#GuestPost and #Giveaway ~ Jean Rabe #Author of The Dead Of Summer – A Piper Blackwell Mystery @LetsTalkLTP

Today I’m happy to be hosting Jean Rabe as part of the blog tour organised by Let’s Talk! Promotions. Her new book The Dead Of Summer is due to be released on the 5th August.

Jean talks about the inspiration behind her characters and her perfect day.

When I was a newspaper reporter out of the Evansville Press Kentucky Bureau, I covered a lot of stories at the Fort Campbell Army base. On one occasion I was there for a week straight. I learned a lot about the base, training, and the Screaming Eagles, and I figured if I ever got around to writing fiction, I’d have a character from Fort Campbell.

Eventually I left the news industry and got around to writing fiction. I settled on a young main character who had her training at Fort Campbell, worked in their MP division, and had a few tours in the Middle East. The public information officer and some of his staff helped me build Piper so her background, training, and down range assignments would feel authentic.

Going back to those newspaper days, I covered a lot of courts and cops. I met some sheriff’s deputies that had Oren Rosenberg’s traits. He’s basically a meld of some law enforcement types I met through the years.

Other characters are also inspired by real people in my lives. The coroner, Annie Neufeld, is a blending of my great aunt and my childhood doctor. Nang is loosely based on a Chinese restaurant owner in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Wrinkles, the pug in my books, is literally curled up between my feet right now.

The cases in the books are inspired by real news stories that I’ve twisted and folded and put my own spin on. Sometimes I get inspiration for scenes from specials I’ve watched on Discovery, National Geographic, or the History channels.

My perfect day would be writing a story on my back porch, a nice breeze blowing through the windows, my dogs in the yard playing, train whistles accompanying everything.

I’m a pretty simple soul. I would rather be writing and playing with my dogs than doing just about anything else. And I love summer.

So the ingredients of a perfect day: summer, back porch, laptop, dogs and dogs, and maybe a cold lemonade.

About the Book

Shouts of delight turn to screams of terror when a carnival ride goes berserk at the Spencer County Fair. Sheriff Piper Blackwell must contain the chaos and investigate the possible sabotage, even as she tries to solve a local businessman’s horrific murder.

But managing two investigations with at least one killer on the loose pushes the young officer and her tiny staff to their limits. Can Piper catch the murderer, or will the summer’s body count continue to rise?

Book links ~ Amazon UK | Amazon US

Giveaway

To enter the giveaway for a $35 BN gift card please click the Rafflecopter link.

About the Author

I WRITE…A LOT. And I write with dogs wrapped around my feet. I get to wear sandals or bedroom slippers to work, and old, comfortable clothes. When the weather is fine I get to write on my back porch. I love summer. I am working on promotions for The Dead of Summer right now, the third in my Piper Blackwell series. It has a nifty cover … which fits where the story kicks off. The first two books in the series are The Dead of Winter and The Dead of Night. Yeah, someone ends up dead in each book. Gotta have a death to make it a murder mystery. and I put a good amount of death in this latest book.

I started getting published when I was 12, studied journalism at Northern Illinois University, then went to work as a news reporter…eventually for Scripps Howard, where I managed their Western Kentucky bureau. Getting itchy feet, I moved to Wisconsin and went to work for TSR, Inc., the then-producers of the Dungeons & Dragons game. I dipped my itchy feet into the fiction pool and wrote Dragonlance novels for several years.

I’ve written forty SF, fantasy, mystery, and adventure novels (including a couple of ghosted projects), more short stories than I care to count, and I’ve edited magazines and anthologies.

Right now it’s all about mysteries…thrillers, suspense and uncozy-cozies. I had to change genres from SF and fantasy ’cause my feet were itching again and I needed to do something different.

I attend game conventions–as I am a geek about boardgames and rpgs, work as a mentor for graduate-level writing students, and toss tennis balls for my cadre of dogs.

Author links ~ Website | Amazon Page | Newsletter