by Linda Rodriguez When a group of writers decided on Twitter to put together an anthology—Feeding Kate: A Crime Fiction Anthology (http://www.amazon.com/Feeding-Kate-Crime-Fiction-Anthology-ebook/dp/B00B6UMGSM)—to benefit our friend Sabrina and the Lupus Foundation, I was in on it from the start. After all, I love Sabrina, and I deal with lupus every day myself. The two main characters […]
by Linda Rodriguez I have piles of books sitting on my coffee table right now. None of them are mine. Some of them are from people I know, even people I consider dear friends. Many of them are from people I’ve never met and have little connection with. Some are mysteries. Some are thrillers. Some […]
by Linda Rodriguez One of the secret benefits of writing crime novels and short fiction is the chance to vicariously kill off people who have worked hard at pissing you off. We’re seldom violent people, we mystery writers, even though we write about murder and lesser crimes. We’re usually polite and kind to our friends […]
Friends used to be people you grew up with or worked with or lived next door to, and of course, they still are. But friends are now also people who live across the country from you whom you never worked with or went to school with or even physically met. The internet has changed our […]
by Linda Rodriguez I’m working on a new novel project that I find very exciting. So as we begin this new year, I thought I’d give you a taste of the original journal entry that led to this project. These words were seeds that have grown into a sapling that’s on its way to major […]
by Linda Rodriguez I write murder mysteries for a living. My Skeet Bannion mystery series (Every Last Secret, Every Broken Trust, and Every Hidden Fear) is set in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. For these books, I make up crimes and murderers entirely out of my imagination, but I have had real experience with […]
by Linda Rodriguez I’ve been thinking of redemption narratives lately—plots where someone, usually a charismatic male character, who has been of dubious morality redeems himself, quite often as an act of love for a major female character. Redemptions plots are powerful storylines that crop up in every genre—literary, mystery/thriller, science fiction, fantasy, adventure, western, and […]
by Linda Rodriguez UPDATE: Handler has come out with a real apology that acknowledges the racist content of his remarks and is now matching the next $10,000 donated to the #WeNeedDiverseBooks fundraiser. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/we-need-diverse-books I congratulate him on actually dealing with what he did. —————————————————————————– Wednesday night, the National Book Awards took place, and a multiple-New-York-Times […]
by Linda Rodriguez I’m a big rescue-animal person. I’ve had rescue dogs and cats all my adult life. When I’ve lost a dog to the cancers and other vicissitudes of old age, always a heartbreaking situation, I go looking for a replacement in the dogs on death row—those scheduled for euthanasia. I have found so […]
by Linda Rodriguez A reader recently wrote to me to praise my new book, Every Hidden Fear, and apologized for having checked the book out of the library. I reassured her that there was no need to apologize, but I know why these readers and others have felt this way. A few authors have been […]