Greetings, readers. This being the low, slow season, I’m going to try something different with the blog for a few weeks.
First, a little background: Back in the days when I lived in the USA, I wrote things other than web content. I wrote magazine articles, and I wrote books, on architecture, interior design, music, and travel.
I also wrote fiction, half a dozen murder mysteries featuring an amateur sleuth named Lucy Ripken. The first three books in the series were published in paperback, the other three online.
Here’s the basic premise of the series: Lucy Ripken is a freelance photographer and writer based in SoHo, in New York City, an adventurous, 30something woman, decidedly feminist but avowedly heterosexual as well. She’s tough, no pushover, and takes no bullshit in either personal or professional relationships. In the first two books, called Murder on Naked Beach and Pre-Colombian Jive (alternative title Mexican Booty) she gets involved in some nefarious doings, first in Jamaica and then in the Yucatan Peninsula on the other side of Mexico.
In the third book, the main part of the action takes place in Sayulita, and so it is this third book that we are going to serialize. The book is called X DAMES. This next paragraph is straight from the back cover of the paperback edition of the book.
For New York-based freelance writer and photographer Lucy Ripken, every month brings another financial adventure, but it all boils down to one challenge: how to make ends meet. In X Dames, Lucy gets lucky when an old friend, Teresa MacDonald, calls with a seemingly unbeatable offer to work in LA on a new reality TV show—Called X Dames—featuring a shifting cast of curvaceous female athletes competing in extreme sports.
Lucy jumps at the chance, makes a move to Southern California, and soon finds herself en route to Mexico’s Pacific coast, to the small but booming resort town of Sayulita, the location for the show’s premier event: a women’s surfing contest. Giant surf, real estate shenanigans, and a mysterious death by drowning combine to transform the reality show into a real-time investigation of murder in the high waves.
With video cameras recording everything for the upcoming premiere of X Dames, Lucy and her pals soon find themselves deeply enmeshed in uncovering a conspiracy involving crooked real estate dealers, corrupt politicians, and an old nemesis returning from one of Lucy’s earlier adventures.
The original paperback book was written maybe ten years ago. In the years since, Sayulita has changed, but not that much. As we begin, Lucy, her good friend Teresa MacDonald, and Marcia Hobgood are flying into Puerto Vallarta. Marcia, the daughter of one of Lucy’s oldest friends is young, beautiful, hip, a stoner, an artist, and a great surfer. Lucy has arranged for her to compete in the X Dames.
