Mystery-suspense
novels have always intrigued me. I can curl up for hours with
my favorite authors—Linda Barnes, Nelson DeMille, Jonathan
Kellerman, Ed McBain, Dick Francis, Minette Walters. I also
like romance, science-fiction, horror and fantasy, as well
as the occasional mainstream novel by such wonderful authors
as Annie Proulx.
I tried my hand at romance and didn’t
fare so well. My niche is darker, grittier. Nevertheless, Romantic
Times Magazine gave Bitch Factor 4-1/2 stars,
and the other Dixie Flannigan novels also earned high marks for romance. So if
you like a smidgeon of romance with your hard-edged suspense, you’ll like
these novels.
You can sample them all here free.
Student
Bill Chalmers took Bitch Factor when he
sailed
in the Havana Cup
Sailboat Race
from
Tampa to
Havana, Cuba. To quote
Bill, "The
book
was
a lot
more exciting than the race."
Slice of Life
“Two
ripe and ready redheads,” Leon Stovall marveled, trying
to sound hip and experienced...to sound like anything but an
overweight, slightly drunk, nineteen-year-old virgin. “How’d
I get so lucky?”
He copped a feel under the heavy one’s T-shirt. Sharon,
wasn’t that
her name?
The slighter one teased his zipper down. “Before you go talking
about luck,
Leon, let’s see the size of your ante.”
“What, right here?” Leon had stood naked in gym showers often enough
to know he wasn’t lacking in size, but he’d never shown it to a girl.
He glanced at the glaring light bulb swinging from a grimy electrical cord, then
at the cluttered shelves, rusted file cabinets, and dusty racks of wine bottles,
some probably older than he was. A storage room. “Don’t you have
a bedroom in this spooky old shack? Cold as iced shit up here.”
“Not for long,” Sharon whispered, nipping gently at his neck.
If
Betsy Keyes had known about the car waiting at the curb that
morning, waiting for the moment she stepped into the intersection,
she would have worn the purple shirt. Purple was for special
days, days she marked with stars in her diary. The most important
days got the purple shirt and three stars.
Hopping over a jagged
hump in the sidewalk, she shoved a hand in her pocket and pressed
a thumb-sized metallic noisemaker: Click! Released it. Click!
Sometimes
the dark secret Betsy held inside made her feel exactly like
a teakettle about to boil over. Squeezing her toy clicker allowed
tiny bits of worry to escape,
like steam from a teakettle’s whistle. The shiny black cricket painted
on top had worn thin from rubbing against her finger. Crickets were supposed
to be lucky, weren’t they?
A vile stench
invaded her nose. The back of her head throbbed, each pulsating
beat ringing like steel on an anvil. Her mind, muggy with something deeper
than sleep, faltered at the rustling near her face.
Somewhere, a motor whined.
Were her eyes open? Darkness wrapped her so completely
she couldn’t be
sure. She tightened them, opened—
Ohh! One eye stayed shut, hurt when
she tried to force it. The other opened only halfway. She reached to touch
her face—
Pain ripped through her arm into her chest. She couldn’t
breathe—
Ah…there, subsiding now. She swallowed carefully, barely
moving, didn’t
want the pain again…then sipped a shallow, tentative breath—
Lucy Ames, a plump fifty-five-year-old divorcée,
swept into the Texas Citizens Branch Bank on a crisp May afternoon
and waited her turn in silence, not chatting with other patrons
as was her custom. Instead, she hummed “Bad Moon Rising” and
spent the brief wait noticing the rich viridian carpet, rose
marble counter, and Ms. Darlene Flores pecking away at her
computer. Lucy didn’t usually bank at the Webster branch.
Nevertheless, she’d come to make a withdrawal.
When the
woman ahead of her, wearing an outrageously short, poppy-print
dress, turned from the counter to exit through the glass doors,
Lucy laid an empty
book tote in the window and smiled at the teller. The tote was empty now because
Lucy had removed the only item it carried, a .38 Police Special.
Create Your Own Magic
for CLNC® Success by Vickie
L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD
With
illustrations by Chris Rogers
Inside
each of us lies a desire to do something spectacular—to
fly, to write, to sculpt, to climb mountains or perhaps to
step off into the unknown and create a business where none
existed. That space between vision and creation is a magical
land filled with wondrous adventure but also with treacherous
pathways and fierce, fire-breathing dragons.
Maneuvering in
such a land requires that we suspend fear and embrace valor.
Yet courage alone is not enough A courageous fool is no less
a fool.
With the tools, skills and knowledge to conquer the
unknown, we shape our own destiny, we forge a new reality.
We reach to the stars and grasp handfuls of
wonder.
When I stepped out for my own adventure in 1982, I had no guidebook. I
pioneered the field of legal nurse consulting, carving a new
industry in an uncharted land,
conquering the dragons and narrowly skirting the pitfalls. What I did have was
vision, persistence, and the voices of my favorite inspirational coaches urging
me onward and upward.
