trueromance

BORN TO DIE

When my editor at Kensington Publishing came up with the idea for a new series, I thought he was nuts. His idea was a series about a team of two female cops. I immediately thought of Cagney And Lacey of 1980’s television fame.

Really?

That’s where we were going?

Now you have to understand that John Scognamiglio and I work closely together. We take turns coming up with and sometimes discarding new ideas. Most of my ideas come from something I’ve seen or read about or heard, a germ of a story that I develop into a novel. Honestly I don’t know where John gets his ideas.

So when John suggested the two female cop thing, I wasn’t completely on board. Then out of the blue, his germ of an idea blossomed. In my mind’s eye I saw the first cop–a struggling, twice-married single mother of teenagers, and not necessarily A students at that. No, those kids didn’t appreciate her. She had red hair to match her temperament. I’d name her Regan–-yeah, Regan Pescoli, once married to Luke “Lucky” Pescoli. Yeah! She’d have a daughter and a son by different fathers, neither of which were supportive. Hot-tempered, willing to bend the rules every which way, Regan would be teamed with a emotionally distant, never-been-married woman who was smart as a whip and played everything by the rules. Selena Alvarez began to form in my mind and she came to me with a dark, deeply-imbedded secret.

And they weren’t city cops. Oh. No. These women were detectives with a county sheriff’s department. Far away from New Orleans where my Bentz/Montoya series is set, I came up with the town of Grizzly Falls, Montana set right in the heart of the Bitterroot Mountains.

I’d deal with craggy mountains and a small town perched on an icy river rather than the sultry, big-city feel of New Orleans.
I saw the town and peppered it with the characters that came into my mind. A sexy, guilt-riddled sheriff, a loner who is convinced he was once abducted by aliens and a women who talks to ghosts are a few of the citizens.

Recently I wrote BORN TO DIE, the third book and it’s available in August 2011. Detectives Pescoli and Alvarez are on the scene again and this time they discover the victims have an eerie resemblance to each other. No one is more aware of this disturbing fact than Dr. Kacey Lambert, who, herself, bears an uncanny likeness to the victims.

From a B level actress in Hollywood, to a teacher in the local elementary school, the victims are near mirror-images to Kacey. It only makes matters worse when she learns that the sexy rancher she’s confided in has been involved with several of the dead women.

And it scares her to death.

All in good old Grizzly Falls, Montana around Christmas time! Fa-la-la-la-la, La-la-Ti-Dah!

Question: What really has had you so frightened you could feel your heart skip a beat?

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