her abusive husband, the county prosecutor, sees photos of Daughtry's creations in a magazine, she contracts him to build a fireplace in her new home. There’s a romanc...

Unless you were already living in a war zone, a global pandemic is the probably scariest thing you have experienced in a very long time. If you were already prone to depression and anxiety, there is nothing like a plague to ramp up the tension setting to high. It is okay to feel scared and frozen. To wonder why you should bother to write a book when the world feels like it is ending. What's the point? Who can afford to buy it? How could you possibly launch it? Are publishers even accepting new works? The fact is books are getting many of us through this difficult time. Book sales are up.  Some are reading dystopian books for reassurance. Fictional worlds survived. People carried on. In many countries, dictators are in power and authoritarianism is on the rise. We may be inspired by heroes who fought to overturn corruption. The same applies to historical books set in war time and disaster thrillers. There is comfort in knowing someone somewhere managed to survive natural disasters, ...

How do you feel about 2020? Without a doubt, this year will go down in history as one we never want to revisit. Certainly, we've read (and lived through) challenges we never imagined we'd endure. News folks, other commentators, and journalists have beaten us nearly to death with negativity from virtually all fronts—and understandably so.  We are writers of fiction and nonfiction. We are editors, journalists, and so on. Among our talents is the ability to look at any given situation from a variety of perspectives. Let's put the kaleidoscope of 2020 up to our eye and turn the image wheel slowly.  Bright colors of rebirth we expected in the spring lost their brilliance, their beauty, their appeal. Instead, we faced a pandemic, something most of us have never experienced. Schools closed. Restaurants and a host of other businesses shut their doors. Store shelves emptied faster than they could be restocked, and many necessities could not be found because warehouses ran out of sup...