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Yes, you read that correctly. No, we didn’t plan to be gone this long. So what happened? In two words, real life. 

Real life? We had some personal matters to attend to, which turned our hiatus into what some readers have teasingly termed a sabbatical. Another reader cornered me the other day to say he was glad his memory is poor. He’s been rereading the first four novels in the Darcy McClain and Bullet Thriller Series while he waits for the release of book five. In the meantime, he was happy to hear that we’ll resume posting to our blog starting in early September.

Back to “real life” for a moment. The words conjure up bittersweet memories of a dear friend. I met Linda McKinley when we were both members of the DFW Writers Workshop in 1996. We became good friends and were beta readers of each others’ works. To this day, I can see Linda’s hand on my revisions. For example, in Brainwash, there is a sentence that reads: “With practiced ease, Elena rolled a bead between her fingers.” Practiced ease are Linda’s words, and she left her mark in the most subtle but memorable ways with her revisions.

In 2001, less than a week after 9/11, Linda and I boarded a plane for Albuquerque, New Mexico, to attend the Southwest Writers Conference held by the Greater Dallas Writers’ Association. During the awards ceremony I was so preoccupied with thoughts for my next novel that Linda had to nudge me when my name was announced. “You won,” she said softly. It took a moment to sink in. 

My novel Gadgets had won the Betty L. Henrichs Award for Best Publishable Mystery Novel. Winning certainly bolstered my  confidence in my writing skills, and I couldn’t wait to start the next book in the Darcy McClain and Bullet Thriller Series. 

In 2009, Linda suddenly passed away. This blog post is dedicated to her and all the fond memories of our friendship. She is greatly missed.

While on hiatus  or should I say sabbatical – we three made good progress on book five in our thriller series—Blue Angel. 

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Synopsis: Darcy’s best friend, Samantha Logan, is lured out of retirement by the CIA for a Special Op. When Sam doesn’t show up in Dallas as planned, Darcy senses that Sam is in trouble and begins to track her whereabouts. Her desperate hunt leads Darcy on a footrace across Europe, always trailing steps behind, until she resorts to help from her canine partner, Bullet. 

To complicate matters, the CIA is concerned that Darcy and Bullet will blow Sam’s cover and expose the secret operation, so the Agency deploys field agents to stalk them. As if that weren’t enough, Darcy’s former FBI partner, Dan, is worried that both women might be in grave danger, so he’s shadowing them as well. 

Thrown back into the environment in which she was raised, Darcy learns the shocking truth about her childhood. These startling revelations shake her adult world, for every truth that Darcy knew about her past would soon be revealed as: Lies.