Owen McKenna # 23!

 Owen McKenna is back in another thrilling adventure...

My new book will be out this summer. Those of you reading this will be the first to know.

TAHOE SPEED 

When a world-class Tahoe skier dies on a speed course in France, a Truckee chef's life is thrown into chaos and danger. Tahoe Detective Owen McKenna's investigation is unsuccessful until he discovers an unlikely connection to Victor Hugo's novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

The story of TAHOE SPEED grew out of Tahoe history. Back in the 1970s, Tahoe skier Steve McKinney became the first person to ski 125 miles per hour, which was astonishing because that is the terminal velocity of a falling skydiver in the classic belly-down falling position. 

Imagine that: Skiing as fast as a person falls through the air! Steve McKinney became the fastest non-motorized human in history.

Twenty years later, another Tahoe skier, Jeff Hamilton, became the first person to break 150 miles per hour.

Tahoe skiers have been leaders in super-charging the sport of speed skiing, an amazing sport of race-car speeds but with none of the protection of the race-car shell.

Imagine stepping into very long skis, jumping onto an impossibly steep track, and skiing straight down a mountain. If you have a perfect aerodynamic tuck and skill, and a world-class athlete's strength to hold that tuck, you accelerate to race car speeds in seconds, faster than any non-motorized human has ever gone before.

In TAHOE SPEED, a French chef named Genevieve Laurent falls in love with an American speed skier named Colin Burns, named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Colin is a spectacularly successful skier from Tahoe. When Colin dies on a French speed-skiing course, Genevieve's life implodes and her French restaurant, GENEVIEVE, in Truckee is threatened.

Of course, it looks like Colin Burns's death was an accident. But Tahoe Detective Owen McKenna finds out otherwise.

McKenna learns that Colin's death was suspicious, and the collapse of Genevieve's world appears to be some kind of twisted design.

Tahoe Speed is a love story with danger, poetry, an evil villain, and speed...

Tune in this summer to find out what happens! The book will be available wherever you've purchased it in the past. And you can always preorder it at Amazon

A Bunch of Books Since My Last Post

 Back in 2018, I began writing a new series. 

The Josie Strong Wilderness series: A Dark Road Suspense

My idea was to create a new protagonist who was the opposite of my Tahoe Mystery protagonist Owen McKenna. Where he was a big tall white guy, my new character would be a small Black woman named Josie Strong. Where he was outgoing, Josie would be an introvert. Where McKenna was an ex-cop, Josie Strong would be a professor of medieval history and an expert in the design of medieval weapons. Where he was self-employed and lived and worked in the mountains of Tahoe, she would teach at UCLA and live in Santa Monica. 

Josie Strong and her daughter Samantha are very urban, as unfamiliar with the wilderness as a person could be.

Of course, that meant the Josie Strong books would largely take place in the wilderness!

Book 1: Wilderness Vacation

Book 2: Wilderness Justice

Book 3: Wilderness Punishment

Book 4: Wilderness Threat

I wrote the first four books over the course of four years while I was continuing to write the Tahoe Mystery series. 

Because a series develops nuance and subtlety as it is written, and I knew I'd find many possible improvements, I decided to wait until I had four books completed before publishing them.

The result was that all four books came out the summer and fall of 2024.

Beginning with Wilderness Vacation, the series had a great hook: 

'Professor Josie Strong and her daughter Samantha didn't realize they'd witnessed a crime that made powerful men want them dead. Their would-be assassin didn't realize how hard they'd be to kill...'

When the killer follows Josie and Samantha into the wilderness, he doesn't know that, while the mother and daughter are unarmed, Josie is an expert in the construction of medieval weapons. She can go into the forest and fashion a deadly weapon. Good luck, Mr. Assassin, you've met your match.

If you hadn't read them, check out the books, which are cheap on Kindle.

Meanwhile, my next Owen McKenna came out in August of 2024.

Tahoe Rescue is about a young woman named Olivia (Livvy) Paar, who gets a job working as a personal secretary for a cosmetics tycoon at Lake Tahoe. When her boss, Georgia Connor, dies in a car accident at Emerald Bay, Livvy comes to believe the death wasn't an accident. The book has the typical thrills and excitement of the other McKenna mysteries. However, its theme is unique: Pirates on Lake Tahoe!