Tag Archives: crime

15Jul/22

Frank W. Butterfield

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July 15, 2022

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 7, Episode 28 – Frank W. Butterfield + Our Review of Stranger Things!

Frank W. Butterfield returns to share his latest novels: Situation, The Useful Uncle, and his upcoming The Seductive Sellout with us, and we then discuss his ability to weave mysteries in multiple decades as well as some of his more recent, modern tie-ins. Then Baz and Vance review Stranger Things and share who won the week for them!

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Bio:
Frank W. Butterfield is the Amazon best-selling author of The Nick Williams Mysteries and dozens of other stories all set in the same universe. Frank is a Sagittarius who enjoys the beach, watching old movies, and listening to the bossa nova.

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ9QcRh_dQU[/embedyt]

December 11, 2020

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Frank W. Butterfield back as the guest on Episode 298 – I Knew The Answer To This Yesterday!)

Frank W. Butterfield returns to share a year of holiday-oriented short stories, dealing with COVID in contemporary novels, and his deep dive into a real 1947 murder in Daytona Beach and how he’s using it as a template for a novel!

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Bio:

Amazon best-selling author Frank W. Butterfield (not an assumed name) loves old movies, wise-cracking smart guys with hearts of gold, and writing for fun.

Although Frank worships San Francisco, he lives at the beach on another coast. Born on a windy day in November of 1966, he was elected President of his high school Spanish Club in the spring of 1983. After moving across these United States like a rapid-fire pinball, he now makes his home in a hurricane-proof apartment, built in 1926, with superior water pressure. While he hasn’t met any dolphins personally, that invitation is always open.

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August 16, 2019

Frank W Butterfield 2019 graphic
It gives us great pleasure to welcome Frank W. Butterfield back as the guest on Episode 229 – 3000 Questions About the Past!

Frank W. Butterfield returns to chat about his three series, how they’re all related, and about queer history and history in general. A fabulous time had by all!

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Bio:

Amazon best-selling author Frank W. Butterfield (not an assumed name) loves old movies, wise-cracking smart guys with hearts of gold, and writing for fun.

Although Frank worships San Francisco, he lives at the beach on another coast. Born on a windy day in November of 1966, he was elected President of his high school Spanish Club in the spring of 1983. After moving across these United States like a rapid-fire pinball, he now makes his home in a hurricane-proof motel, built in 1947, with superior water pressure. While he hasn’t met any dolphins personally, that invitation is always open.

This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
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October 26, 2018

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Frank W. Butterfield back as the guest on Episode 187 – My Gay Perry Mason!!

Frank W. Butterfield returns to the show to discuss adding a series alongside his current series, reconstructing history, and reviewer vs character point of view.

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Books Mentioned in this Episode:

Bio:

Frank W. Butterfield, not an assumed name, loves old movies, wise-cracking smart guys with hearts of gold, and writing for fun.

Although he worships San Francisco, he lives at the beach on another coast.

Born on a windy day in November of 1966, he was elected President of his high school Spanish Club in the spring of 1983.

After moving across these United States like a rapid-fire pinball, he currently makes his home in a hurricane-proof motel with superior water pressure that was built in 1947.

While he hasn’t met any dolphins personally, that invitation is always open.

This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
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Or right here:

November 17, 2017


It gives us great pleasure to welcome Frank W. Butterfield as the guest on Episode 138: It’s All True and Very Silly!

This week Frank W. Butterfield joins us to talk about his latest novel, The Rotten Rancher, the joys (and woes, but mostly joys) of writing a historical fiction series, and suspending belief long enough to let historical figures impact a story without their legacies being impacted!

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** Read Jayne’s Review of The Laconic Lumberjack HERE!

Bio:

Frank W. Butterfield, not an assumed name, loves old movies, wise-cracking smart guys with hearts of gold, and writing for fun.

Although he worships San Francisco, he lives at the beach on another coast.

Born on a windy day in November of 1966, he was elected President of his high school Spanish Club in the spring of 1983.

After moving across these United States like a rapid-fire pinball, he currently makes his home in a hurricane-proof motel with superior water pressure that was built in 1947.

While he hasn’t met any dolphins personally, that invitation is always open.

This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
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Or right here:

01Apr/22

Candas Jane Dorsey

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April 1, 2022

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Candas Jane Dorsey as the guest on Season 7, Episode 13 – If You Read This Your Head Will Explode!

Candas Jane Dorsey shares her wise-cracking, grammar-obsessed, pansexual amateur sleuth from her The Adventures of Isabel and What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? crime novels AND her intersex teen from her The Story of My Life Ongoing, by CS Cobb young adult novel. She also can’t help teasing a masterclass in harnessing her passion for advocacy and using it to guide her writing.

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Bio:
Candas Jane Dorsey is an internationally-known author of sci-fi, Y/A, and contemporary novels, poetry, short stories, reviews, and critical essays. She has received a variety of awards and honours for her books and short fiction.
Dorsey is a partner in Wooden Door & Associates, a professional communications consulting company in Edmonton since 1992, providing writing, editing, and consulting for private, public and non-profit clients. At WDA, Dorsey was the co-author of several significant reports including The Report of the Review Panel on the Alberta Human Rights Commission, Cultural Diversity in the Workplace, and Children’s Interactive Television in Canada. She has written screenplays and educational television scripts. She was editor/publisher for ten years of the arts newspaper The Edmonton Bullet and for fourteen years of literary press The Books Collective, including River Books and Tesseract Books.
She teaches writing to adults and youth, has been teaching at universities and continuing education since 1983, and at MacEwan University since before it was a university, where she now teaches in the Bachelor of Communications programme. She also speaks widely on writing, speculative fiction, and other topics.
She was founding president of SFCanada, and has been president of the Writers Guild of Alberta. Her awards include the Province of Alberta Centennial Gold Medal for her artistic achievement and community work, and the WGA Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts, the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, YWCA Woman of the Year Arts and Culture, and an Edmonton Arts Achievement Award. And in 2019 she was inducted into the City of Edmonton Arts and Cultural Hall of Fame.
Candas is also a community activist, advocate and leader who has won two human rights awards and served on many community boards and committees working for neighbourhoods, heritage, social planning, equality of policing, and human rights advocacy. And she also makes time to be a visual artist.

This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAtUhZuq1Pg[/embedyt]

21Jan/22

Robyn Gigl

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January 21, 2022

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Robyn Gigl back as the guest on Season 7, Episode 03 – There’s A Little Bit Of Backstory!

Robyn Gigl returns with her second Erin McCabe novel, Survivor’s Guilt. We talk about trans characters being someone with whom you could have a beer, courtroom action, human trafficking, and vengeance.

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Bio:

Robyn Gigl is an attorney, speaker and activist who has been honored by the ACLU-NJ and the NJ Pride Network for her work on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. Robyn is a partner at Gluck Walrath, LLP in Freehold, NJ, where she handles complex commercial and employment litigation. She has been selected as a NJ Super Lawyer since 2010 and as one of the Top 50 Women Lawyers in NJ in 2020 & 2021. Robyn is a member of the Board of Directors of Garden State Equality, NJ’s largest LGBTQ+ Civil Rights Organization. She is a graduate of Stonehill College and Villanova University School of Law. A frequent lecturer on diversity issues, she lives in New Jersey where she continues to practice law by day, and work on her next novel by night. Fortunately for us bibliophiles, she has a very boring social life.

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMWAPzZO1to[/embedyt]

June 25, 2021

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Robyn Gigl as the guest on Season 6, Episode 25 – A Behind-The-Scenes Peek!

Robyn Gigl, attorney and novelist, serves up a summer crime thriller with her novel By Way of Sorrow. We discuss a transgender main character, followed by the intersection of race, privilege, gender identity, and power on the justice system… and then get a behind-the-scenes peek into Robyn’s life!

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Bio:

Robyn Gigl is an attorney, speaker and activist who has been honored by the ACLU-NJ and the NJ Pride Network for her work on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. Robyn is a partner at Gluck Walrath, LLP in Freehold, NJ, where she handles complex commercial and employment litigation. She has been selected as a NJ Super Lawyer since 2010 and as one of the Top 50 Women Lawyers in NJ in 2020 & 2021. Robyn is a member of the Board of Directors of Garden State Equality, NJ’s largest LGBTQ+ Civil Rights Organization. She is a graduate of Stonehill College and Villanova University School of Law. A frequent lecturer on diversity issues, she lives in New Jersey where she continues to practice law by day, and work on her next novel by night. Fortunately for us bibliophiles, she has a very boring social life.

This Podcast episode is available on these channels (in order alphabetical):
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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-tZiIsG7Ws[/embedyt]

31Dec/21

Dharma Kelleher

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December 31, 2021

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Dharma Kelleher back as the guest on Season 6, Episode 52 – Trust Your Process!

Dharma Kelleher returns to share her latest work, Breakthrough: Overcoming Creative Self-Doubt, Writer’s Block, and Imposter Syndrome. We talk a bit about each of those aspects of being creative so that you can let go of fear and fall back in love with your process!

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Bio:

Dharma Kelleher writes gritty crime fiction about bounty hunters, bikers, and other badass women from a transgender/queer perspective . She is the author of the Jinx Ballou bounty hunter series & the Shea Stevens outlaw biker series.

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyu9K2fICL8[/embedyt]

August 6, 2021

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Dharma Kelleher as the guest on Season 6, Episode 31 – Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That!

Dharma Kelleher joins us to share the latest in her Jinx Ballou series, TERF Wars! We also discuss confronting transphobia and talk about trans tropes to avoid.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Bio:

Dharma Kelleher writes gritty crime fiction about bounty hunters, bikers, and other badass women from a transgender/queer perspective . She is the author of the Jinx Ballou bounty hunter series & the Shea Stevens outlaw biker series.

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOm13gE4gE[/embedyt]

23Jul/21

Marco Carocari

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July 23, 2021

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Marco Carocari as the guest on Season 6, Episode 29 – A Dare To Myself!

Marco Carocari joins the show with his first novel, Blackout. He had challenged himself to write a crime thriller with a gay protagonist that wasn’t about being gay, and he delivered a beach read that’s rich with characters you could expect to meet in life.

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Bio:

Marco Carocari grew up in Switzerland, where he, over the past fifty-odd years, worked in a hardware store, traveled the globe working for the airlines, and later as an internationally published photographer, and frequently jobbed as a waiter, hotel receptionist, or manager of a professional photo studio. In 2016 he swapped snow-capped mountains, lakes, and lush, green pastures for the charm of the dry California desert, where he lives with his husband. ‘Blackout’ is his first novel.

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16Jul/21

Jennifer Hanlon Wilde

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July 16, 2021

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Jennifer Hanlon Wilde as the guest on Season 6, Episode 28 – He Is Not A Plot Device!

Jennifer Hanlon Wilde shares her debut novel Finding the Vein – a crime read about murder at a summer camp for adopted kids. We discuss how important it is for children to be with other children with shared histories, and her inclusion of a trans character!

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Bio:

Jennifer Hanlon Wilde lives and writes in Oregon. She is a nurse practitioner and teacher who thinks of her work as opening a kind of map to study the well-worn places where storytelling intersects with health. She also enjoys real maps, traveling the world with her family, and, as a doctoral student at Washington State University, nerding out over global health data. A robust community theater and music scene, acres of orchards, and unparalleled local cider and beer have made it a joy to put down roots in the Columbia River Gorge, but being a Red Sox fan is in her DNA.

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22Jan/21

Jade Winters

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January 22, 2021

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Jade Winters as the guest on Episode 304 – Get Some Reins on Me!

Jade Winters jumps into a discussion on her journey from author to filmmaker. She shares her books, film, and pending project in a discussion about storytelling and funding.

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Bio:

While Jade Winters has been putting words together since she was a child, it wasn’t until 2010 that she became a serious writer. As a full-time author, she has published several novels in the lesbian fiction genre as well as a number of short stories.

Jade was born and educated in London where she studied journalism for three years at a London University. She now makes her home in Dorset in the South of England with her partner and furry companions Zorro, Buttons and Zeus.

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25Sep/20

Jude Tresswell

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September 4, 2020

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Jude Tresswell as the guest on Episode 287 – A Tiny Little Box I Hadn’t Ticked!

Jude Tresswell joins us to discuss her County Durham Quad Series, her Scar Ghyll Levels works, ACE representation from an ACE author, Ace love in a polyamorous relationship, found family, and other complications when writing about this part of the queer spectrum.

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  • Scar Ghyll Levels, a historical short story about two miners in an ace/non-ace relationship was always intended to be spoken. The video is complete with 200 photographs.

Bio:

Jude has written six novels featuring her crime-prone, all-male, North East England quad and she still doesn’t know what the characters look like. Hence the silhouettes on the books’ covers. She’s pretty sure that her Q+ labels are ace and aegosexual. She doesn’t even like to read about other women, let alone write about them—it’s too close to self-participation—but, although never present in body in the stories, she is often there in mind, especially when she writes about compromise. Being an ace who has been long married to a non-ace man, she reckons she’s an expert on relationships involving compromise.

She blogs regularly, has a YouTube channel (only one upload as Covid scuppered her plans), and is happy scrabbling in mining-spoil heaps, indulging in her love of geology and industrial history.

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03Dec/19

A Knife’s Edge by Eliot Parker

Review, , , , , , , , ,

To find out more about Eliot Parker’s latest work, check out Episode 219: Don’t Be Afraid; Be Proud!

This is Eliot Parker’s new novel featuring police sergeant Ronan Mccullough, who previously appeared in Fragile Brilliance. This story can be read as a standalone, although it follows on neatly from the previous book.

Bloody and gruesome in places, but not gratuitously so, this is a clever crime novel with definite noir undertones and lashings of corporate intrigue. Ronan is very believable as the cop trying to make sense of the murder of a mutual friend, but before that even happens, there is a spectacular crash which sets up the tone of the book, and introduces tension between Ronan and his nearest and dearest.

I struggled in places with the plotting, and felt the editing could have been tightened up a bit. At times my attention began to wander, which didn’t make it a book I felt the need to devour in one go. As plots and characters go, there was nothing really new here but it was a solid crime novel with some genuinely shocking moments, although I had clocked who was the real crime kingpin by the middle of the book. The writing was good and it felt as if the author knew what they were doing, even if the reader didn’t, which ultimately kept me reading until the end.

BLURB

Six months after a drug cartel infiltrated Charleston, Ronan McCullough continues to fight the drug war that plagues the city. His investigations are halted when the body of a mutual acquaintance, Sarah Gilmore, is found in the trunk of a burning car. In an investigation that takes him deep into the professional and personal life of the victim, McCullough discovers secrets lurking in her past, and a tangled web of personal and professional conflicts, suspicion, and betrayal. Was Sarah killed for those reasons or something larger? As Ronan seeks answers, his life and the lives of those closest to him are used as pawns in a deadly game that has no ending.

 

02Nov/18

The Rotten Rancher by Frank W. Butterfield

Review, , , , , , , ,

Frank W. Butterfield was recently a returning guest on WROTE. This prodigious writer has a new novel out, but to find out more about him and get links to all his works, check out Episode 187: My Gay Perry Mason

I rather like this engaging series, with lovable millionaire PI Nick Williams and his hunky sidekick, Carter. Set in the 1950’s, they battle prejudice and bigotry whilst people from all walks of life try to kill them. And despite this, they seem to maintain a surprisingly upbeat approach to life. Of course, money helps, which means Nick really doesn’t give a screw, but he’s a lovely, generous fellow for all that.

The sixteenth book in the series, The Rotten Rancher, reeks of 1950’s America. I was expecting cowboy boots and lariats, but it isn’t quite like that. I can almost smell the gasoline and leather of Nick and Carter’s massive and impractical soft-top as they cruise down Highway 1 to spend some time on the coast, in Nick’s father’s ultra-modern (for the time) cliff top home. You just know it won’t end well.

For a book with a twisty plot, I would have appreciated a bit less tell and and a bit more show. There’s lots of dialogue and some of it kind of gets in the way, causing me to backtrack to remind myself what just happened. That’s really my only niggle.

I can’t fault any of the characters. They were all drawn really well. For a book with a lot of characters, they all seemed relevant and all had a part to play. There was a good sense of atmosphere, sometimes really suspenseful, other times cringeworthy (when one of the characters was spouting their hate, I really wanted to slap them.) The story could also have worked well as a ghost story, and there was a bit of that at the end, which I found slightly confusing when it didn’t seem to go anywhere.

In the end, the book is popcorn entertainment with bite, not shying away from the serious issues of the time (and of now, sadly.) Yes, the plot and dialogue could have been tightened up, which would have given the action a bit more impact, but it was a fun read. Listen to Duayne Eddy when reading it to really get into the mood!

BLURB

Friday, November 11, 1955

It’s Veteran’s Day, and a gorgeous one at that. Parades of flying flags and grizzled old soldiers marching to the tunes of John Philip Souza are definitely in the works.

Meanwhile, Nick and Carter are heading south on Highway 1 for a relaxing week down in Big Sur, just south of beautiful Carmel-By-The-Sea. They’ll be staying at the home of one Dr. Parnell Williams, Nick’s father. It’s a modern sort of thing, made of wood and glass, and perched right on the cliff’s edge with dramatic views of the ocean and the incoming banks of fog.

But when the power goes out late at night and the newly-installed generator kicks on, it’s not long before Carter is dragging a bewildered Nick to the front door because, it turns out, someone intentionally disconnected the vent and the house quickly fills up with deadly carbon monoxide.

As they search for their would-be murderer, Nick and Carter quickly discover all sorts of secrets, hidden away among the verdant valleys and stands of Monterey pines. Secrets that go back twenty years, or more, and stories of wild times that would deeply shock the gawking tourists from Topeka and Des Moines, if they only knew.

Will Nick and Carter uncover the killer before he, or she, strikes again?

To find out, jump into the nearest convertible and follow the narrow, twisting highway that takes you through the land of towering, ancient redwoods and mountains that crash into the bright, blue ocean below.

It’s gonna be a wild ride!