First a word from our sponsors. This is both a blog posting as well as a new book newsletter. If you happen to be on both lists, please accept my apologies for the duplication.

OverKill, Ali Reynolds # 18, goes on sale officially on April 1. Those of you who read the blog have already learned that little pieces of my own life tend to sneak into my books, so here goes. My mother, Evelyn, was totally incapable of minding her own business. When that happened we said she was Evieing it. And when Ali Reynolds’s mother, Edie, did the same thing, her husband always said she was Edieing it. Not surprisingly, her daughter, Ali tends to do the same thing.

In OverKill, she takes Edieing it to an entirely new level. Ali is supposedly minding her own business at High Noon Enterprises, a cybersecurity company she owns with her husband B. Simpson, but then she receives a totally unexpected collect call from an inmate in the King County Jail in Seattle. The caller is none other than Clarice Brewster, B.’s former wife. She’s in lock-up awaiting charges on the murder of her husband, Chuck Brewster, who happens to be B.’s ex-partner and former friend. An affair between Clarice and Chuck marked an abrupt end of both the partnership and B.’s first marriage. Unsurprisingly, B.’s wants nothing to do with Clarice’s current predicament. Ali, on the other hand, is unable to help herself, and thereby hangs the tail.

You might be asking yourself, “If the book isn’t coming out until April one, why is she writing this in February?” In a word, the answer to that question is TFOB, aka, the Tucson Festival of Books. That’s coming up a little more than two weeks from now, on March 14 and 15. If you’re interested in attending that from out of town, you might want to make arrangements in advance. The publisher is making OverKill available for that and it will be on sale at the festival. In conjunction with my being in Arizona, there will also be another pre-pub Overkill event at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale at 6 PM on the evening of March 13. At this point, I don’t have any firm events listed for after publication. Once those come in, we’ll add them to the schedule. You can pre-order signed and personalized copies of OverKill from Brick&Mortar Books in Redmond, Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, and Mostly Books in Tucson.

So now, after this preview of coming attractions, how about a trip down memory lane? Most of the time while I was growing up, the Busks on Yuma Trail were a three-newspaper family—the Arizona Republic and the Bisbee Daily Review in the mornings and the Douglas Daily Dispatch in the afternoons.

Once I was able to read the papers, I quickly became a fan of the advice columns. Dear Abby showed up in the Arizona Republic and the Bisbee Daily Review. Ann Landers was in the Dispatch. I loved them both. It wasn’t until decades later that I learned the writers of the two competing columns were actually sisters, twins in fact, who suffered from a seemingly incurable case of sibling rivalry. As far as I know, the two of them never got around to burying the hatchet, so maybe they were far better at dishing out advice than they were at taking it. But that’s another story.

As the decades sped past, however, I noticed something interesting. The photos that ran beside the columns never changed. They were always the very same headshots, day after day, week after week, and year after year. Over time I puzzled about that. Not any more. Now I understand completely.

So here’s a word of warning to readers who may be coming to TFOB and meeting me for the first time. I won’t look anything like the headshot on the covers of my books. Those photos were taken 25 years ago when I was 55. I’ m eighty now. There’s a big difference between 55 and 80. At some point in life, no amount or makeup of photo-shopping does the trick. You are what you are. It is what it is.

With that in mind, I’d like to close with some words of wisdom from a guy named A. H. Euwer.

As a beauty I’m not a great star.
There are others more handsome by far.
But my face, I don’t mind it
For I am behind it.
It’s the people in front that I jar.