What Theme Song is Your Book?

I haven't posted anything in a long time. Between my fall book tour (cut short due to upcoming surgery), editing Book # 13 and writing Book # 14, I've had a very full schedule.

Perhaps because of impending surgery, I've wanted to become lost in my new series, Black Swamp Mysteries, and the characters, setting, and plot. The series was inspired by the success of Exit 22, my most popular contemporary suspense/thriller. Since the book's release, I've had so many people ask me what happened to Brenda Carnegie, Christopher Sandige, Alec Brodie - and even the assassin, Joseph Gabucci - that I had to revisit their adventures and expand upon them.

The result is a series with an ensemble cast. Think of a television series such as True Blood, where you have some characters rise to the forefront for awhile, then take more of a back seat while others move up. That will be the journey you'll embark upon in the Black Swamp Mysteries series, while all of the characters are forever tied together through something that happens in their lives.

Exit 22 introduced Christopher Sandige as a political strategist driving from New York to Florida when he is involved in an automobile accident at Exit 22 in North Carolina. Stranded for the weekend in Lumberton, he meets a beautiful but mysterious woman, Brenda Carnegie, and immediately becomes embroiled in a double homicide. As they flee from Alec Brodie, the detective leading the investigation, they find a hired assassin hot on their heels as well. While Alec wants to capture them, Joseph wants to kill them.

While writing the scenes between Chris and Brenda, I listened to Paul McCartney's song, This Never Happened Before. Chris had been a workaholic, so engrossed in his work that he came home each night to an empty house and never had time for dating, much less a relationship. But when he meets the mysterious Brenda, he is immediately captivated. There is something about her light brown eyes that could appear almost amber in some lights, her long, wavy copper hair, and her secrecy that intrigues him. She seems to be everything he is not: comfortable with sloshing through alligator-infested swamps on the run, street-wise, living on the wrong side of the law, flying through life by the seat of her pants, not to mention her amazing sex appeal, that he finds irresistible.

The problem, he soon finds, is whether to believe this woman he's falling in love with... Or face the possibility that she is a killer.

This Never Happened Before is Chris' and Brenda's song.

If you chose a scene from your book - or an overall theme song - what would it be?

Exit 22 Kindle edition is on sale only through October 31 for 99 cents (regular price is $6.99). The printed edition is also available. The next book in the series, Vicki's Key, will be released in March 2012 and the third book in the series (as yet untitled) is due for release in September 2012.