It’s taken 3 years to bring By Accident to publication.  By Accident is the fifth in my Santa Monica police procedural series. Back in the day, whenever that was, I could write one crime novel a year. That was then. This is now.

Things have happened in the meantime.

In that three years, I did uproot my 50-year life in California to settle in Canada. That took time and effort. Then there was the pandemic storm that’s shaken us all to our roots. But while we’ve all suffered in the Covid storm, we haven’t all been in the same boat.

I live alone in a leafy suburb of Canada’s national capital, bounded by the Ottawa River amid a nature conservancy. I have a small dog and I’ve been able to mask up and go for long walks and do the errands I need to do.

How wonderful you might think! All that time to write. It didn’t quite work that way for me, but I struggled through in fits and starts to finish By Accident.

Many of my friends are in the writing game and I wonder about them.  The ones who have a new book; the ones who have dropped off the page. Some of my crime fiction friends have written good books during the pandemic itself. The bestselling authors who are tied to a contract and a publication schedule have been productive.

But I write for the pleasure of writing the books that I want to read. This is what By Accident is about. A Hollywood celebrity couple kill their nanny by accident and bury her in a lapsed construction site next door. The twist is that this is a Guatemalan girl whose brother is a photogenic and media-savvy lawyer, intent on making trouble. Detective Dave Mason and his activist girlfriend are indeed a match for the Hollywood fixer.

I’m hoping you’ll take a look at By Accident available here on pre-order for $1.99  September 15, 2021. I marvel it only took three years to write this mystery.

Here are my other books. They were easier to write. Scroll down to see them all.