FEATURED AUTHOR: JUDI LYNN

ABOUT THE BOOK

High summer in River Bluffs, Indiana, is always sweltering and sweet. But the heat is really on when a decidedly dead body turns up in the neighborhood.

When established house flippers Jazzi Zanders and her cousin Jerod donate a week’s worth of remodeling work to Jazzi’s sister Olivia, they’re expecting nothing more than back-breaking roofing work and cold beers at the end of each long, hot day. With Jazzi’s live-in boyfriend and partner Ansel on the team, it promises to be a quick break before starting their next big project—until Leo, an elderly neighbor of Olivia’s, unexpectedly goes missing . . .

When the friendly senior’s dog tugs Jazzi and the guys toward the wetlands beyond Olivia’s neighborhood, they stumble across a decomposing corpse—and a lot of questions. With Jazzi’s pal Detective Gaff along to investigate, Jazzi finds her hands full of a whole new mystery instead of the usual hammer and nails. And this time it will take some sophisticated sleuthing to track down the culprit of the deadly crime—before the killer turns on her next . . .

Book Details:

Title: The Body in the Wetlands

Author: Judi Lynn

Genre: Cozy mystery


Series: the Jazzi Zanders mysteries, book 2

Publisher: Lyrical Underground
 (April 23, 2019
)

Print length: 268 pages


On tour with: Great Escapes Book Tours


IFs ANDs OR WHATs INTERVIEW WITH JUDI LYNN

Ifs


IF you could talk to anyone, who would it be and what would you ask them?
I’ve watched way too many movies about Elizabeth I. Looking back, I’d love to know her take on her lifetime, and why she made the choices she made, and if she wished she’d done anything differently.

IF you had to do community service (or already do volunteer work), what would you choose?
I don’t do volunteer work anymore, but I really enjoyed volunteering in my daughters’ schools when they were young. I taught elementary school before I had them, and when Holly, my older daughter, started first grade, the principal of her school said that if I’d teach a half-day reading (for free) with the poor teacher who was given a reading readiness/first grade split class, my second daughter Robyn could join the class every morning and go to school half days. Robyn loved the idea, said she was starting school like her sister, so I agreed. The teacher and I made a great team, and the kids did well.  Robyn didn’t understand, though, why she got As on all of her papers and didn’t get to first grade the following year like the rest of her friends. She was only three. I tried to explain she wasn’t old enough to start school yet, but it took the principal telling her, “Hey, it’s a legal thing. You’re only three years old.” So the next year, Robyn started pre-school, even though she could read like a whiz! After that, I volunteered in the school’s computer room and spent one afternoon a week reading to first grade classes. I loved it all until my husband’s mom had to find a good nursing home, and then I didn’t have time for those programs anymore.

IF you were on the Amazon bestseller list, who would you choose to be one before and one below you?
I made the Amazon best-seller list for my cozy mystery, The Body in the Attic. And it was wonderful! But it would have been even better if my writer-friend Julia Donner was before me for her Regency romances and my friend, Mae Clair, was behind me for her brilliant Hode’s Hill series. I love both of their writing!


IF you could meet any author for coffee, who would you like to meet and what would you talk about?
Easy! I’m a huge Ilona Andrews’ fan—I’ve read every Kate Daniels book and Hidden Legacy novel.  And if it’s like getting together with any other of my author friends, we’d talk writing!

IF you could choose a fictional town to live in what would it be and from what book?
I’m not brave enough to aspire to being a hero or clever enough for intrigue, so I’d go for Shangri-La in James Hilton’s book, Lost Horizons.  It sounded a lot like heaven on earth.


Ands


5 favorite possessions:   
•    I have an old leather satchel that I carry to every meeting of my writers’ club. I’m our unofficial moderator who sets up every meeting and the three readers who volunteer for each one, plus a list of all of our members and their e-mails. When I think writers’ club, I think of my satchel.
•    A pin my dear friend, Wayne Rothgeb, gave me from when he was a pilot in World War II.  I mentored him when he wrote a book about his experiences, New Guinea Skies, and he gave me the wings as a thank-you.
•    A teapot my husband gave me that’s shaped like a writing desk with an old-fashioned typewriter on top since I’m such a fan of Agatha Christie.  The piece of paper in the typewriter has a page from one of her manuscripts painted on it, and the papers wadded up in the wastebasket come from the same book.  I love it.
•    Chanel #5—another gift from my husband.  I always feel feminine when I wear it.
•    And a loose-leaf notebook full of poems in my mother’s handwriting that she copied from her favorite poetry books.
mentored him when he wrote a book about his experiences,  and he gave me the wings as a thank-you. 

5 things you need in order to write: 

•    The plot points I did for my book—1 plot point for each chapter.
•    The character wheels I drew and filled in for any important characters in the book.
•    My Roget’s Thesaurus
•    Diet juice or coffee
•    And My computer.  (I do better on a desktop than a laptop).

5 things you love about where you live:  
•    The Midwest is GREEN. Lots of places are warm and wonderful, but the green of Indiana always makes me happy.
•    Fort Wayne is big enough to have a lot of things to offer, but not so big that the traffic snarls make me crazy.
•    Pork tenderloins. I know. I read the men’s sports magazine that said too many Hoosiers are obese.  But my daughter lives in Florida and called for a recipe to make pork tenderloins because you can’t find them where she lives. Neither can John’s brother in Oakland. And they’re wonderful.
•    People are pretty friendly here.
•    And We live in northeast Indiana, and there are a lot of lakes nearby. 

5 favorite foods:
•    Scallops. Love ‘em!
•    Sausage rolls.
•    Balsamic chicken breasts
•    Butternut squash ravioli in a brown butter-sage sauce
•    And Macarons (the French kind)

5 favorite books:  
•    Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
•    The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
•    E Pluribus Unicorn, Theodore Sturgeon
•    The Old Fox Deceiv’d, Martha Grimes
•    A Great Deliverance, Elizabeth George
•    And sneaking in another one: Midnight Bayou, Nora Roberts

Whats

What’s your all-time favorite place? 
I love Fort Wayne’s Children Zoo, but my parents used to drive us to the Toledo Zoo in Ohio when we were kids as a special summer trip, and I still love to visit it.

What’s your all-time favorite author? 
I think I’ve read every Agatha Christie mystery, even a few of her paranormal type short stories.

What’s your all-time favorite city? 
I love LIVING in Fort Wayne, but I love VISITING Washington, D.C. Chicago has to be a close second.

What’s your all-time favorite library? 
I have to say our local Waynedale library. Not because it’s the BEST in the city, but because the people there were so wonderful to our grandsons and encouraged them to visit the library every Saturday. And for myself, I’m wonderfully proud of the Little Turtle Library in Fort Wayne for hosting our writers’ club every second and fourth Wednesday.

What’s your favorite dessert? 
Chocolate pavlova with strawberries and whipped cream.

What’s your favorite social media site? Would you rather tweet or post on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest . . .?  
I have a thing for Twitter. I like to visit it 3 times a day. You can find me at @judypost.

What’s your latest recommendation for:
Food: Stromboli.
Music: Keith Urban’s CD Ripcord
Movie: The 13th Warrior
Book: The Anatomist’s Wife, Anna Lee Huber
Audiobook: never listen to them
TV:  The Kitchen on the foodnetwork (I love to cook!)
Netflix/Amazon Prime: Stranger Things

What other books do you currently have published?
I started out self-publishing (through my literary agency) urban fantasy. I have 9 novels and 7 novella bundles, plus one longer novella—all listed under Judith Post on Amazon:

When I started writing for Lyrical Underground, I wrote 6 Mill Pond romances as Judi Lynn:
Cooking Up Trouble
Opposites Distract 
Love on Tap  
Spicing Things Up 
First Kiss, On the House
Special Delivery

I’ve just started writing cozy Jazzi Zanders mysteries as Judi Lynn. My first one was The Body in the Attic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

USA Today Best-selling author for The Body in the Attic. 
When Judi started self-publishing, she wrote urban fantasy as Judith Post. Then her wonderful agent, Lauren Abramo, suggested she try to find a publisher by writing romance, and she was right. Judi sold her Mill Pond romances to Kensington's Lyrical Press. After six romances, her equally wonderful editor, John Scognamiglio, asked if she'd like to try to write a mystery. Ironic, because she started writing--forever ago--by writing mystery short stories and selling them. She decided to write about a fixer-upper because her husband and she bought a 1920s small bungalow when they got married, and it needed lots of work. They're still working on it. And cooking crept into the stories because she LOVES to cook and have friends over to eat supper. A lot of her passions have ended up in her books:)



Connect with Judi:
Webpage  |  Blog  |  Goodreads  |  BookBub

Buy the book:
Amazon 

a Rafflecopter giveaway