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In 2002, I had the extraordinary good fortune to win the St. Martin’s Press “Best First Traditional Mystery” contest. One year later, they published Murder Off Mike, featuring talk radio host Shauna J. Bogart, who made her hometown of Sacramento, California, a better-informed and safer place to live by keeping killers and other creepy types off the streets and inside the state capitol where they belonged. Murder Off Mike received a lovely amount of attention for a first-time, non-celebrity author: all the way from being reviewed in USA Today to getting to ride in a convertible in the opening-day parade for the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, calling it “riveting” and “will leave readers eager for more.” More they got, with two more Shauna J. mysteries published by St. Martin’s Minotaur: Slip Cue in 2004 and Riding Gain in 2005.
MacMillan (parent company of St. Martin’s) has brought back my books as Kindle downloads. If you like to read in traditional paper format, you’ll find a number of independent booksellers with used copies. Currently I’m working on a new crime series for adults set in the early days of Silicon Valley. But-but-but … what happened to Shauna J. Bogart and the talk radio mysteries? Without going into the messy details, let’s just say that reality intervened. Death in the family, resulting in the type of financial crisis that selling another cozy mystery would not come even close to solving. Then my agent decided to quit the biz. ’Nuf said! So, like, does that mean there will never again be another adventure with Shauna J. and the radio gang? As a person who believes in keeping her options open, I would never say never. But realistically, the world of commercial radio in this country has changed so drastically — big, corporate, boring — since I first started writing fiction in 1994 that the only way I could see it working is to play around with Shauna J.’s timeline and send her back to the 1970s and 80s — back to the days when we were all young and radio was fun. |
© 2003-2019 by Joyce Krieg