MKC Books

The trade paperback version of Dead Wrong is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and independent bookstore Powells. It can also be ordered from your local bookstore.

Sorry for the late arrival. Gremlins got into the pdf file and turned all the fonts to boxes. Oh, what fun! But my formatter got it fixed and all's well that ends well.

Now I can get serious about the next book, as yet untitled. Well, Dead...something! It takes place in springtime in Sheriff Karen Mehaffey's mother's reclusive German Anabaptist community. Sort of like the Amish. Only not.

Whew. This book was a bear!

I'm as glad to finally have Dead Wrong off my hands as I hope you're glad to have it in yours. It's now available in ebook form at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords. It'll take a bit longer to filter through to Apple, Diesel, and Sony.

The trade paperback should be done in a month or so. I'll announce it here when it's ready.

The third book in the Dakota Mystery series has an ebook cover! Once again, Glendon Haddix of Streetlight Graphics nailed it on the first try.

As for the book itself, I pulled two almost-all-nighters to finish the draft of Dead Wrong for my editor last weekend. I wish I could say I nailed it on the first try but I am expecting a sea of red.

I'm not sure exactly how long the editing process will take, as each book is different, but I hope to get Dead Wrong out to you by early next year. Fingers crossed!

If it weren't for a friend who'd just been to Rapid City, South Dakota, I probably wouldn't have heard about the massive loss of cattle in West River during a very early blizzard in the first week of October.

Oh, I'd seen the pretty pictures of the snow from Facebook friends who live there. But none were ranchers. The news is only now hitting the national media. Dakotans are used to being ignored and often like it that way, but not in this case.

Because the ranchers who lost their herds need help. If you have any spare change, please consider a donation.

In Dead White, set in the midst of winter, such blizzards are expected, or at least prepared for. And my fictional characters fret over the potential loss of livestock. But nothing like on this scale.

Not being a rancher myself, I know I don't truly understand what's been lost. Not just the animals, not just the livelihood, but bloodlines and lifelines. When the Indians lost the buffalo, killed off not by Mother Nature but human nature, it was even more devastating.

My own struggles with the next book in my mystery series pale in comparison. Dead Wrong is due at the editor's in mid-November. We'll see if I make it and how much work it will require if I do.

Fingers crossed that I get it out by the end of the year.

Just an update on where I'm at with the next book, tentatively titled Dead Wrong. I'm at the percolating stage, having finished most of my research but not having done much actual writing yet.

The story starts with a body found in front of an old pickup crashed up against the Wrong Way sign on the ramp off Interstate-29. The man's been shot in the head and the gun is still in his hand. Is it suicide or something more insidious?

That scene came to me several years ago, actually, as I was waiting on a ramp and glanced in my rear view and saw the sign. Wrong Way. That seemed like a neat title. Now that I've locked myself into titles with Dead as the start, I had to revise that a bit, but this story started on that momentary glance.

Such is the writer's life. Every little thing can be used.

The draft of Dead Wrong is due at my editor's on October 1st and should be out by the end of the year. If all goes as planned, that is!

For those of you waiting for the print version of Dead Dreams, a trade paperback is now available. It's up on Amazon already but will take a while longer to filter through to other sites like Barnes & Noble. Eventually you should be able to order it through your local bookstore.

The next book in the Dakota Mystery Series is finally out!

I’ve uploaded Dead Dreams to the various ebook sites and it is available at most already. (Kobo is the exception.) The print version will lag a month or so behind, if all goes well.

Just a little on the background of this book. I wrote the opening scene several years ago after one too many rejections from literary agents. I thought seriously about giving up writing at that point, at least for publication.

Then I found myself sitting down at my laptop and writing what it felt like to be a failure at the one thing I thought I was on this earth
to do. So the idea of Dead Dreams was born, though I wrote Dead White first. 
 
With winter around the corner, I hope this mystery set in July warms your holiday season. I am grateful for every single one of my readers, who’ve made my dreams come true!

The e-book cover for Dead Dreams is done!

I'm really pleased with how it turned out, thanks to the magic of Glendon S. Haddix of Streetlight Graphics. 

The draft of Dead Dreams is now in the hands of my editor. I've got my fingers crossed that revisions won't be a nightmare. I'm still aiming for a release date before the end of the year.

Sorry for the radio silence. I'm busy working on the second book in the Dakota Mystery series. The title is Dead Dreams. Per usual, I'm all in a muddle at this point and don't have a clue how I'm going to wrap it all up.

But I'll get there somehow. Or so I have to believe.

Who knows what my editor will do with it when I turn it in. But here's a blurb for those of you who want to know what's coming. The ebook should be out by the end of the year. If not, someone's gonna die. ;-)

   Dreams can inspire, crush—and even kill.
   When Sheriff Karen Mehaffey calls back Adam Van Eck to look after
his ailing mother, he reluctantly returns from pounding the boards on
Broadway—and is found days later, shotgun in hand, with his mother planted dead in her garden. With half her head blown off.
   He claims he was chasing rabbits. Right.
   But Karen is too distracted to listen to his prevarications, what with rising flood waters threatening the town. Going for the stars—sheriff’s stars—wasn’t turning out to be a dream come true. And she’s been offered a dream job in Washington DC.
   Detective Marek Okerlund, on the other hand, welcomes the distraction from the anniversary of his wife’s death and his mother-in-law’s unannounced visit.
   But who other than Adam Van Eck could possibly want the retired schoolteacher dead? The only link to her life outside her garden is the Dream Team, a group of high school students dreaming up ways to revitalize the dying county of Eda.
   With the detritus of dead dreams all around, Karen and Marek must flush out a killer.
   Before the levees break.

In my short bio, I note that I’m part of the Dakota diaspora, but
what does that actually mean? 

According to the venerable Merriam-Webster, diaspora (lowercase) is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland.” 

But what it actually means is that I was looking for a term that
wouldn’t lay me open to the accusation of bragging, an activity heavily frowned upon in the Dakotas.

The term I discarded is one familiar to many Dakotans who have pursued advanced education and left to find professional work not readily available in our homeland: The Great Plains Brain Drain. But using that term would not only swell my own brain beyond its (demonstrably small) capacity but insult the many bigger brains who remained. 

So I coined the term Dakota diaspora as a way of saying that I
was too stupid to figure out a way to stay in the Dakotas and make a
living.

Only in researching this article for my blog did I find out that there’s actually a book out there, published in the 1980s, called Dakota Diaspora: Memories of a Jewish Homesteader by Sophie Trupin. Being neither Jewish nor a homesteader, perhaps I need to find yet another
term.

But right now that's too big a drain  on my plain brain. Back to work on Dead Dreams...