New Ebook Covers for Josephine Fuller

There’s always more to learn in book publishing. My new goal is targeting readers with ebook covers that pop up and wave at the reader out of the overcrowded waters of the sea of books. I've been bashing up against the wall of book publishing for decades now because I've got some pitbull terrier blood and an unquenchable need to tell stories and make jokes.

Oh, yeah, so what about readers who might want to read these stories and laugh at these jokes? Who are they and how can they find my books? It turns out it's possible to answer these questions, at least I hope so!

Here are the new covers on the ebooks for the Josephine Fuller mysteries. thanks to Sharon Lipman at Fantasia Book Covers for designing them and Peggy Elam at Pearlsong Press for putting them up on the net. (You may notice that the paperback books have different covers. Long story short: paperbacks change more slowly.)

Larger Than Death

A slain designer of plus-sized clothing, a killer now stalks Josephine,

Large Target

A Top Secret safe cleared out and an admiral kidnapped in San Diego. The family doesn't want him back and someone's targeting Josephine to keep her from getting answers.

At Large

Josephine finds the body of a well-known mountain climber, who is also the woman who broke up her marriage. Now she's the prime suspect.

A Ton of Trouble

A body in a wine barrel in the Northern California Wine Country sets off a chain of murders and has Josephine trying to clear the name of a plus-sized adult film star whom she is sure is innocent--at least of murder.

As time, and ex-husbands go by....

Josephine Fuller's third adventure, At Large, has just been reissued as an ebook and in trade paperback. The first line is a nod to Casablanca: Of all the women's job skill centers in all the towns in all the Pacific Northwest, he walks into mine. To read the first two chapters click At Large sample

Don't you just hate it when an incriminating murder weapon turns up in your personal space?

In At Large (coming soon for the first time as an ebook) Jo Fuller discovers a blood-coated murder weapon in her storage locker: I screamed and backed out of the storage room, slamming the door, which promptly hit the door frame and flew open again. Hope's apartment door opened, and a bleached platinum head peered into the hall.

"Are you okay?" Since she was now doing the prison visits to her boyfriend, Maxine's daughter had abandoned the rainbow hair for a platinum blond look with dark roots. She saw me staring into the storage room, and came out of her apartment. "What is it, mice? You'd think that good-for-nothing cat would—" Her words trailed off in a gasp. She stood next to me, and stared.

"Close it! Close it! Lock the door. We've got to call the police." She kicked the door closed, and I locked it, and followed her back to her apartment. I was too shocked to say a word. Not that Hope would have heard me. "It's him." She said, pacing back and forth. "I told her she was crazy to let him stay there."

I went to Hope's phone, and pulled the fresh business card Gonick had given me out of my pocket. Groucho's cage had been installed in one corner of the small front room. He craned his white-masked green-feathered head sideways to fix me with a glare from beady black eyes. As I walked past to get to the phone, he spread iridescent green wings wide in alarm.

While I was talking to the man who answered the phone in Homicide, Groucho let loose a shriek so deafening that the man asked if I was in any immediate danger. "No, it's a somebody's pet macaw. But I do need to talk to Gonick, tell him it's about the ice axe."

Hope paced back and forth muttering to herself. I had never seen her so agitated. I wondered if Gonick had even had time to get down to Police Headquarters with Griff. After I hung up the phone I meditated briefly about my little talk with Gonick about searching Nina's apartment. I put a call in to the local lawyer Ambrose had suggested. I got her answering machine. I looked at my watch. It was 6:30.

"It's that slimy creature that's living with Mom," Hope said heatedly. "He's killed before you know."

Where to find Prizes Next Week & from At Large...the wandering murder weapon

Next week check out Zetta Brown's The Full-Bodied Book Blog for "A Tribute to Pearlsong Press: Healing the World, One Book at a Time." My own contribution on Wednesday June 13: Watching Our Language what not to do if you write about characters that are “large and in charge” if you want to keep your reader’s respect.

There will be free book prizes and surprises!

Now, here's the weekendly excerpt from At Large, soon to be published for the first time in ebook form by Pearlsong Press, Josephine Fuller discovers the body of Francesca Etheridge, the woman who broke up her marriage. The police grill Jo about an ice, missing from the murder victim's climbing gear. Back in her apartment Jo decides to put her nervous energy to work:

Finding Francesca like that had riled me up so that I couldn't sit still. It was impossible to return to sorting things. I decided to take some of the boxes of Nina's things down to the basement and bring up some of my things that had been sitting patiently for years waiting for me to settle down. A little heavy lifting would probably calm my nerves, or at the very least exhaust me so I could collapse.

The storage room occupied the end of the building, and took some space away from Mulligan's apartment and Maxine's daughter Hope's apartment which faced it across the hall. As I came down the stairs into the basement, I could hear Groucho, the macaw, warming up with some preparatory shrill cries. It must be intolerable when he let loose a major shriek in Hope's small, windowless apartment.

I put the boxes down and opened the storage room door, feeling around for the string that would turn on the overhead light bulb. The room was crowded with some furniture that Nina had stored there. A table and three stacked chairs pressed up against the stacks of boxes that held all my earthly possessions. Nina had kindly stored them for me, at first when I was following Griff around the world and lately since I'd been traveling on the job for Mrs. Madrone.

An oddly angled shadow sprang into view when the light bulb went on. I realized with a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach what it was. The cardboard packing box just inside my door had my name in black felt marker with the word "BOOKS" below it. An ice axe, its leather harness trailing, was embedded in the front of the box right below the label, its claw end half buried in the corrugated cardboard, and a thin layer of dried blood coating the edges of the point of penetration.

Seven Paragraphs from At Large

Now that I'm not constricted to prune an entry to six sentences, and yet I'm still in the habit of weekendly posting here, what to do? I happen to be editing/correcting the scanned text of At Large, the third Josephine Fuller book, to be re-issued in ebook and trade paperback soon. I've no reason to impose a sentence count or even a paragraph limit, so here are seven paragraphs from page 1:

Of all the women's job skill centers in all the towns in all the Pacific Northwest, he walks into mine. It had been a rocky week already, and it wasn't Friday yet. In fact Thursday morning was moving so slowly that if I hadn't personally witnessed each second tick off on the big black schoolroom clock across from my desk, I would have sworn that time was standing still. It didn't help that no one was buying my best impersonation of a mild-mannered receptionist. As a woman who has never weighed less than two hundred pounds in my adult life, you might not guess that I can be inconspicuous, but if I keep my head down and my mouth shut, I can usually pull it off. Unfortunately the earnest blue silk pantsuit, pearls and expression of well-bred naiveté weren't working.

Something about this job skill center wasn't quite right. I needed to find out what it was for Mrs. Madrone, so that my wealthy employer could decide whether to award the place a grant. Maybe I had asked too many questions.

By the time Ted showed up, I was already on Delores Patton's radar. The center director was an African American woman who commanded respect with an attitude that could clean brass at twenty paces. She knew I wasn't your usual do-gooder. She just hadn't decided how to deal with it. Ted's arrival made up her mind, and managed to get me fired from a volunteer job—not as easy as it sounds.

Teddy Etheridge was the first male who had entered the office in the three weeks I had been volunteering there. The center was located in Bremerton, about an hour's ferry ride southwest of Seattle. I'd stayed in town during the week answering phones, helping out and nosing around.

For a split second when Teddy walked in the door I thought he might be a potential employer who had strayed in without an appointment. Not that I'd ever seen an actual employer on the premises. Though they did call from time to time to get cheap labor. then I recognized him. "Teddy!" It was always Ted or Teddy to his friends. Never Theodore, not even on his book covers. He wrote humor books for a living.

When he realized it was me, his bearded face lit up in a huge grin. "Josephine Fuller!"

"Ted Etheridge. The last of the hopeless romantics."