I watched a lot of episodes of Murder, She Wrote with my mom when I was growing up. In case you weren’t a fan…(are there non-fans out there?)…the show is about a mystery writer who lives in Cabot Cove, Maine, and solves crimes on the side. For the record, I want to write crime and solve it in my spare time. That is the dream.
The joke of the show was that it took place in a lovely small town and about 500 people died there during the run of the show. If this happened in real life, the FBI would be all over the area and we’d have nonstop documentaries about the place. But, it’s fiction so it worked.
When my editor asked if I’d ever thought about writing a romantic suspense series set in a small town, I thought about Murder, She Wrote. I also thought about how cool it would be if the small town were actually an isolated island. And then there was my love for the Pacific Northwest. Combine all those things and the fictional Whitaker Island—the setting for Her Other Secret—was born.
Whitaker is the place people move to when they want to start over or hide from their pasts. The people are a bit…let’s use the word “quirky”. It’s the perfect home for Tessa, who is on the run from a scandal, and Hanson, the handyman who is more than he seems. They find each. The only problem is that dead body no one expected to find…