Month: June 2024

Did You Miss Something? Gifts and Thefts on Sale

Book 7.5 in the Mae Martin Mystery Series, Gifts and Thefts, is on sale for 99 cents through the end of July. This suite of six short mysteries fills in the year in Mae’s life between the end of Shadow Family and the beginning of Chloride Canyon. I had fun bringing back several characters from earlier books for roles in the short stories. Readers shopping on Amazon can click on a button to buy the series or remaining books in the series, but that click will deliver only the books with whole numbers. Other retailers sometimes show Gifts and Thefts on the series page, but they don’t have a series buy button. And you don’t want to miss this book. A lot happens in it!

Rodeo Regrets: Will Baca receives a cat from an anonymous giver, and his girlfriend suspects it’s from another woman. Mae Martin’s psychic journey into Will’s past on the rodeo circuit takes a puzzling twist while she’s solving the mystery behind the gift.

Responsible Party: Mae’s internship in fitness management gets stressful when her supervisor starts accusing other employees of theft and tells Mae to find the responsible party. Her efforts bring results neither of them expected.

Guardian Angel: When Jamie stops at a roadhouse in west Texas, a woman who won a pool tournament is in trouble and needs a guardian angel. Is he up to the job? Was he somehow called to it?

 Hidden Fish: Mae’s stepdaughters create an elaborate trivia treasure hunt as a Christmas gift for their Uncle Vaughan, leaving a trail of clues and origami fish hidden around downtown Truth or Consequences. But the fish vanish before Vaughan can solve the puzzle, and the children ask Mae to find out what happened. At Jamie’s New Year’s Eve concert, she’s caught between the suspects.

Tipped Off: Who would leave a hotel housekeeper that big a tip, and why? Montana Chino has a birthday surprise for Mae, but first she needs Mae to do a psychic investigation into the suspiciously generous tip. Was there a mistake, or did the guest have mischief in mind?

Elephant: On the weekend Mae and Jamie attend two weddings, she can tell he’s keeping something from her. He has to resolve a problem before he can talk to her, though. A problem that began almost a year before, with the arrival of Will’s gift cat.

Pictures I Didn’t Take

I often get a powerful urge to stop and take a picture. Then I don’t do it, for many reasons, but primarily because it takes me out of the moment. Instead of experiencing where I am and what I’m seeing, feeling, hearing, and smelling, I’ll get wrapped up in composing a picture to post. Granted, I would love to share the experience, but this urge usually occurs when I’m by myself out in the desert on a long run. If I pull out my camera and try to find some shade where I can actually see my screen and then make adjustments, I’m missing part of part of the joy of running. If I were a photographer, this would be joy to stop and take a picture. I admire and deeply appreciate the work of gifted photographers.  But that’s not my creative form. Words are. So, here are the words.

A fox den that lasted two days. I think the fox realized it had dug in too close to a well-used trail. So much work for a couple of busy nights, and now there’s a cobweb draped over the entrance. It’s been there for a long time. Sometimes location is everything. The shade of that big juniper, alas, was a bad location.

The bats. At sunset, they come pouring out from behind the mural on a roofless building. I met a friend on the way there one evening. She also loves the bats. As we watched them emerge in an erratic cloud, a complex aerial ballet, she laughed in delight. They have that effect on me too, as if their sonar is vibrating something positive deep inside us that creates pure happiness.

Other things I haven’t taken pictures of are odd moments where something looks out of place on the street, and I think “I should take a picture of that. That’s strange.” Maybe nobody else would think it was odd or interesting. I don’t take the picture. I have my moment and keep going.

I often think of a friend who told me about being near the edge of a woodland with her father when a herd of deer exploded from the trees. Her father was scrambling in the car for his camera so he could get a picture of the deer while she watched them leaping past. By the time he got his camera out, the deer were gone. Pictures I haven’t taken are moments that I lived. I’ll share them some other way. Some will show up in my stories. I’ll remember them when I need them. A pyrrhuloxia, a desert Cardinal, perched atop of a half dead tree in the desert has a place in the book that I’ve just started. He’s going to show up near the end as a significant and meaningful sight, with his brown-gray body and his red crest and his three different songs pouring out. I saved him in my memory, but I didn’t take his picture. (Someone on Wikipedia did.)