DISCOVERING SETTING by Paty Jager
Marilyn, Thank you for having me on your blog today!
Root Diggers |
the very first Shandra Higheagle book I wrote I knew
there would come a point when I would need to know more about reservation life
and especially life on the Colville Indian Reservation. Shandra’s paternal side
of her family are Nez Perce Indians who live on the Colville Reservation.
It was fortuitous for me that I’d have several book signings
in Clarkston, Washington with a woman who was married to an Arrows Lake
descendent and who lived on the Colville Reservation. She is a wonderful, open
and giving woman who not only answers my questions and sends me photos, but she
also took me on a tour of the reservation so I could see the different agency
buildings, where people lived, and get a feel for the atmosphere.
While touring and seeing the reservation was great, the most
valuable asset to having this woman who lives on the reservation give me a tour
was learning the dynamics of the twelve tribes who live on the reservation.
There was a time when many of them were enemies. It is over a hundred years later and there
are still rivalries and animosities that lie under the surface of the different
tribal members.
This animosity will come out in a later book, though some of
it did come out in Murderous Secrets, book four in the Shandra Higheagle Mystery
series. I used the rivalry as a red
herring when Shandra travels to the Reservation to discover if her father’s
death thirty years was a rodeo accident or murder.
Murderous
Secrets: A Shandra Higheagle Mystery Blurb
Book
four in the Shandra Higheagle Mystery Series
Jealousy…Deception…Murder
The accident that took her father’s life has
always haunted Shandra Higheagle. When her dreams become too real, she knows
it’s time to discover the truth. It doesn’t take long to suspect her father had
been murdered and that someone is unhappy with her probing.
Detective Ryan Greer knows Shandra well enough
to insist he be kept informed of her investigation into the decades old death
of her father. When signs implicate her mother, he can’t withhold the
information, even though he realizes it could complicate their relationship.
Bio:
Award-winning author Paty Jager and her husband raise
alfalfa hay in rural eastern Oregon. On her road to publication she wrote
freelance articles for two local newspapers and enjoyed her job with the County
Extension service as a 4-H Program Assistant. Raising hay and cattle, riding
horses, and battling rattlesnakes, she not only writes the western lifestyle,
she lives it.
All Paty’s work has Western or
Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging
characters. Her penchant for research takes her on side trips that eventually
turn into yet another story. She recently returned to the genre of her heart-
Mystery.
You can learn more about Paty at
her website; http://www.patyjager.net
Newsletter: Paty’s Prattle: http://eepurl.com/1CFgX
twitter@patyjag.
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