Okay, there's a ton in this newsletter, so I'll give you a table of contents (oh my gosh, I think this means I have a problem...I promise not to go too nuts in the future) in case you want to jump to certain parts.

1. From Gunpowder Available
2. A Thank You recipe from me and Mom
3. Books or book fairs with potential books
4. First 2 chapters of From Gunpowder if you're still on the fence and want to try it out.

1.

From Gunpowder is now available! Grab a copy if you're interested and haven't already. And if you're not quite sure, I'll be including the first chapter below for your enjoyment. You'll find it at the VERY END of this email (just about the links for my socials).

Also, if you enjoy reading review copies, I've got one available with Story Origin. You can get the link for that HERE. There's no obligation to review if you read, though it's certainly always appreciated--at least if you liked the book:).

2.

Secondly, I just wanted to thank you all for your support this month. As you probably know by now, for the month of May, 10% of all my profits and all the proceeds from Hugging Death: Essays on Motherhood and Saying Goodbye will go to Huntsman Cancer Institute. I've done this for a couple years in a row now and plan to do it every year. This year has been the best yet, and I'm excited to make the donation to Huntsman, and, well, THANK YOU!

To thank you properly, I thought I'd include one of Mom's favorite recipes (like, she could eat this until she felt sick and we talked about it the last week of her life, reminiscing about this dessert with her). It's perfect for summer when you want a cool dessert or don't want to heat up the house baking. It's, uh, not perfect for losing weight.

Cookies and Cream (An Icebox Cake)

Serves: Um, my family of 6 (but it should serve more; it really should; we have issues)

Prep time: 15 minutes

Fridge time: 24 hours

1 box Nabisco Chocolate Wafers

1 pint cream

3/4 C sugar

2 tsp vanilla

Beginning by whipping your cream. Pour it in a bowl and blend it until soft peaks form. When they do, add the sugar and vanilla. Whip or beat until firmer peaks form.

Put a blob of it on the bottom of a salad bowl and spread that around. Make one layer of cookies, breaking some if you need to so they don't overlap. Add more whipped cream and spread. Add another layer of cookies. Repeat until you top it off with a thin layer of whipped cream.

Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours or until the cookies are perfectly soft.

This recipe requires Nabisco chocolate wafers. Can you use Oreos or chocolate graham crackers or some other chocolate cookies? Well, yes, but it won't be as transcendent--not even close. So just look for those pesky, hard-to-find Nabisco chocolate wafers (they're often on the ice cream aisle or a specialty cookie aisle or they can be found at Christmastime, or you can order them off Amazon, though it's pricier). And I know that's a pain, but this is really best with these particular cookies.

3.

And if icebox cake isn't enough, and you need something that isn't mine to read, here are some suggestions.

Featured Books and Book Fairs (My normal disclaimer: I haven't read these, but thought they looked fun!)

BOOK FAIR

Sweet and Clean Romances (May 30th-June 30th)

BOOKS

Vacation in Paradise by Megan Jacobs ($.99)

A romantic mystery...

Just as she’s easing into her role as official photographer for a prestigious freediving event, Abigail unwittingly witnesses an incident that reveals there’s a lot more than friendly rivalry between the top competitors

The Sweetest Surprise by Sophie Sweet ($.99 or free on Kindle Unlimited)

From the author: The Sweetest Surprise is a bite-sized small town insta-love romance about about two single parents getting surprised by love at first sight during the Thanksgiving season. No cheating, no cliffhangers, and only fade-to-black intimacy awaits. HEA guaranteed!

Return to Nantucket, Book 1 by Annie Diamond ($.99 or free on Kindle Unlimited)

A devastating secret. Heartbreak, lies and unfulfilled lives. Will the family come together or fragment beyond repair?

4.

Excerpt From Gunpowder:

Chapter 1:

 

           I never forget a name. Or a voice. In fact, I’ll remember the color of your nails when you put the clipboard down, the shape of your knuckles, the turn of your ring, the freckles along your arm.

           A bizarre talent that didn’t have much room for growth in the dentist’s office where I used to work (and I thank my stars every day that I wasn’t the dentist herself because—all those mouths—I never would have forgotten them; and some of them, well, you kind of want to forget).

           As for my name. Macie. Macie Greene.

Nice to meet you.

           Maybe I would have worked in that dentist’s office forever, remembering names and filing X-rays, if my boss, Rachel, who also became my best friend, hadn’t had to go and die. After that, it didn’t take long for me to quit—the whole place just felt so empty. I drifted from one office to another, looking for a place where I fit just right. Which started to feel like nowhere.

And then my husband left too. He didn’t die, in case that was unclear. He went to find himself. Because himself was not, apparently, in the life and house we’d been trying to build together for the past ten years.

After that, I got a call. A little spot with the police department had opened up. Receptionist. Same thing I’d been doing, only with uglier nails and dirtier knuckles now handing back the clipboard.

           A temp job. Rachel’s sister-in-law, Kate—she was having a baby, her fourth or fifth—needed someone to fill in at the police station. And, well, I needed a spot to fill. Somewhere, anywhere. With my dead friend, and dead marriage, and dead hopes of ever having a family. After all, I was pushing forty. Short, bobbed hair, a little round in the way a lot of guys didn’t trip over themselves to get a piece of. That was okay, because after my marriage went up in flames, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be the piece guys went for anyway.

           What I really wanted was to drown in my work—a thing that was, that is, difficult to do when I’m working as a temp secretary and I know the normal gal will be back in a couple months to reclaim her job.

I do my best to drown in it anyway. My paperwork is always done, perfectly filed. I even make a new organizational system for the active cases on the computer. It isn’t enough. I still have moments without work to do, moments when too many thoughts, too many memories crowd my brain. In order to push them out, I start sketching some of the hands that come across my desk.

           From the chipped red fingernails (hooker most likely) to the bruised purple middle finger (no idea) to the calloused fingertips (guitar player) to the knuckles lined in oil and grime (machinist) to the brown, slender fingers of Officer Brandt to the stubby, beefy paws of Sergeant Black to impeccably clean nails of Chief Sanders. And then one man. Broad, square nails. Almost like a kid had drawn them up in geometry class. Normally manicured, but today that fat pinkie finger has a sliver of brown under one nail. Dirt maybe, but probably not. Not here. Not today.

           Question is, was it his blood or somebody else’s?

           Not my job to answer. But in my break I draw that hand, ignoring the sandwich that sits beside me, ignoring the bustle and sound around me, ignoring the laughing and curses that are the police department—all my focus on the arc of that pinkie, that pinkie that I want to get just right. A voice rumbles behind me and I half jump out of my chair, stabbing the lower half of one of the knuckles I’m drawing in the process.

           “Ms. Greene,” the chief bellows like I’m not half a foot away.

           “Sir?”

           He leans then, bald head tipping forward, the only hairs in sight a few that straggle from his ears. “I’d like a word with you. In my office.”

           He doesn’t snap his fingers, but it has that vibe. I tuck the notebook in my bag and trudge after him.

           By the time I get to his office, he’s already seated and looking all zen as though he wasn’t hovering over me just two minutes ago.

           “Sir?” I repeat.

           “Didn’t realize you were an artist.”

           I wasn’t really and say so.

           “Then what, exactly, do you call that drawing in your bag?”

            Boredom. But I don’t say that. “Just a sketch, sir.” And then I wonder—maybe I’m not allowed to draw the clientele that pour through the doors of this department. “Am I in trouble?”

           The chief doesn’t answer. “Drawn from memory?” he asks.

           “Yeah, I—”

           “And with precision.”

           “My brain kinda does things with precision,” I reply.

           He nods.

           I’m still not sure if I’m in trouble or not.

           “What else does your brain do?” he asks.

           I look at the walls, his desk clear of everything except one of those huge daily calendars. “I guess it remembers.”

           “And what,” he says, leaning forward, hands steepled in a way that definitely makes me feel like I’m in trouble, “does it remember?”

           “Names mostly,” I say. “And the voices that go with them. Faces sometimes. And—” I point to my bag. “—hands obviously. Stuff like that.”

           He leans back, the steeple of his fingers grazing his chin, like the tip of a gun he’s forgotten to set aside.

           “Name them,” he says.

           “Who?” I ask.

           “Each person who’s crossed your desk today.”

           That’s an easy one. Thursdays are always slow. The lady who smelled like a poodle and sounded like one too with that high, barking cough. Too many nights on the street. Red fingernails. Wine and blood. Janine Jakovsky. The other woman who wasn’t a woman at all. Patsy (just Patsy), she called herself, well maybe himself, since he only does drag a few nights a week. A hobbyist. He was brought in drunk and in full costume. Hot pink everywhere—nails, lips, cheeks, dress, shoes. Not an accent piece in the whole getup. Time to up the game and get a blue purse or belt or boots or something (Thinks the dowdy lady whose husband left her. Maybe I should take the fashion advice, not give it.) Patsy’s voice tipped into the stratosphere until he mumbled under his breath (which he did a lot). Then it was a rumbling, hissing sound, a leak from a gas stove.

           Two more men. Bill Menard and Tyler Smithson. Plain enough. T-shirts, jeans, baritones. Though one sang more while the other gurgled like he’d had a cold for ten years. One here to pick up a daughter; the other, a son.

           And then, bloody pinkie—the inspiration for my staggering work of artistic genius, drawn out on a notebook with lined paper. Classy, right? Just like me. Anyway, his name was Clarence Turone, and that was all of them.

           The room goes quiet after that. Seven clicks of the second hand on the clock.

           “You’re hired,” he says, both hands tapping the desk, just before the eighth second strikes.

           “With all due respect, sir, I already am. Hired, I mean.”

           “Not like this you’re not.” And then the smile. Almost like an eel with his thick, dark lips. But only if eels could be really happy and kind of sweet.

           “Victoria,” he says, clicking a button on his phone. “Send a message to Tad. He’s getting an assistant.”

 

Chapter 2:

 

           The body is covered, scene taped off. Everything in order and about to be shuffled and filed away. The house looks like crap. Not to speak ill of the dead or anything, but dude had about forty-seven cats and not a litter box in sight. And it kind of shows. Beneath the dresser, a new litter of kittens was mewing.

           Tad didn’t notice any of this. Or maybe he noticed all of it. It was hard to tell. His eyes flit over the scene with a vacant look, his fingers tapping soundlessly around the room, touching everything. A job that I don’t envy.

           You’ve seen Psych maybe. Or Monk. Hyper observant, loveable weirdos, working for the cops—assigned the job to see all the things the police don’t see. Tad was like that. With one crucial difference.

           He can’t see a thing. And so he touches and listens and smells. While I watch. The new girl, sent to be his eyes.

           He isn’t too happy about it.

           He grunts something to me about the time and circumstances of the death, and I look at the body under the sheet. 

           Which is, to say the least, a step up in my career. From temp receptionist to almost detective. Working with a man who wears freaking cufflinks to a crime scene. I glance sideways at the fitted suit, the shoes polished till you can see the lights reflect in them. Me, I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt, my hair in a super short half pony tail that is a little crooked on the top of my head. As basic as you can get. Per my usual. But seriously, there’s blood on the floor. I didn’t realize that made for a black tie event.

           “So what are we looking for?” I ask.

           “You’re looking,” he replies. Which almost makes me laugh, but also annoys me, because he knows what I mean.

           “Okay,” I say. “What am I looking for? And you, sniffing for, or whatever?”

           He doesn’t turn to me. Normally I’d say that that was just a thing blind guys didn’t do, but in this case it was definitely a slight.

           “I’m sniffing for things the seeing miss,” he says. “So I don’t know what you’re looking for.”

           I rifle through a few papers on the desk. I wear gloves. Tad has special permission not to. Bills, still in their envelopes, a grimy takeout menu along with a napkin, folded and unused.

           “Bunch of bills he hasn’t paid,” I say.

           “Yeah, cops already know he was hopelessly in debt. They don’t think this was about that.”

           I look at the sheet-covered body.

           Then what is it about, I wonder. I have to remind myself that I’m not really a detective. Just a used-to-be-temp with a photographic memory, a steady sketching hand, and a good ear. I look around at the scene, allow the details to blur, and listen. A few of the cats mew. Several kittens are under the bed. Outside a squirrel chatters. One of the cops slurps his coffee. And then the phone rings.

           Tad and I both jump. The cop looks up as the answering machine picks up. “Didn’t even know those things still existed,” he says.

It is odd.

“Hey,” a slightly accented voice says on the machine. High tenor or low alto—not clearly male or female. “Missed you last night. Call me.”

“Well, someone’s gonna be disappointed,” the junior officer says, trying to coax the kittens out with a bit of bagel housing a chunk of cream cheese. A tiny pink tongue laps out at it, followed by a paw. Disgusting house aside, it’s pretty cute.

“Did he not have a cell phone?” Tad asks.

“He did,” the senior officer responds.

“Hmm,” Tad says and the whole room seems to get it, though I don’t.

“So,” the senior cop says. “The home number was likely for someone he didn’t want to be able to follow him around, someone he didn’t want to contact him anywhere else. Someone he probably just wanted to meet at the apartment.”

“Accent, Thai,” Tad says. “Long time in the U.S. or maybe even second generation, considering how light it was.”

“Girl or guy?” one of the cops asks.

“Unclear,” Tad answers, tipping an ear unconsciously toward the voicemail machine, red light now flashing.

Before I can pick up the takeout menu, Kitten Cop is there, fishing the menu out of the stack. “We can run it for DNA. See what happens.”

Guess my eyes aren’t super necessary after all.

“Anyone hungry?” the senior cop asks, dialing the number.

I barely dodge a cat turd and realize I’m definitely not hungry. But the guys all put in an order. “You gonna recognize that voice?” the head cop asks.

“Likely,” Tad says.

The cop flips it to speaker.

A kitten weaves around my leg. I reach down and pet it.

The tenor-alto voice answers, “Hello, Thai Kitchen. How can I help you?”

Tad nods. “That’s the one.”

But it isn’t. I can tell from the clipped consonants at the end of the words; they’re not quite the same. Similar. Almost. Maybe a sibling or parent.

“No,” I say as the cat settles for a nap against my shoe.

Tad turns to me, turns on me—the girl who was supposed to be the eyes. He can’t see me, not really, but in his cheekbones and the purse of his lips, I get the idea that he’s staring daggers anyway.

 

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