Tess Talks To: Lee Carruthers

Marilynn Larew was here in February to talk about The Spider Catchers, the first book in her Lee Caruthers thriller series, published by Artemis Hunter Press. Today, my main character, Tess, sits down with Marilynn's mc, Lee Carruthers. Let the girl talk begin...

About the book:

What do the violent takeover of Fez brothels and a new stream of terrorist funding have to do with the disappearance of Alicia Harmon from the Fez office of Femme Aid Maroc? When CIA analyst Lee Carruthers tries to find out, she is swept into a tangled web of dirty money and human trafficking, and people will kill to find out what Alicia knew. If only Lee knew. She’s working blind, and in this case, ignorance is death. Her search takes her through the slums of the Fez medina to the high-rises of the new city and finally to a terrorist camp in the Algerian desert.

About the character:

Lee Carruthers was born in the small town in Maine where her mother’s family originated. She's the third generation in the spy business. Her father was in Hong Kong in the last days of the Vietnamese war selling counterfeit piasters on the black market to finance CIA operations. Her grandmother ran a safe house and escape route in Paris for OSS during World War II. She has Bachelors and Masters degrees from Yale in Islamic civilization and went to work as an analyst for the Agency directly out of graduate school. She's currently based in Paris, where she chases the profits of gun runners, drug smugglers, slavers, and terrorists by computer, seizing their money and putting them out of business. Sometimes her boss, Sidney Worthington, sends her out to do things analysts don’t usually do, which gets her into trouble analysts don’t usually get into.

Tess Talks to Lee Carruthers

Lee, how did you first meet Marilynn?

I was sitting at my computer in Paris, hacking into a private Geneva bank in search of a couple of million dollars belonging to a big-time Merchant of Death, when Paul, who runs the café-bar-tabac on the ground floor of my building brought her up and introduced her. He said she was looking for a heroine for a spy book. She didn’t look like much – tall and skinny with muddy brown hair and thick glasses. I didn’t know what writers look like, but she looked like one. She said she was looking for a girl who knew her way around computers and could handle a Glock. It sounded like more fun than sitting around the office, so I told her I give it a try.

Want to dish about her?

She turned out not to know her way around a computer, and she couldn’t handle a Glock either, so she needed a lot of advice, but she learned fast, although I’m not sure I’d let her behind me with a loaded gun even now. Her plots tell me she hasn’t had much adventure in her life; in fact, I think she’s had a pretty boring time of it. I guess writers don’t do much but sit at their computers thinking of outrageous things for people like me to do.

Did you ever think that your life would end up being in a book?

No, I didn’t, and to tell you the truth, I’d rather be in a romance. In her thrillers I get too much exercise of the wrong kind. Would it be too much to ask for her to put me in a romantic thriller where I get the guy – the hunky one I thought was the villain until the last chapter – and ride off with him into the sunset? She says in a series I can’t keep getting the guy, because I’d have to kill him at the end of every book, and that would make me look like the Black Widow spider we have on the cover of Spider, but couldn’t I have a partner. . .?

Did you have a hard time convincing Marilynn to write any particular scenes for you?

Actually, I have trouble holding her back. She likes to write things for me to do that are not humanly possible. I mean, readers will put up with stuff that’s a little bit over the top, but I have my reputation at the Agency to think of. The guys I trained with know what I can do.

What do you like to do when you are not being actively read somewhere?

I like to ski in a little resort in Switzerland where only a few of the guests are Beautiful People. After sitting at a computer for weeks on end or trying to satisfy the wildest dreams of my author, I find streaking down the run with the wind in my face the best feeling in the world.

Do have any secret aspirations that your author doesn’t know about?

I’d really like to have a little shack in the Caymans, a private beach where I can wear something or nothing, a banana tree, an avocado tree, and space to raise some tomatoes, beans, and salad. I could live off fish and crabs I caught, with the occasional bought chicken for a change. I’d buy the chicken and my gin by doing Arabic translations, and I wouldn’t have to think about guns or drugs or slaves or terrorists for the rest of my life.

If you had a free day with no responsibilities and your only mission was to enjoy yourself, what would you do?

I love to walk around Paris, looking in shops, having a drink at a café, just doing nothing the way Europeans do so well. Americans always have to be doing something. If they’re not working, they’re not playing either; they’re exercising. Hard. The Puritans have a lot to answer for. Rooted in the American soul is the feeling that just having fun is sinful.

What impression do you make on people when they first meet you?

I’m quiet and a bit of a loner. I guess my job is responsible for that or I like my job because it lets me be quiet and a bit of loner. When they first meet me, people almost always think I’m shy or standoffish.

How about after they've known you for a while?

After they know me better, they know I have a mordant sense of humor and am always ready to party. In small groups. I hate crowds.



What's the worst thing that's happened in your life?

Going to my father’s funeral and discovering he was a bigamist was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I guess I should explain that. My father worked for the CIA, and he wasn’t home much. I always thought he was out there spying for his country. I adored him and brought myself up in his image. I went to work for the Agency just as he had. One day when I was still at Langley, I came across the notice of his death in the Washington Post. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been notified. Everybody at the Agency knew I was his daughter. I went to the funeral home to see what was going on, and down by the casket, I saw a pretty, plump woman taking condolences from people who knew I was his daughter.
Beside her was a dainty blonde girl with a heart-shaped face and delicate features about my age. Probably exactly my age. So I learned that my father wasn’t home often because he had another family. And he wasn’t a spy after all. He was just a desk man.

What did you learn from that?

Probably the wrong lessons. I learned that loving somebody will break your heart. And I learned not to trust men. This has not been useful in my relationships with members of the opposite sex. I also don’t much like blondes.

Understandable. Tell us about your best friend.

Somehow I missed out on having friends. I have acquaintances but no close friends. I didn’t belong to any of the little cliques the girls moved around in in school. Maybe I am shy. More likely, it’s because I had to go home from school and take care of Mother. My mother was a drunk, and I could never tell what condition she would be in when I got home. I didn’t even have a date until I was in college. How could I ask a guy to pick me up at home when he might see my mother passed out on the couch? I didn’t get inoculated against love in high school the way most girls do. I don’t think I even know what love is.

What are you most afraid of?

Confined spaces. I can’t even sit in the middle seat in an airliner. I have to have space around me. I have to walk free.

What’s the best trait your author has given you? What’s the worst?

Curiosity is the best trait she’s given me. It’s also the worst. It tends to get me into serious trouble, but I have to know the answer to a question, no matter what the risk.


What’s Marilynn’s worst habit?

She talks too much. She used to be a college professor and is primed to lecture for fifty minutes. Doing research is a second flaw. She used to be a historian, and she has to know everything about everything; the tiniest little detail has to be just right. Until I talked her out of it, she was determined that even the flight schedules in Morocco had to be accurate. She couldn’t work them into the plot that way, but they had to be accurate. She was using a real terrorist group, and, when she first started out, it was a small rag-tag bunch of men on the run from the Algerian Army. By the time she got around to the last draft, it had grown rich and powerful and was certainly not the kind of group one woman, however brave and determined, could deal with. It took a lot of talk to convince her that she was writing fiction and needed to make up a terrorist group that I could deal with.



How do you feel about your life right now? What, if anything, would you like to change?

If it’s not a spoiler, I’ll tell you that I left the Agency at the end of The Spider Catchers. My life is up in the air right now. I’m trying to decide if there’s life after the CIA. I know a guy in Boston who has a small IT company. He wants me to join him, but I’m tired of computers. I want somehow to have a life – a life I can depend on to be the same tomorrow as it is today. Right now she’s got me in Dubai in the middle of a turf war between contending gangs of arms dealers. Somehow I’ve got to convince her that I’m tired of dodging bullets.

What aspect of your Marilynn’s writing style do you like best?

She’s got a kind of smart-alecky, world-weary style that suits my personality. In the last performance evaluation I had before I left the Agency, the examiner wrote that I was impertinent, insubordinate, and impossible. I’m afraid she’s got me down pat.

You sound like my kind of woman! If your story were a movie, who would play you?

I’ve been out of the country for so long that I don’t know much about current American film stars. A friend suggested Scarlett Johansson, but I think that Daniela Ruah, who plays Kensi on NCISLA, comes closest. She’s a little young, maybe, but she can play older.

Describe an average day in your life.

There’s no describing an average day in the field, so I’ll tell you what life has been like in Paris. I get up in the morning, and Paul from downstairs brings me café au lait, bread, butter, and the morning’s L’Humanite, whose content is awful and whose credibility is worse. It’s fitting that it’s published by the French Communist Party. I find it at least as credible as Le Monde, and it somehow fits my mood. Then I go upstairs to the office in my bunny slippers to check the day’s email. If there’s nothing there that requires immediate attention, I turn to my Bad Boys and start hacking their money. Slipping into a Geneva bank’s files gives me the same kind of thrill that breaking into a flat to search it does. It’s always new – following the twisty trail of illegal money, and I get a similar thrill from confiscating the money or making it disappear into the stratosphere. I don’t have a very law-abiding mentality, do I? Sometimes when the trail is hot, the work goes on into the night. Sometimes when I can’t find anything, I stop beating my head against the wall and go across the river to look at the Egyptian collection at the Louvre. Sometimes I have a date in the evening, but more often not. How many times can you break a date because you have to “go out of town on business” before a guy gets tired and looks elsewhere? Sometimes I go downstairs to Paul’s and have a bifteck-frites and go upstairs and see what’s on my Kindle. It’s usually to bed early, sober, and alone.

Will you encourage Marilynn to write a sequel?

It would be hard to stop her. Right now she’s got me in Dubai trying to find out why George Branson is dead. So far, I’ve broken into a safe and discovered a baggie full of diamonds, used a forged Power of Attorney to get into a safety deposit box, and found another baggie of diamonds, raced from Istanbul to Varna, Bulgaria, in search of an arms dealer, and back to Dubai, where, at the moment, she has me in a midnight knife fight down on the dhow docks. Sometimes I wish she’d slow down. I’d give a lot for a good night’s sleep.

I don't blame you! Good luck with that! Why is it that authors always seem to enjoy getting us into trouble? Thanks for being here, Lee!

About the author:

Marilynn Larew was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and after a living in a number of places, including the Philippines and Japan, she finally settled in southern Pennsylvania, where she and her husband live in an 150 year old farmhouse. She has taught courses about the Vietnamese War and terrorism at the University of Maryland and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia. She likes to write about places she has been or places she would like to go. She has published non-fiction about local history, Vietnamese history, and terrorism. This is her first novel.

Connect with Marilynn:                                        Buy the book:
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Featured Author: Julie Moffett

CLP Blog Tours brings Julie Moffett here today to talk about her fourth Lexi Carmichael mystery novel, No Place Like Rome, published by Carina Press (Harlequin).

About the book:

A Lexi Carmichael Mystery: Italy might seem like a long way to go to hide after a disastrous date. But when sexy uberhacker Slash (no, that’s not his real name) asks me to go with him to Rome on an investigation, the timing is sort of perfect. My messed up love life becomes the least of my worries though, after the dead body, the near-kidnapping, and the discovery of a top-secret encrypted file that even I can’t hack. With time running out, there’s only one thing to do: call in the legendary Zimmerman twins and my best fluent-in-Italian friend, Basia, to crack the code. Now if only someone could help me solve the mystery of whether Slash is flirting, or if all the kissing is just one of those “when in Rome” things… But when we finally uncover the secret someone would kill to keep, it’s up to me to solve the case and save the lives of my best friends. Just another week in the life of geek-girl Lexi Carmichael. Read about Lexi’s previous adventures in No One Lives Twice, No One To Trust and No Money Down.

Excerpt from No Place Like Rome

I’ve loved listening to music since I was a little girl. Not because I’m musically gifted, but because notes, themes, chords and tempo all have an intrinsic mathematical logic that speaks to me. After all, music is defined by its numeric divisions, such as a beat, a measure or a bar. Musical scales are actually harmonics based on the numerical ratios present in the Fibonacci series, which are a sequence of integers beginning at zero and one and continuing with each new number being the sum of the previous two.

I know all of this because I’m a geek first-class. My name is Lexi Carmichael and I’m a mild-mannered twenty-five-year old who, thankfully for music aficionados, is not employed in any part of the music industry. By day, I work as the Director of Information Security at a hot new cyber-intelligence firm just outside of Washington, D.C. By night, I’m a gamer, book nerd and fangirl (Bond, Star Wars, Dr. Who, Lord of the Rings). I’ve got long brown hair, no discernible curves and zip in the social skills department. I double-majored in mathematics and computer science at Georgetown University with a specialty in cybersecurity. Ask me to talk about a rigorous axiomatic framework or computational complexity theory, and I’m all over it. Ask me to make small talk and I’ll imagine myself jumping off a bridge.

Yet here I am, dressed in my fanciest dress—okay, it’s my only dress—and attending an opera at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., with a man whose social skills and intellect far exceed my own. Small talk is inevitable, and I have a sad feeling that my observations on the Fibonacci series in Don Giovanni won’t fill more than a few minutes.

My acquaintance’s name is Slash, which is short for “backslash” in hacker lingo. I’m pretty decent myself at the keyboard, but Slash is a hacker of extraordinary ability. Of course, Slash isn’t his real name but so far he’s never felt compelled to tell me what his family named him at birth. In fact everything about Slash is a mystery, except that he assures me he’s Italian-American and he works, at least partially, for the NSA, where I was once gainfully employed. He’s so good at what he does that he’s watched around the clock by a team of FBI agents who I’m pretty sure are instructed to kill him rather than let him fall into enemy hands.

Tonight, Slash looked jaw-droppingly handsome in three piece suit and tie. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a date because I’m quasi-seeing my boss, Finn Shaughnessy, and Slash knows that. But Finn’s and my situation is fraught with complications and I’m having a hard time sorting it all out. Maybe Slash doesn’t care about Finn or maybe he does. I wouldn’t know either way. Technically, the word date wasn’t mentioned once in relation to our evening. So, as far as I know, this is just Slash’s goodwill gesture to expand my personal horizons into areas, up until now, unexplored.

Interview with Julie Moffett

Julie, you have thirteen published novels--wow! How long have you been writing, and how did you start?

Well, I published my first book in 1993. I wrote it because publishing a novel was something I’d always wanted to do. It was a Scottish historical romance with a strong heroine and two leading men. It wasn’t overly sexy, just an unusual romance featuring a woman who had to choose one man, even though she loved them both. Luckily, I was clueless that this was not standard at the time, and sent in the manuscript on my own to several New York publishing houses. I had two offers on the book within two weeks.

I actually wrote my first book in the second grade when I penned a love story between Prince Valen and Princess Tina who met, fell in love and got married on Valentine’s Day. I still have it. It was a big hit with all the girls in my class. The boys held their noses. After that I won a 3rd grade poem contest about a haunted house. I followed up that with a stint on my college newspaper, and later moved into international journalism. Eventually I got brave enough to pen a novel for publication purposes.

What do you like best about writing?

I love writing because the voices in my head finally get heard! It’s a wonderful, magical, frustrating and agonizing process.

What’s your least favorite thing?

My least favorite part is putting my bottom in a chair and writing every day. Writing and wrestling with my Muse is really hard work.

How did you come up with the title No Place Like Rome?

My first novel in the Lexi Carmichael series, No One Lives Twice, is a word play on a Bond movie because my heroine, Lexi, is a Bond geek (and in the spirit of full disclosure, so am I). Since then, I have kept NO as the first word in all the titles in the series. I love the title of the latest book, No Place Like Rome. One of the main characters in the series, a sexy uberhacker named Slash, is Italian-American. He enlists Lexi to go with him to Rome to help his uncle who is accused of hacking money from the Vatican Bank. I’m not sure Rome will be the same after a visit from Lexi!

Do you have another job outside of writing?

I do. I am a proposal writer for a defense contractor in the Washington, DC area. Proposal writing is quite similar to fiction on occasion! 

How would you describe your book in a tweet? (140 characters or less.)

Get your geek on in No Place Like Rome with hacker extraordinaire, Lexi Carmichael. Spies, Geeks, and Lies, oh, my! #mystery #romance #adventure

Do you outline, write by the seat of your pants, or let your characters tell you what to write?

I write with an outline. I know, boring. I’m a total plotter. Think Dragnet: “Just the facts ma'am.” I need to know the plot up front and all the way to the end, including the series arc. That doesn’t mean things don’t sometimes take an unexpected turn. They do. But I’ve always got a goal in mind. I really wish I could write by the seat of my pants, have curly hair (it’s as straight as it gets), and brush my teeth with my eyes closed. But we are who we are.

Do you have imaginary friends? When do they talk to you? Do they tell you what to write or do you poke them with a Q-tip?

My first imaginary friends were the Chipmunks when I was three years old. I kid you not, Alvin was my closest buddy. My mom said the Chipmunks hung around for some time. As I grew up, I just replaced the Chipmunks with other characters in my head. Finally, I decided to write stories about them. My characters talk to me all the time, no Q-tip required. The first time I heard an audio book of one of my novels was surreal. The voices in my head were actually talking aloud! That was a real ‘whoa’ moment for me.
 
Sophie’s choice: Do you have a favorite of your characters?

I think my favorite character is Lexi herself. She’s such a conundrum. She’s smart enough to know she needs people and a life outside her “virtual existence,” but she doesn’t know quite how to go about it. Enter her best friend, Basia, who is essentially the expositional character in the series. She plays off Lexi’s inexperience and offers suggestions to help bring her out of her geek shell with sometimes—-well, most of the time—unexpected results.

Are any of your characters inspired by real people?

Honestly, things, people, and events in real life inspire me. A lot. So, to know me is to be in danger! You could be in my next novel in one form or the other.

Are you like any of your characters?

I think there are definitely parts of me in Lexi. I’m also a lot like her best friend, Basia, but much less of a fashionista!

What song would you pick to go with your book?

Here is the soundtrack that I typically listen to while I’m trying to write... “Mommy, play with me, please,” “Can I have a popsicle?” “Mom, he’s in my stuff again!” “He breathed on me.” “MOM!!!” 

I'm not sure that's on YouTube, but I've heard it often! Who are your favorite authors?

Okay, I like Michael Crichton, Robert Crais, Dean Koontz, Lisa Gardner, Stephen King, Tess Gerritsen and Nora Roberts/JD Robb, among a thousand others. Favorite book of all time: Watership Down by Richard Adams. The rabbit fantasy thing just does it for me every time.

Which author would you most like to invite to dinner, and what would you fix him?

Oh, Lexi and I would have a blast at dinner eating cookie dough ice cream and chocolate éclairs. But a dinner with Slash would be eventful to say the least. A good Italian wine, some spicy pasta, all while playing a game of strip poker. Hmmm...

What book are you currently reading and in what format (e-book/paperback/hardcover)?

I just finished The Farm by Emily McKay. It’s a young adult vampire novel. It’s not my typical reading fare, but someone whose taste I trust highly recommended it to me, and I enjoyed every page. I just purchased I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. I’m looking forward to reading that book, too. Both of them are in e-book format.


Do you have a routine for writing? Do you work better at night, in the afternoon, or in the morning?

Are writers with young children allowed to have a writing routine? I simply snatch every writing moment I can find. Someday, I’ll have a real writing schedule, or at least I hope so!

If you could take a trip anywhere in the world, where would you go? (Don’t worry about the money. Your publisher is paying.

Egypt. It’s on my bucket list to see the pyramids. Then I could know for sure if they were engineered by aliens or not.

What are you working on now?

Just finished up the next book in the Lexi Carmichael series, tentatively titled, No Biz Like Show Biz, and should be sending it out to my editor any moment now. Lexi goes undercover on a reality television dating show to catch a hacker. Hilarity ensues, of course!

Of course! And I'm looking forward to hearing more about it!

About the author:

Julie Moffett is the award-winning author of thirteen published novels in the genres of historical, paranormal fantasy, and time travel romances, and action/adventure mysteries.

She grew up as a military brat (Air Force) and has traveled extensively. Her more exciting exploits include attending Kubasaki High School in Okinawa, Japan, backpacking around Europe and Scandinavia for several months, a year-long college graduate study in Warsaw, Poland, and a wonderful trip to Scotland and Ireland where she fell in love with castles, kilts and brogues.

Julie has a B.A. in Political Science and Russian Language from Colorado College, a M.A. in International Affairs from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and is nearly finished with her M.Ed. Able to speak Russian and Polish, she worked as a journalist for the international radio station, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Washington, D.C. for eleven years, publishing hundreds of articles. She now works as a proposal writer and research advisor for a defense contractor in the Washington, D.C. area.

Julie is a single mom with two sons, who keep her quite busy. She belongs to Romance Writers of America and Washington Romance Writers where she served six years on the organization’s Board of Directors. She was also the Market News Columnist and Feature’s Editor for the organization’s monthly newsletter, Update, for eleven years.


Connect with Julie:
Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads 


Buy the Book:
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Featured author: Paul Anthony

I'm happy to welcome the very accomplished author, Paul Anthony, to A Blue Million Books. He is the author of Moonlight Shadows, which one Amazon reviewer described as a "Wonderfully twisty mix of crime and spy thriller with great characters."

About the book:

When Conor is betrayed, he spends the night hidden in the bracken surrounded by security forces hunting him down. As moonlight shadows flicker, he realises who is responsible. With his unit destroyed, Conor sets out for revenge.



But dark unspoken forces are at work and the track goes cold.



A decade later, Pegasus, a discredited British Intelligence Agent, produces a mysterious piece of computer software and demands reinstatement. The enigmatic software, carried in a memory stick, threatens to destabilise the world’s economy should it fall into the wrong hands.



Assured of peace, desperate to be home to be near her loved ones, Pegasus returns only to find herself plunged into a world where he who holds the software holds the future of the world in their hands.



A breathtaking international chase involving terrorists, spies, and criminals ensues with greed, corruption, dishonesty and mistrust, uncovered in the most powerful of places as the need to secure an enigmatic memory stick dominates proceedings, twists, and conspires to destroy the human relationships that so many take for granted. Only Davies King, a chess playing, barfly of a detective, and his trusty team, seem capable of bringing sanity to the lawless corruption threatening the very fabric of a cyberspace driven society.



But all the men and women of power can be trusted with such responsibilities, can’t they? Or is one of their number a traitor to his country, a traitor to his calling..... A traitor of the worst kind. And there’s only one traitor.... Isn’t there?



From Pauline Livingstone, Editor and Book Critic:

Paul Anthony builds tension into every page. His characters are so real you will feel as if you know them, and believe me, some you will never want to know... A cracking read... 

Interview with Paul Anthony:

Paul, how long have you been writing, and how did you start?

I began writing poetry when I was 16 years old and have hundreds of poems dotted around the house. Some years ago I consolidated some of them into my book ‘Sunset’ and I plan to do similar in the future. I wrote my first book in 1994 - The Fragile Peace -  and this was published in print only in 1996. It was a best seller for the publisher (and myself) reaching 25,000 copies before I escaped the contract in 2012 and recently updated and Kindled it. After the first, I got a commission for the second - BUSHFIRE - but the company went bust 6,000 sales later and not one penny received, Oh dear, I turned to television and screenplays with some success and then decided to concentrate on books. So I’ve been writing pretty much solidly since 1994.


How did you come up with the title of your book?

The title Moonlight Shadows came to me early in the writing since the ‘baddie’ hides in the bracken all night enduring the moonlight shadows all around him. But the words also turn out to be the code for a piece of missing software that is central to the plot and threatens to destroy the world’s economy.


How did you create the plot for this book?

I created the plot sitting by the pool in Corralejo thinking things through and working out the characters and the plan of action.

What do you do to market your book?

I market via social media, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Goodreads, and I’m a member of both the Independent Authors Network and the Writers Circle. But I also run a book club locally and do regular talks to a wide variety of organisations, book clubs, library groups, history groups, and community groups. I talk about my life in the police service, working with various national agencies, and the publishing process. I also have an extensive email library and contacts that I have built up over the years and are part of the marketing strategy. I’m hoping this will work one day and I will sell a book!!

I know authors aren't supposed to, but do you have a favorite character?

Yes, a character by the name of Claudia Jones. She is a civilian administration officer in all three Davies King books and a dominant figure in all three stories as her character just fits into everything that is going on during the investigations.

Tell us about your favorite scene in the book.

One of my favourite scenes in Moonlight Shadows is a chase through the centre of Amsterdam, where many a gunshot is fired in anger. But I’m not going to spoil it by giving details of the chase other than to say it ‘rocks.’

Okay, I believe you! Who are your favourite authors?

Gerald Seymour, Terrence Strong, Jack Higgins, and a dozen more.

Do you ever get writer’s block?

No, I’ve never really suffered from it. When I get tired I just close the computer down and watch TV, read or have a snooze. I tend to spend a lot of time plotting out the book and the characters in my head. I write notes and run a chronology through the chapter headings and then ‘just write it.’ I stop, return to the start, write a bit more, stop, return to the start - and continue. Then I use my own team to edit before a final polish. Once I’m sitting writing, that’s it. Do not disturb.

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

I like to keep physically fit doing kettlebells, jogging, swimming and pilates. I go to the gym four or five times a week. I play guitar badly and not enough and enjoy walking in the Lake District.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Carvoeiro, Portugal or Corralejo, Fuerteventura.

What are you working on now?

Behead the Serpent. This one consolidates Moonlight Shadows and contains the same characters. I’ve really enjoyed both researching and writing it. This is the draft blurb on the book cover: Disturbing photographs discovered in a vacant office in central London are not immediately connected to a ferocious attack on Davies King. But when the campaign against the chief of detectives and his closest friends turns to blackmail, it becomes personal. A series of horrendous bomb attacks and brutal shootings convince Davies to discharge himself from hospital and confront the two ‘most wanted’ criminals in the United Kingdom. Disillusioned with an unreliable temporary chief constable, and anxious to relieve a stressed out bomb disposal officer, the chess playing detective joins forces with British Intelligence to challenge the megalomaniacs who are holding the nation to ransom. Her Majesty’s Government announce a Tier One threat level as the lights across the south of England are extinguished and parts of Europe and North America face the reality of the first stages of society’s breakdown - Dystopia. It’s a simple question for the obstinate detective to answer. Does the country pay the ransom or do the lights go out?
It’s not rocket science, but who makes the decision, and why?

Paul, good luck with Moonlight Shadows, and please come back soon and tell us more about Behead the Serpent.

About the author:

Paul Anthony is a retired British detective who has served extensively throughout the U.K and elsewhere. He is a former winner of the Independent Authors Network Featured Author Contest and was a Featured  Author at the 'Books without Borders' Event in Yonkers, New York, 2012. He has been published by a vanity house and a traditional house. He is currently self-publishing under his own imprint Paul Anthony Associates. Over the years, Paul has also written both television and screenplays / film.  He is currently working on the third Davies King novel - Behead the Serpent which he expects to publish in February, 2013. 


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