Marilyn's Musings

Believe me, I can attest to that. Spending nine years working as a feature writer and city editor for a rural weekly newspaper has shown me some pretty twisted things. Stuff, if you put it in fiction, folks would snicker and say it was too twisted to happen.  All those stories and marvelous characters I met during that time are filed away. Frankly I never thought I’d use them. Writing Western Historical romances didn’t call for most of these modern day happenings here in our Ozarks. But then one day, it occurred to me that I wanted to write something else as well. Since I like reading mysteries, the sexy, dark, and gritty kind, I navigated in that direction. Why not write about a reporter working for a rural weekly newspaper? Inspired, wasn’t I? And as for the sexy part, we needed a tall, dark and handsome hero. One with secrets and special talents. So Jesse West, my reporter and Dallas Starr, my Cherokee ex-narc who visits with those killed violently were born. As for...

A mysterious man who lives in a cave above the small town. A farmer whose dogs dig up bones he believes are human. They aren’t, but what if they were? A prominent member of the town with a huge opinion of himself plus a temper. Twin tornadoes that hammered the place twenty-five years earlier. Could these things be put together to create a mystery novel? As I began to envision the crime for my novel originally titled Dry Bones, I was inspired by several stories I’d written none of which sprung from a major crime. Writing feature stories and a historical column for a small town paper, I seldom ran into murder most foul, but I did run into likeable and unlikeable characters I could use. Was the cave man crazy, dangerous, or just weird? Would he be able to kill? What had happened to the city council member’s first husband? After he left she married my prominent resident who certainly had the temper needed to commit such a deed. He had stormed the newspaper office more than o...