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

I'll drink a cup to Fat Friendly Fiction in 2013!

This year I'm collaborating with Pearlsong Press to put out a Fat Friendly Fiction list. The blog is in progress with information and links to all the titles. Eventually an ebook version wil be available. But I want to start by posting the authors by genre. Please feel free to visit Fat Friendly Fiction for more info or to comment.

Email me at murraymade@yahoo.com for a one-page printable Word version of the author list.

Here it is for your reading pleasure! FAT FRIENDLY FICTION

CHICK LIT & HUMOR

Backauskas, Staci

MacAfee, Stephanie

Murray, Lynne

Palmer, Liza

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

Carlson, Nancy

Corum, Ann Kondo

Ka, Olivier

CURVY EROTICA

Armstrong, Mechele

Brown, Leila

Blank, Hanne

Davis, Justine

Hunter, Adriana

James, Karolyn

Lane, Gretchen

Lee, Marilyn

Lovell, Christin

Moore, Alexis

Scott, J. S.

Verdenis, Angelina

Wick, Christa

FANTASY/PARANORMAL/VISIONARY

Bertauski , Tony

Fox, Andrew

Murray, Lynne

Owen, Lauri J.

Pratchett, Terry

Price, Susan

Truant, Johnny B

MYSTERY & SUSPENSE

Ballard, Pat

Biggers, Earl Derr

Carr, John Dickson

Chesterton, G.K.

Collins, Wilkie

Dickens, Charles

Dickson, Carter

Langton, Jane

Le Carré, John

Lorens, M.K.

Lovesey, Peter

Lovett, Charlie

McKevett, G.A.

Mortimer, John

Murray, Lynne

Smith, Alexander McCall

SHORT STORIES

Bagshaw, Judy

Ballard, Pat

Blank, Hanne (Ed.)

Chesterton, G.K.

Irving, Washington

Jaffarian, Sue Ann

Jarrell, Donna (Ed.)

Koppelman, Susan (Ed.)

Ira Sukrungruang (Ed.)

UNCATEGORIZED

(LITERARY/PLAYS/WOMEN'S etc.)

Adams, Essa

Dickens, Charles

Shakespeare, William

Stinson, Susan

YOUNG ADULT BOOKS

Bellairs, John

Bennett, Cherie

Berk, Josh

Bethancourt, Ernesto T.

Healy, Karen

Hoffman, Nina Kiriki

Lovett, Charlie

Newman, Leslea

Purtill, C. Leigh

Rex, Adam

Strickland, Brad

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.

From At Large--Bad News on the Home Front

From At Large, Josephine goes home after a rough day at the Women's Job Skills Center. Looking for her straying cat, she knocks on the building manager’s door.

Maxine answered the door. She was a short, full-breasted woman in her sixties with wildly cut gray hair. Today she wore a mauve sweat suit and hoop earrings.

"Hi, Jo. You're back early."

"I finished up. Thought I'd come home. Where's the bird? He's awfully quiet. Is he okay?" Groucho, her green Military Macaw had a shriek that could be heard blocks away and he usually made some sort of preparatory shrieks when he saw that Maxine's attention was focused into the hallway, rather than on him where it properly belonged.

I blinked in surprise when a face popped up behind her shoulder. A man squeezed up behind Maxine and wrapped his arm around her substantial middle so that her breasts flowed over his forearm, nearly but not quite covering the crude tattoo that snaked up from his wrist to curl around his elbow. Without meaning to, I took a step backward into the hall.

"I've been threatening to put him on a spit for dinner, but Maxine won't let me. Her daughter took him down to her place, the noise was driving me apeshit," the man said with a gravelly voice. "Don't worry—Bird lives!

"Can you believe I've hooked up with a literate jazz buff?" Maxine said in tones more appropriate for baby talk.

"Hope took in Groucho?" I said in disbelief.

"Oh, she was glad to take him." Maxine's new friend grinned broadly. "She hustled that cage outta here in ten minutes flat, once I told her I liked him a lot and I'd like him even better fried with biscuits and gravy."

Meeting the "Other Woman" in the Worst Possible Way

From At Large, Josephine goes to the apartment her ex-husband is sharing with the woman whom he left her for...but a stranger rushes out the door and calls out as she runs off, "Don't go in there! Call the cops, she's dead!"

I turned back to confront the polished stairs leading up into the townhouse. I took out my cell phone. The top autodial button was programmed for 911. I didn't press the button though. Instead, I kept it in my hand as I cautiously went up the stairs. Confronting me at the top of the stairway was a larger-than-life, beautifully framed print of a color photograph of Francesca. It dominated the entry. It was clearly Griff's work, and he had done her justice. It showed her hanging from a wall of sapphire ice, supported by two ice axes and the crampons attached to her boots. Her hair had been shorter in that picture, and the hood of her parka had fallen back a little to show a spiky halo around her determined face. The sun that illuminated the blue ice reflected in her blue eyes. She looked great. It was easy to see why Griff had fallen for her. She looked like a snow goddess—the petite version.

At the top of the stairs I saw a series of huge prints of Griff's pictures hanging along the back wall. Every one showed Francesca in climbing gear. From the massive peaks in the background, I guessed that these were taken during the early days of their relationship in Nepal.

The condo had high ceilings and hardwood floors. The cathedral effect was heightened by the sparse furniture, which gave the place a cavernous empty quality. The place seemed deserted except for the persistent buzz of a fly. The main room was blocked from view as you rounded the top of the stairs by a glass cabinet that must have been seven feet tall, filled with sports trophies and climbing memorabilia.

I went around the trophy display, and tripped over a black leather case that had been unceremoniously dropped at the edge. I went down sprawling on the hardwood floor, cursing myself for awkwardness. I lay for a second, assessing any damage, cringing in expectation of laughter and expecting to look up and see the petite and athletic Francesca sneering at my huge awkward self, complaining that I had scuffed the waxed floor.

Instead, cautiously getting to my feet, I saw a long oak table with a new canvas tarp half pulled off it, and what appeared to be a dummy, submerged in a welter of climber's gear—harnesses and rope, caribiners, crampons, pitons. I had never climbed a day in my life but I'd watched enough people pack and unpack their gear to easily commit it to memory. I didn't see any ice axes, although I saw the harness with the holster from which most climbers hung a couple of axes with their claw-like heads for climbing ice, the way Francesca had in that huge photo.

I went a little closer, puzzled. Mountaineers are usually very particular about their gear. After all, their lives depend on it. Someone had scattered Francesca's stacks of pitons like matchsticks. Her ropes were tangled into a spider's nest, hanging half off the table.

This was a cruel joke surely. I went a little closer, my steps echoing on the hardwood. The tarp had been partially pulled off the gleaming oak table. The climbing gear made a disorderly still life.

My stomach lurched when I realized that the totally still figure at the center of the disorder was no dummy. Francesca Etheridge, a rope around her neck, her red face distorted, lay among her gear, one of her ice axes planted in the soft base of her throat. The bloodied rips and tears in her thermal undershirt showed where she had been hacked before dying. She was clearly lifeless. The blood long clotted. Twisted where she had fallen like a broken doll, her arms were trapped by the ropes and frozen at an awkward angle, not by cold but by death.

Six Sunday -- out of the line of fire, into another danger zone

From Large Target, Jo escapes from an ambush scene where the kidnapper has shot one person and incinerated a car. She has guessed the kidnapper's identity and tricked his father, who knows nothing about the crime, into giving her directions to the kidnapper's workshop.

I heard sirens, and a fire truck raced past headed for the fire that had been Zane's car with an ambulance and a police car following soon after. I started to feel very conspicuous. I got back on Foothill Boulevard and began to follow the instructions my lie had earned me.

The old man hadn't been exaggerating about needing a bodyguard in that part of town. A small detachment of marines would have been appropriate. The warehouse sat at the end of a block that was occupied by a junkyard on one side and a dirt lot ringed by several deserted buildings on the other, chain-link fences featuring razor wire on top set the dominant motif in exterior trim.


This event lures dozens of writers to share sentences on Sundays, this weekend I saw 173 signed up to play. For a good time check them out at six Sunday

Six sentence Sunday week 50 - sometimes it's hard to be a kidnapper

From Large Target, Jo is at the home of the missing admiral’s daughter when her husband, Ivor, reports that the kidnappers have called Colleen, the admiral’s daughter-in-law, with detailed demands about the million dollar ransom.

"She turned them down."

"What?" Amy was horrified.

Ivor shook his head and reached out for his beer bottle and upended it, without getting more than the dregs. "Colleen said we don't have the money," he concluded.

I was fascinated and had to ask, "Did Colleen make a counteroffer?"

For more fun in six-sentence snippets, check out the writers at six Sunday.

44th Six Sunday - from Large Target, an encounter with Genghis Ron

A pivotal moment from Large Target, just released last week. Investigator Josephine Fuller has a special assignment looking for an admiral’s daughter who may be in the grip of a fanatical organization. Unfortunately Jo walks into a family house party and runs into the admiral himself, drunk, grabbing at women guests and living up to his nickname “Genghis Ron.” He tries to aim a minicam up her skirt but Jo shakes him off:

"Thinks she can get coy," he brayed, gripping my skirt for purchase and holding out the minicam with the other hand.

"No," I said as I shook the can of soda with a thumb over the hole and aimed it at his eyes. The spray at close range startled him enough to send him back on his rear while I jerked my skirt from his grip.

"Whoa!" the admiral exclaimed, shaking his head and looking around as if he weren't quite sure how he had landed wet-faced and back on the living room floor.

Several guests applauded as I retreated into the kitchen where a woman handed me a dampened dish towel and took my dripping soda can with a smile, "Here, honey," she said, "we all enjoyed that."

To party on with six sentence servings from dozens of authors in many genres check out the action over at Six Sunday.