Deborah Coonts's Blog: Deborah Coonts' Blog

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Great news: Lucky is at Costco!

No, she’s not shopping—I can’t even imagine such a thing Lucky buying groceries? Never happen.

But Costco put together a super bundle of the first five audiobooks in the Lucky series.

If you are a Costco member you can grab the bundle and get five audiobooks for the price of one.

Pretty sweet

Here’s the link: https://www.costco.com/lucky-o'toole-series-books-1-5,-by-deborah-coonts—audiobooks.product.100737591.html

Please check it out if you’d like Lucky to chat in your ear as she helps you through your workouts, makes you laugh on your hike, or tosses a guffaw into the geraniums while you turn the soil for summer plantings.

Wishing you sunny days, cool breezes, and loved ones near,
Deborah

The post Lucky in Costco? appeared first on Deborah Coonts.

I recently offered my launch team the opportunity to review my new thriller, Deadfall. It’s the sequel to After Me, a Kate Sawyer Medical Thriller, which has been well-received despite being rather far afield from my “normal” genre of light, romantic mystery.

One of my fabulous readers wrote me back and said, “Wow! I’m still not sure what to make of this.”

I had to laugh.

Leave it to me to take a hard turn and leave some scrambling to hold on.

You see, the wisdom in the writing world dictates that a writer should carve out his or her spot in a particular genre and then mine that genre for all it’s worth. Applying that advice to my career would seem to indicate I should write light and funny forever.

One problem with that: I get bored.

And, if I’m bored, my readers are bored.

Don’t get me wrong—I love a good belly laugh, just not all the time. And that snarky voice I’m sorta known for? It creeps into every story, so not to worry. And, while I will always write light romantic mysteries, I do love a good chase book, don’t you?

Hence the thrillers.

Folks ask me all the time where I get my ideas. To be honest, I’m one of the lucky ones—ideas find me. Of course, my curiosity roams far and wide and I read…a lot! Throughout my adult life, I’ve loved cutting-edge medical stuff. And, as every writer would, when presented with some new ideas I always ask, “What if?”

So, what if someone is getting stem cell therapy for Alzheimer’s (they really have started exploring this as a treatment)? And what if they get stem cells from their brother? And what if their brother dies shortly thereafter? And what if memories are stored in our DNA (actually true in certain circumstances)? And what if that someone who got the stem cells is a former cop in witness protection? And what if someone thinks she knows the whereabouts of twenty million in uncut diamonds that disappeared in a bust gone bad? And what if her brother, the stem cell donor, was also involved in the bust? And what if she can’t remember any of it?

Enough what ifs and I was off and running.

That story ended up being After Me.

And for the sequel, Deadfall, I was reading a story about weaponizing DNA. Yes, it’s a thing. It is possible to create a “weapon” if you will that targets an individual and exploits a genetic weakness they might have. And it won’t hurt anyone else (unless they have the exact same genetic weakness.) So, it’s possible to deliver this “weapon” as a virus that would ride in through the air ducts. And only one person would die—all the rest might get a bad cold, but that’s it. Holy cow! Who knew!

So, what if….?

Cool, right?

So that brings me back to my first question: why did I, a light romantic mystery writer, take a huge leap into the dark work of thrillers?

To learn new things. To excite myself. To hopefully excite my readers.

In writing the thrillers, I not only found a place for my love of synthetic biology, epigenetics, and biohacking (actually, they are the foundation of the what-if, but not much of them are actually in the stories) but I also found new challenges as a writer. To be honest, I had to put After Me, aside for six months or so while I figured out how to write the darn thing. The challenges were many, chief among them were: writing in the first person from the point of view of a young woman with genetic early-onset Alzheimer’s, and then not using her lack of memory as a device to “solve” the mystery (that would so be cheating). Yes, there’s a good twist at the end.

But you know what? I figured it out and, in the process, I hopefully added tools to my writer toolbox and became a better storyteller. With each story that’s always my goal.

With Deadfall, I faced a different challenge. I’d sorta mined the Alzheimer’s angle and didn’t have a lot more to say about it that was vastly different. Well, that’s not entirely true. There are amazing things being done these days to fight the horrible disease (and the other tangle diseases) I just didn’t think they were good fodder for a story.

But weaponizing DNA?

Now there’s a crazy good premise for an epic chase book.

But it needed to be bigger than After Me.

So, I introduced new characters—their scenes are in the third person.

Kate still gets to tell her story in the first person.

Oh, boy, new set of writer problems, new learning curves to travel.

And what fun it was to actually figure it out and then bring both storylines together for a whizz-bang climax.

THERE’S A NEW LUCKY BOOK COMING!!

Lucky started filling me in on what had happened in her life since we’d last had a meaningful conversation. Whoa boy! That woman has been busy.

She is home in Vegas, after her high-body-count tour through Europe. After her romantic disasters with Teddie and Jean-Charles, Lucky is hoping for some R and R. Of course, she gets anything but. (The woman should know better by now!) Mona, Lucky’s mother, is desperate to be “relevant.” Always a recipe for disaster. The two men in Lucky’s life are still circling. The NBA is in town. A particularly persistent DEA agent is dogging her heels about a smuggling ring.

And a dead man turns up in the delivery bay at the Babylon.

On top of that, Lucky’s father checks himself out of the ICU, (yes, he’s still not doing well) only to lay a problem in her lap that, if she can’t “fix”, will change everything forever.

It's going to be a whirlwind adventure and can be in your hands May 10th (Mother's Day and the 10th Anniversary of Wanna Get Lucky?)!

You can pre-order now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble NOOK, Apple Books and Kobo!

Now as some of you may have noticed, this is the last book in the Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure.

I know many of you will be sad by this news and it's very bittersweet for me too.

When I launched Wanna Get Lucky?, I had an arc in mind for Lucky, a growth path if you will.

In Lucky Enough she fulfills the destiny I had planned for her all those many years ago. It’s taken me awhile to get my head around the fact that Lucky has done it! She’s actually made the choices I foresaw and has grown into the woman I wanted her to be.

And, I feel, as I hope you do, Lucky needs to go out on a high note.

But don’t worry about not hearing Lucky’s voice again! She is a recurring character in another series I’ve already started writing called Ninety Days to Score. I'll share more about that project soon!

In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy the final installment of Lucky’s adventure.

I'm conflicted (as always). I wasn’t sure about any of it when I started, but I’m sure pleased with how it turned out!

Stay tuned for more good news coming. We’re cooking up some fun stuff to celebrate such an incredible milestone!

I’d like to thank each and every one of you who have made the Lucky ride possible for me. The whole thing has been magical and way beyond any dream I had.

Hugs and many, many thanks to all!

Deborah

The post The Next Lucky Adventure appeared first on Deborah Coonts.

I found a few things that might help us all pass the time as we practice social distancing/quarantine during CORVID-19.

Many authors are offering free or discounted books during this hard time. Book one in my series, Wanna Get Lucky? , is free on all ebook platforms. I'm also doing a special promotion with Barnes & Noble (NOOK) until March 31st 2020. This is a buy one book and get one free deal on books two through ten of the Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure Series and the novellas. Click here to check out the promotion! Other free books from authors: Dianna Love, Zara Keane ( Dial P for Poison , Love and Shenanigans , Her Treasure Hunter Ex ), Kristina Rienzi (Choosing Evil, Luring Shadows, Twisted). If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited you can read these books free: Falguni Kothari's Starstruck (A Second Chance novella), Eric R Asher's Vesik series (urban fantasy) and his Mason Dixon Monster Hunter series.Enjoy this funny Lucky World video based on my Lucky O'Toole book series :). The Metropolitan Opera is offering free nightly streams: https://operawire.com/metropolitan-opera-to-offer-up-nightly-met-opera-streams/If you have kids at home, many kidlit authors are doing read alongs and activity times online like Peter H. Reynolds (picture book read alongs), Rachael Allen (science experiments), Mo Willems (lunch doodle time), and Chris Field (afternoon adventures). Even if you don't have kids at home, you might enjoy some of these online events yourself.Fatherly has a list of indoor games to play with your kids.Take one (or more) of these 450 online Ivy League courses for free. Click here for more info.Explore famous historic and cultural heritage sites with Google Arts & Culture. Take a (virtual) museum tour: British Museum (London)Guggenheim Museum (New York)National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.)Musée d’Orsay (Paris)National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul)Pergamon Museum (Berlin)Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam)Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles)Uffizi Gallery (Florence)MASP (São Paulo)National Museum of Anthropology (Mexico City)the Louvre (Paris)Google Arts & Culture’s collection of museumsmuseum Street Views from Google

Staying safe doesn't mean putting life on hold or not having fun. We'll get through this together!

The post Staying in? Here are things you can do! appeared first on Deborah Coonts.

Books are magical beasts with minds of their own.

Stories open worlds, teach you things, make you laugh and sometimes cry. They give perspective or provide an escape. Whether the reader or the writer, the journey through a fictional tale is pretty much the same—absolute magic.

When writers get together to chat, that’s exactly what they
talk about. You’d think writing a story is the same experience each time, but
nothing is further from the truth. When you sit down and type “Chapter One” you
have no real idea of the breadth of experience that lies between the beginning
and “The End.”

Recently, Josie Brown and I got together to giggle over the latest Lucky O’Toole book, Lucky Ce Soir, which recently hit the bookshelves. As usual, our conversation wandered a bit—this time through Paris and the world of fine wine, the bumps along the way to a lasting relationship, and the creepiness of the catacombs. As I said, stories take you all kinds of places.

If you’ve a mind to listen, here’s the link:

For more grab your copy of Lucky Ce Soir today!

The post Books are Magical Beasts appeared first on Deborah Coonts.

The 10th Lucky O’Toole book, Lucky Ce Soir, is here!

Yes, Lucky’s back! But this one is a little different. Instead of Vegas, this time Paris serves as the backdrop for love, laughter, and serious shenanigans.

Why Paris?

Well, as the man said, “Paris is always a good idea.” Yes, this is a line from one of my favorite movies, Sabrina—also a story of love, mischief, and sentiment.

While I might find Paris to be magical, Lucky’s Parisian adventure gets off to a rocky start. First, she has to meet her future mother-in-law who is determined not to like her.

As if this isn’t bad enough, soon Lucky finds herself up to her ass in alligators when a fortune of wine is stolen from her future in-laws and an unsavory character from Lucky’s past shows up to implicate her in the theft.

And then a killer jumps into the mix.

Working against an old flame of Jean-Charles’s who now is in charge of the police investigation (and who lets everyone know she’d like Lucky out of the way), Lucky is faced with a future on Devil’s Island.

Or she can find the thieves and the murderer and clear her name.

To complicate things, Teddie, Lucky’s former love, is in town to open a musical revue in Montmartre. Sensing an opening, he offers his “help.”

What does Lucky do?

Find out in Lucky Ce Soir! Order you copy today!

The post Paris is Always a Good Idea appeared first on Deborah Coonts.

Both are tight-wire acts, fraught with peril, but also imbued with hope….and folly. BUT, each can have glorious consequences. Well, the teaching the husband thing, not so much. That one didn’t work out so well…

But the co-authoring thing? It turned out like gangbusters!

Recently Josie Brown, author of The Housewife Assassin series, and I decided our heroines should meet. I mean, seriously, Lucky in London, crossing paths with a black ops team on loan to the CIA? Who could resist? Not this gal, that’s for sure. And so, sitting in the Milwaukee airport, Josie and I plotted and planned, killed off a bunch of people (amazingly nobody reported us to the police) and laughed and giggled until we had a plot we both loved.

And The Housewife Assassin Gets Lucky was born.

I’m here to tell you dead bodies, hilarity, a little romantic wishful thinking and some awesome clothes are all part of the mix.

Here's the blurb!

When two hot, haute heroines team up to solve a murder, neither can afford to be fashionably late.

No one expected to find a dead girl in the Royal Suite at the Babylon’s posh London club.

Who would kill her? And why?

With little to go on, and no friends to rely on, Lucky O’Toole, the Babylon’s Chief Problem Solver is dispatched to…solve the problem.

But she needs to be in Paris. Her fiancé—and, worse, his mother—are counting on her presence at a party in her honor in seventy-two hours, more or less.

With a personal-life time-bomb ticking, Lucky hopes for a quick solution.

A mystery woman, seen leaving the Royal Suite just before the girl’s body is discovered, attracts Lucky’s attention.

She has to be the key…

On loan to the CIA, assassin Donna Stone Craig and her crack black-ops team have stepped into a viper’s nest. First, they darn near get out-bid and overwhelmed at an auction to acquire a vintage purse hiding some critical intel its lining. Then a very important source Donna is to meet at the Babylon London Club winds up dead. And the young woman’s intel—bearing incredible global consequences—is encrypted.

She was the only one who could give Donna the cipher, and she’s dead.

Surely someone else would know. But, who?

It’s easy to see why Acme’s prime suspect is the tall brunette who acts like she owns the place. Lucky O’Toole shows up at the wrong time, and in the wrong place.

But before Donna and Lucky can find the right answers, they’ll need to overcome their reservations and resolve their differences.

But can they learn to trust each other before the real killer gets away?

They have to. Their lives—and world peace—depend on it.

So, why tackle such a project?

For me, the choice had to do with bringing something new to the Lucky series. When a series extends for more than a few books, it’s important to find ways to keep injecting new things, new enthusiasms, new twists and turns that keep not only the reading experience fun and fresh, but the writing experience as well. If I’m not having fun telling the story, you won’t have fun reading it.

And, with the same characters in the same setting, having fun, keeping it fresh, becomes harder and harder. Of course, with Vegas it’s easy to bring in a new cast of conventioneers, etc. and that helps. But, the core setting, the core people (all now good friends of mine

Series are funny things. I know readers like them. As a writer, they are both a boon and a bust, if you will. Or, as Lucky might say, a pair of fur-lined handcuffs.

Don’t get me wrong, writing about Lucky and Vegas and all the silliness has been, and continues to be, great fun. But one of the challenges is finding fun groups that filter through Vegas, groups that readers would like to read about.

Groups where murder might be part of the mix.

Years ago, I got interested in the ongoing argument that Las Vegas would not be a good venue for a professional sports team of its own.

The access to betting was the most often trotted out excuse. Pretty lame in the digital age. Even when I was a kid and the first computer filled a building the size of a football field and could do little more than add single digits, I knew people who had their bookies in Vegas who placed bets for any and all—but that’s another story.

I guess we just didn’t have the right cache and I thought we got a bum rap.

Now all of that is behind us. The Vegas Knights Hockey Team is doing pretty well this season, I hear.

And Las Vegas will be the new home of the Oakland Raiders in a few years.

As a football fanatic, this one really captured my fancy. All the money, all the infighting, the new stadium, who’s going to pay for it, and how will the concessions be split?

Money.

As William Shakespeare said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And if professional football is about anything, it is about money.

So, I created a fictional team and looked at all the possible competing interests, from public to private, to players, and had some fun with it.

I hope you will, too.

Lucky Score is a Top 100 Bestseller in Apple iBooks and Barnes & Noble NOOK

The post Lucky Score appeared first on Deborah Coonts.

Makeovers should be celebrated!

Even though things are working and we’re still feeling that swagger, sometimes we just need a makeover, right?

That’s how I felt about Lucky. She was still walking the walk and for sure talking the talk, but she needed a fresh, sassy exterior to go with that moxie.

And when a gal gets some fancy on, what does she need?

A party, of course!

And what does a party call for? Well, gifts, of course.

Lucky has pulled some serious swag from the Babylon, swag you can’t get anywhere else. And we’ve put together boxes of fluffy robes and Champagne flutes, and bath bombs, candles, and some Lucky playing cards…all sporting the Babylon logo.

Oh, and there’ll be books, too, of course, all with the fabbo new covers.

So, check out the giveaways, eight of them—one for each of the Lucky books. These will run for one day each starting today, November 14th!

Then a grand prize starting after the eight individual giveaways on November 22nd and ending on December 13th.

You’re gonna want in on this one!

Check below and enter to win!

As a note, the giveaways are running on EDT—so all times for the opening and closing of entries will be on East Coast time.

GRAND RELAUNCH GIVEAWAY (November 22nd-December 13th)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure Series

One-Day Giveaways Starting Now!

Wanna Get Lucky?

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Lucky Stiff

a Rafflecopter giveaway

So Damn Lucky

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Lucky Bastard

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Lucky Catch

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Lucky Break

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Lucky the Hard Way

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Lucky Ride

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Lucky O'Toole Original Novellas

 

Lucky in Love
Lucky Bang
Lucky Now and Then
Lucky Flash

 

The post Lucky O’Toole Vegas Adventures Series Relaunch appeared first on Deborah Coonts.

So many people ask me how I came up with my protagonist, Lucky O’Toole. The short answer is she sort of found me. But the true story is a bit more complicated.

Las Vegas is about as idiosyncratic as cities come—perfect fodder for a novelist. I lived there for fifteen years and have come to understand that those of us who find our place in Sin City are square pegs. There isn’t a normal person in the bunch. Of course, while this presents all kinds of wonderful storytelling opportunities for my mystery series, it also presents its challenges. One of the most critical, I found, was my choice of protagonist.

Now, protagonists are interesting creatures. Not only are they the door through which readers enter and become invested in a fictional world, but they are also a function of the tenor and tone of the tale. Ideally, protagonists are recognizable to readers, someone they can relate to or feel empathy for. Their conflict should strike a common chord so the readers start to root for this character, to care what happens to them.

For storytelling purposes, the protagonist also reflects or embodies the world the writer creates. Since I write stories about Las Vegas, there was no way my protagonist could be a normal, a run-of-the-mill straight arrow. However, she needed to be normal enough that she wouldn’t be off-putting or hard to relate to. It’s a fine line: quirky yet normal. How’s that for an oxymoron? But, if you think about it, most of the people we remember are unique, yet normal enough.

As writers, how do we walk this line? What makes a protagonist memorable yet still accessible to your readers? For me, the characters I remember most are usually a bit eccentric, quite often with a finely-honed wit that made me laugh, whether they intended that result or not. Often they are also a bit unexpected. To me, this makes them more interesting and engaging which is especially important in a protagonist.

It seems there are two different ways to make characters stand out: give them distinctive mannerisms or give them an odd but relatable conflict.

So, in building a back-story for my protagonist, I thought through all of the weird and wonderful things about Vegas. I thought about how someone would be shaped by growing up here. And Lucky was born. A woman in her early thirties who is extraordinarily good at her job as the Head of Customer Relations at a strip mega-resort, but who is completely inept in handling her personal life. She spent her formative years being raised in a whorehouse by her mother, a former hooker and current owner of the establishment. Lucky doesn’t know who her father is. Through all of the bumps and bruises inflicted by this kind of upbringing, Lucky developed a keen appreciation for human frailties. She is tall, six feet, and large enough that she shops in the section where the transvestites shop—not a comfortable existence in the land of the beautiful people. Her best friend is a straight female impersonator, Julliard-trained with a Harvard MBA, who wants to be more than friends. Lucky isn’t too sure about dating a guy who looks better in her clothes than she does.

One of the difficult parts about creating a unique protagonist, is you need to populate the story around them. In my Las Vegas stories, I had to resist the temptation to make them all totally over-the-top. If I did that, then my offbeat protagonist would blend in with the crowd—not a good thing. I had to choose carefully which particular traits or curiosities exposed by Vegas I wanted each character to represent.

Generally, what I like to do with supporting characters is to take the expected and turn it at least ninety degrees. Lucky’s mother the madam? She’s svelte, decked-out in designer duds and is a lobbyist for her industry. Lucky’s boyfriend wears a dress for a living and her assistant is a fiftyish frump with a thirty-five-year-old Aussie hunk. She represents some of the dreams people come to Vegas to find, or the fantasies they play around in while here.

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