Low Country Blood--An Interview With the Author
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LOW COUNTRY BLOOD A Vega and Middleton Mystery Book 2 BY SUE HINKIN
Blurb
Los Angeles TV journalist Beatrice Middleton has lost her job. With a possible employment offer in Atlanta, she heads home to Savannah, Georgia, to reconnect with her contentious African-American family. She arrives to find that her 15-year-old nephew has been murdered.
This begins the unraveling of a cloak of family secrets surrounding another devastating crime, one that shattered Bea’s world when she was a teen. The traumatic memory has been buried so deep it almost feels like it never happened—almost. Humiliated by Bea years earlier, a psychotic Special Ops vet who makes his living moving heroin and specializing in “wet work” has returned to seek retribution.
Meanwhile, Bea’s teenaged son Dexter, an aspiring documentary filmmaker discover an eye-witness connection to his cousin’s homicide. After a rookie attempt at surveilling the perpetrator, he disappears.
Bea and her brother, Sheriff Luther Middleton— along with their quirky friends and family—work together to find the killer, stop a major drug deal, and rescue Bea’s son held hostage in a nightmarish landscape of gator-infested black water rivers and tidal creeks.
PRAISE FOR LOW COUNTRY BLOOD Hinkin’s second Vega and Middleton Mystery…reads like a thriller, successfully blends multiple ingredients: fast pacing, romance, danger, humor, and a crazy wild ending. A spirited reporter dealing with her past and helping police solve a murder in the family makes this novel hard to put down.—Kirkus Review
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Interview
Initially Low Country Blood was the first book that was contracted for publication by Literary Wanderlust, but you wanted to write the prequel Deadly Focus and publish that book first. How did that work with your publisher? Why did you want to go back and write a prequel? Talk about that. What made you decide to go back and write Deadly Focus to kick off the series and then publish Low Country Blood as the second book in the series rather than as the first book?
The prequel, Deadly Focus, actually existed in many versions prior to Low Country Blood. It was loosely based on a story I covered as a TV news photographer in Michigan decades ago. As I wrote the story, I brought the location to LA where I was living at the time and where I spent the most formative years of my adulthood. Through the many iterations of DF, I made every writing mistake a rookie could make. This was a good thing. DF is a critically important book for me because through it, I began to see myself as a writer, learned a great deal of the craft, and got to know my characters intimately.
I also learned the lesson of persistence. I wrote, gave up, shelved Deadly Focus for years, started again, was interrupted by life, gave up again, struggled back into it, and found people in similar straits to slog forward with. I should mention that I’m a Taurus so I have bullish determination in my stars.
Low Country Blood feels like a natural evolution for the storyline of your two main characters. How did both of your books evolve?
Both books evolved from my experience working in the television industry and the stories we covered and the people I initially met in that profession. In book #2, Low Country Blood, Bea loses her job as a result of a corporate buy-out. This happened to many of my friends who worked in print journalism, and I wanted to pursue that thread. Without the anchor an intense work environment provides, you’re forced to fall back onto the support of friends and family. For various reasons portrayed in this novel, Bea returns home to not only deal with her nephew’s murder, but unfinished family business and childhood trauma that has haunted her on many levels.
How do you develop your plots and characters?
My characters come from amalgamations of real-life relationships. I just keep getting to know them better with each book. Plotting comes very organically through my imagination. When I get stuck I stop and try to outline what’s to come. Somet