This is where you’ll find all the places you can buy the (currently) stand-alone mystery Rage Issues. The paperback is available for $15.99, and runs 256 pages.

A reluctant PI with two hot cases…

Synopsis

All Daria Barnes wants to do is produce plays, but can’t make a living at it. So, her best friend, private investigator Berto Esparza, talks her into working for him as his associate investigating the death of Larry Ochoa, drummer for country-western star Luke Winston. Then Berto is seriously injured in a hit and run that was probably not an accident, and Daria gets tagged with keeping the Ochoa investigation going long enough for Berto to recover. More importantly, she needs to find out who wants to kill Berto.  

No surprise, the bad guys are practically taking numbers to take Esparza out. And Luke Winston is not only keeping tabs on Daria, he’s showing more than an appropriate interest in her, especially after Jay Swanson, Luke’s young assistant, disappears.

It doesn’t matter how many people are reminding Daria that she’s a natural at the investigation game; she feels completely out of her element. As the leads go nowhere, the suspects get meaner. Daria struggles on, and eventually finds the path to a suspect who isn’t just enraged. He’s desperate.

How I wrote the story

Like many of my novels, Rage Issues started with a dream I’d had one night. I don’t remember the dream very well, but there was a country-western star in it. The other interesting part is that my life was changing directions at a very rapid rate. I divorced my first husband, became a single mom, met my current husband, then decided to go back to graduate school to get my journalism degree all within a few short months.

So, while the first bits of the story were coming together during this crazed period, I don’t quite remember when I actually started writing it. I have a WordPerfect file, and I haven’t worked in WordPerfect since four or five computers ago. I know when I finished it, in June 2016. So, it was almost fifteen years that I’d been working on the novel.

As life happened, and I grew as a writer and a person, the story also changed. I had originally planned to have my main character, Daria Barnes, and the country-western star fall in love with each other. But then I realized that would be a breach of ethics for Daria as a private investigator. Not to mention, Luke’s behavior needed to make things more difficult for the resolution.

Another fun problem I had was that the technology had changed significantly, which meant several re-writes to bring the story up to date. But I got the book done and just in time to release it in the fall of 2021. Not the best timing, perhaps, but it’s what I had.