My life is lived in northern Michigan, back in the woods among turkeys, deer, coyotes, fox, raccoons, skunks, and a host of other animals and birds. It is the same world Emily Kincaid and Deputy Dolly Wakowski, my two protagonists, inhabit. I know it well and love it, this place of harsh winters and sometimes cool summers. The three of us live among vast tracks of forest and lakes of all shapes and sizes, some left wild, some zipping with motor boats in summer and dotted with ice shanties in winter. The seasons up here are distinct and unpredictable. Mother Nature can be a nurturing lover, a benign acquaintance, an untrustworthy friend, or a terrorist, bent on destroying everyone and everything.

Emily Kincaid has lived in northern Michigan for three years, ever since running from her job as a reporter in Ann Arbor, and from her ex-husband, Jackson Rinaldi, an English professor at the University of Michigan and a Don Juan who considered bedding prepubescent coeds a sport rather than a problem. She lives back in the woods, five miles from the nearest town, Leetsville. At this point in time she has an ugly dog named Sorrow, and a ‘sometimes’ friend named Deputy Dolly Wakowski. Emily is a gardener, a forager, a writer of anything that will bring in money, and a failed novelist, who now busily writes about the murder cases she and Deputy Dolly solve.

The fractious Deputy Dolly Wakowski is one of the two member Leetsville Police Department. Dolly, a squat, earnest women, looks a lot like Barney Fife, only not as pretty. She is the scourge of the back roads since being ordered off all main roads by Chief Lucky Barnard after smashing one of the town’s two patrol cars. She is determined to make a published writer of Emily so draws her into every murder occurring in and around Leetsville.

Once a ghost town and now reborn in the Emily Kincaid series, Leetsville is situated along U.S. 131, north of Kalkaska and south of Mancelona, in Michigan’s north country. The town is home to Eugenia Fuller’s restaurant ‘EATS’ where the special is always meatloaf. And home to The Church of the Contented Flock, The Skunk Saloon, and a barber shop with a retro wooden Indian at the door. You can buy udder cream at the farm supply and fishing flies at the sports shop. The people are iconoclastic and individualistic. They take care of each other and rise to any occasion requiring casseroles. It is a small town with small town values.

Now, on to the opening pages of DEAD DANCING WOMEN, due out from Midnight Ink Publishers in September, 2008.