Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Blame it on Nancy Drew. She was my first love (but far from my last) in the mystery genre. In the 1960s, as a young girl, I collected her books and began a life long commitment to binge reading. Which led to writing, which led to writing a mystery. My first mystery, Love and Death in Blue Lake, releases worldwide today.

Love and Death in Blue Lake didn’t start out as a mystery. I’d written several romance and women’s fiction titles and I thought for sure this book, about high school sweethearts who reconnect, would be another in the same genre. But no. Stories often take unexpected turns as this one did when I wrote a gun into someone’s purse.

What began as a small subplot came to be an equal plot to the romance story. It constantly threatened to take over the book, but I had my heart set…