MUD TO ASHES is a stand alone CLEAN story about Karo Meisner, who thought she had the perfect life until her daughter went clear across the country to attend university. That’s when Karo found she wasn’t needed on a daily basis any more; she had been graduated into the consultant kind of mother. Even worse, she found she hardly recognized the man she married in the man who was now sharing her bed, and to cap it all off, she couldn’t even remember all those dreams she had now that she has time to pursue them. Still Karo wasn’t the kind of person who allowed herself to sink into a depression, and wallow in self pity. So when her husband asked for a divorce and her daughter took a job in Boston after graduating, she took charge of her life and decided to pursue new dreams. She moved to a beach town on the California coast, adopted two rescued dogs, and started developing her skills by working in a communal pottery studio while she begins to build a new life for herself.
The plan sounded good, and maybe it would have turned out the way she planned if it hadn’t been for that body Rudy, one of her newly adopted dogs, found in the surf at the beach. That was very disturbing. And the house at the end of the block with the anti-social inhabitants was distressing. And while she loved her work at the pottery studio, she can’t help but notice some of the other potters are a little strange. Still Karo tries to remain positive as she concentrates on achieving her goals, not even conscious that something evil is in play around her. Until that day she finds herself in the middle of a life threatening situation which explodes into a horror reaching nationwide notoriety.

I’ve been living with the ghost of this book for about four years now and finally it has become a reality.  I couldn’t just start writing it when I thought about it because I was deep into the Claire Gulliver mysteries and I just couldn’t stop what I was writing and move on to a new person and new story, abandoning Claire.  And eventually I started the Glenda books, I then had to identify and develop the characters, the action and the plot.  So I’ve been immersed in Glenda, the central coast of Oregon and Zylda for a long time now.  In fact my mind is already working out the events in the next book.

However, I’m very interested as to whether or not the readers who have enjoyed my Claire Gulliver mysteries will also like my Glenda stories.  These new books have an element of the spiritual in them.  I hadn’t planned it to be there at the beginning but Zylda had always been an intended victim.  Unfortunately, by the time the crime was to happen I had come to be so fond of Zylda I didn’t want her to die.  So I did what an old friend suggested, I had her come back from the other side.  It makes an entirely different story but I like it and I can hardly wait to see what happens next.

I invite you to send your comments which I will consider as I’m writing the next adventure and hopefully the end results will end up with something we both like.  Meanwhile, happy reading.

Take a little vacation and enjoy your trip to the Northern California beach with Karo and her precious dogs, but be careful, there is danger a foot.