I met Terry for the first time on Saturday, April 20th at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Well, actually, we met at the Vagabond Inn parking lot a couple of blocks from the USC campus, so that I could load his books and paraphernalia into my car. He didn’t, however, seem like a stranger. We’d been corresponding for weeks prior to the event, brainstorming online and discussing with our co-authors the highest and best use for our booth space. Terry is an easy guy to know right away.
Terry has two mysteries already in print. I took the time to read his cozy-ish PHOTO FINISH prior to the event, because I wanted to know something about each of the other MURDER, WE WROTE authors. PHOTO FINISH is a great book, set in a place I love: Hawaii. His characters are at once funny, entertaining and realistic. (Like it or not, Terry, I pictured Wilson McKenna as kind of an aging Jim Rockford…)
But back to Terry. I expected him in a Hawaiian shirt, which he wasn’t wearing. “I brought one,” he assured me.
Terry is good at one-on-one selling in the booth. He is, after all, the best person to describe his stories, hooking readers with promises of “twists and turns” – certainly true about his mysteries. Terry also doesn’t shy away from promoting others around him, a fact that endears him to his co-booth-sharers.
Just before our grand weekend at USC, Terry exhibited at the Tucson Festival of Books, where folks were lined up at his booth before he was even unpacked. Despite the snow flurries in Southern Arizona, his books flew off the table.
They say you should write what you know, and Terry does. His protag McKenna is an ex-skip-tracer [a person who locates another person’s whereabouts for any number of purposes] and so is Terry! These guys are actually quasi-detectives who use the same tactics as their big brother P.I.’s. Terry advises: “My years of chasing deadbeats taught me many valuable life lessons such as—always keep your car in the garage.”
Terry’s latest release is License to Lie, already nearing the top of my nightstand stack. In addition to writing for Examiner.com, Terry is a member of Arizona Mystery Writers and Sisters in Crime and has run his own web design business since 2003. Busy guy, great author and all around super person. IF you can get him to slow down for a minute!
Visit Terry at his website, and Facebook . He Tweets at @suspense_writer
This is the second in a series of Murder, We Wrote author spotlights.
Wow! Thanks for doing this, Pam, I had no idea. I just wanted to say that I had a great time at the LA Times Festival of Books and look forward to a repeat performance next year. The group you’ve assembled, Murder We Wrote, is a great cross-section of mystery/suspense writers that let us please almost any reader in the genre.
As far as that “car in the garage” thing, at least I now have a bona fide excuse…my HOA requires it. Nobody can say I’m hiding from my creditors because I’m just complying with the HOA requirements.
Mahalo for the post!
Terry