Here's Kelly--again!

 

Kelly O'Connell's debut

As I write, my eyes are on the TV, watching the Kentucky Derby. All I need is a mint julep, which would send me to my bed almost instantly. I do love them, but I am sensible and have a glass of white wine. I’m not much of a racing fan and I often think racing is cruel to the horses, but I love the pageantry and I always feel the suspense. The actual race is over so quickly, it’s almost incidental to the whole event.

It’s been a long, sort of lonely day. A brief visit from Jordan this morning has been my only contact with a human, and Sophie has slept away most of the day. It’s still cloudy and damp, though I think it’s finally beginning to clear up. But it’s been blessedly quiet. Yesterday I was barely aware of construction noise if I was busy, working, moving around the cottage. But when I settled down for a nap it suddenly became the loudest sound ever—an irregular deep beeping sound. Maybe a sump pump? I heard it again this morning with dread and wondered if the workermens (as one granddaughter used to call them) didn’t know it was Saturday. But they must have known and only worked half a day, because it got quiet around noon.

And I’ve been busy re-creating Kelly O’Connell’s world. For those who don’t know (really, you don’t know? I’m astounded), Kelly O’Connell is the character at the center of my longest mystery series—seven books and a novella. She’s a realtor in Fairmount, a historic neighborhood in Fort Worth where she specializes in renovating original Craftsman homes. Kelly stars in a cozy series bearing her name, and in many ways she’s a typical cozy heroine—amateur sleuth who can’t keep her nose out of police business, specifically murder. Not unusual for a cozy heroine to be partnered with a police officer, but in Kelly’s case she’s married to the chief of police, and they have her two daughters from her first marriage; their daughter completes the family.

Yesterday a chance comment made me think I might do another Kelly O’Connell book. It’s been three years since I was in Kelly’s neighborhood, so I did need to do some refreshing. And as I did a character list, it really was like meeting old friends. I’d forgotten some of them, needed to remind myself what happened to others and decide what had happened to them in the hiatus. They were very real people to me, and I remembered the good thing one reviewer said about my characters—they are like people you’d meet in the grocery store. I thought that a great compliment.

This time Kelly will get herself involved in saving the iconic Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth’s Stockyards Historic District—a bit out of her territory, but it springs from some nonfiction work I’d been doing on people involved in preserving the historic aspect of Fort Worth Stockyards district. Lots of opportunity to work in fascinating local history.

I’ve been known before to have these flashes of brilliant ideas and not follow through on them. A sequel to Saving Irene languishes in my computer even now, and indeed the first 20K words of Saving Irene sat untouched for a year until on a whim I went back to them. So I’m not making any hard commitment on this one—I find that often gets you in trouble. But I am enthusiastic about the work I did today. Who knows?

If you haven’t met Kelly yet, the first book is Skeleton in a Dead Space, available in ebook or paperback.

Meanwhile I have fixed myself a good dinner of leftovers and am ready to settle down with a mystery while I keep one eye on the results of the local elections.