REBLOGGED FROM SUSAN TOY'S "READING RECOMMENDATIONS"

The following blog post appeared on Susan Toy's blog on Thursday, January 9, 2014.  Reprinted with permission.  Susan interviewed me about "The Deadly Dog Show".

What is your latest release and what genre is it? The Deadly Dog Show is a mystery. Because one of the lead characters is a dog, Amazon calls it a “cozy”. I’d call it “hard-boiled” or “noir”, but with clean language and no gratuitous sex. I guess that means it’s somewhere between those various genres.

Quick description: The Deadly Dog Show, a suspenseful journey into the world of canine conformation contests, provides an exciting backdrop for murder. Roger Bowman, private eye, is hired to investigate mysterious occurrences at California dog shows. Before long, Roger is working undercover at the dog shows impersonating an owner, dead bodies are accumulating, and a mysterious stalker is pursuing Roger’s wife, Suzanne. The reviewers are enthusiastic about this whodunit novel, which should appeal to mystery readers, dog lovers, and anyone else who wants to learn more about the world of dog show competition.


Brief biography:
The author is a Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of California’s Medical School at Davis. He has a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry and does research on asthma and health effects of air pollution on the lungs. He is also a big fan of California mystery novels. A quick search of Amazon will turn up books and articles in biochemistry previously edited or authored by Jerry, as well as his South American mystery novel series. The settings and locales for all of these novels are authentic; the author lived previously in Salta, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay. He has collaborated with several local scientists in Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru. The Deadly Dog Show, set in California, is the fourth novel in his Roger and Suzanne mystery series, following The Ambivalent Corpse, set in Montevideo, Uruguay and the surrounding region, The Surreal Killer, set in Peru and Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert region, and The Matador Murders, set in Montevideo and Santiago, Chile. All of these mystery novels are available as Kindle E-books from Amazon. Two shorter books in this series, a novelette and a novella, The Body in the Parking Structure, set in Los Angeles, and The Body in the Bed, set in Montevideo, are also available from Amazon. A novel-length anthology of shorter stories entitled Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne, including The Empanada Affair, a novella set in Salta, Argentina, and The Haunted Gymnasium, a shorter and somewhat paranormal mystery set in Fortaleza, Brazil, is also available as a Kindle E-book from Amazon.
Jerry writes hard-boiled mystery books that are fast moving and entertain, while introducing readers to a region where he has lived and worked that is a long way from home for most English speakers. Montevideo, Salta, Machu Picchu, and Iguazu Falls are characters in these books, and the novels portray these places as vivid and real. He lives in Northern California with his wife Elaine, who breeds German Shorthaired Pointers, and with Vinia, Jolie, Schöne, and Ries, four generations of GSPs who contribute interesting material for his blog and characters for his books. Coming soon is a fifth novel, The Origin of Murder, a riff on Charles Darwin’s classic The Origin of Species, which brings Roger, Suzanne, Bruce the Nanny, and Paraguayan police person Eduardo Gomez to the Galapagos Islands where murder and intrigue once again await our detectives in South America.

Links to buy Jerold’s book:
Amazon US
Amazon Canada
Amazon UK

Jerold’s promo links:
Blog
Facebook

What are you working on now?
I’m editing the next novel in the series, The Origin of Murder, which should be published on Amazon Kindle some time this winter. This murder mystery takes Roger and Suzanne to the Galapagos Islands, off the Pacific coast of Ecuador in South America. I’m also starting the next book to follow in the series, which I think will take our detective couple to Alaska.

Jerold’s reading recommendation:
I just finished reading the mystery novel Unleashed by Emily Kimelman (available as a Kindle E-book and elsewhere). I like murder mysteries and I like dogs as characters, so enjoyed this novel.

LIFE WITH ONE OF “JULIET’S” PUPPIES

Well, life with almost one of “Juliet’s” puppies.  Our newest dog pack member, Ries, is the grandson of Jolie, the model for “Juliet” in “The deadly Dog Show”.  He’s almost four months old (that milestone will happen on December 26^th), and most certainly has a personality.  In fact his personality is bigger than he is at the moment.   The dog psychologists have defined a “fear period” from 8 to 18 weeks when the puppy will fear any bad experience he/she has for the rest of their lives.   As a breeder/owner, it’s our job to give the puppy as many different experiences as they can possibly handle during this period, and to make the experiences positive ones, to get the best possible temperament and self-confidence in the adult dog to come.  The human analogue of the “fear period” takes place when a child is 8-18 months old.

THE REAL JULIET

In the current WIP, tentatively entitled "The Deadly Dog Show", Roger and Suzanne, with a lot of help from their Nanny Bruce and Roger's new partner in his detective agency, Vincent Romero, go undercover to investigate irregularities allegedly occurring at a series of major dog shows in California. As part of their cover identities they borrow a dog for Bruce to train and show, called Juliet in the novel. The fictitious Juliet is modeled very closely after our Jolie, AKC Grand Champion Von Der Nacht's Classic Beaujolais, JH, SH, especially when her behavior and personality are being described. To avoid concerns about quarantine regulations and the potential adverse effects of hot, humid weather on the dogs during the shows, this novel is set mainly in California rather than in our more usual locales in the Southern Cone of South America.

Jolie has spent most of her life as a member of a family dog pack, the first three years with just Mom, Vinia, and the second three years with Vinia and Jolie's daughter, Schone. Jolie deferred to Vinia until she had her first litter of puppies, but is probably the dominant bitch in a very mellow pack these days, at least in some ways. For example, she gets to go out of the door first when the pack heads for the back yard. She loves to give big slurpy kisses to humans, including strangers if they have a positive attitude. Like all three of our dogs, and like Juliet, she is a superb athlete in the field and in the back yard.

This book has its origins in Elaine's wanting to see one of these novels having a dog-based theme, especially if it could capture some of her interests in German Shorthaired Pointers and dog shows.  Throw in a badly concealed version of one of our dogs and she seems to be happy, pending some heavy editing still to be done.  Stay tuned to this blog, and hopefully we'll be announcing this book's publication some time this Spring season.

The Next Big Thing

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My friend Pat Bertram invited me to participate in this blog chain. 

The idea of this ongoing blog chain, called "The Next Big Thing," is to answer 10 questions about my current Work In Progress, and in turn "tag" 5 other writers who will write posts on their blogs. I thought this might be a good excuse to tell you about the next novel featuring Roger and Suzanne; this time they'll be investigating crimes closer to home rather than in South America.  The fun part for me in this work in progress is trying to integrate my love of mysteries with my (and my wife's) love of German Shorthaired Pointers.  I'm also toying with the idea of a future trivia question on this blog asking how many references readers can find to German Shorthaired Pointer dogs in the previous books in the Roger and Suzanne series.  I can think of several.

What is your working title of your book?  "The Deadly Dog Show"

Where did the idea come from for the book?   My wife, who has been urging me for at least a year to get Roger and Suzanne to buy a dog, to go to dog shows, and to solve the killing of an unloved dog show judge.  The suggestion was recently reinforced by a reader of a short story I wrote about a P.I. and a dog who asked me on Facebook to write a Roger and Suzanne novel with a dog-based theme.

What genre does your book fall under?   Hard-boiled mystery

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  I think I see Kristanna Loken as Suzanne---a tall, blond, and athletic woman of 30-ish.  If you are asking WHO at this point, look her up on Google or The IMDB (try the name or the SyFy Channel series, "Painkiller Jane").  Roger---how about Aaron Eckhart?  They'd make a nice couple.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?   It's too soon to know, but let's try this one:  Roger and Suzanne