Good News!

Guess which one is Mom's ride?

Abby Lab here:

Mom's  Third Book "Small Town Roads", has been picked up by a very large and well-known Christian Publishing House. She still has some polishing work to do with her editor but she has met her account rep, book sales rep, and marketing lady, and the final manuscript should be to them soon. She had to do some homework on the small town police thing as she's a Fed in a huge city but with her experience having a Mom that was a Deputy sheriff she had a lot of fun with it.

Unlike her first two books, printed through a small publisher with no placement in brick and mortar book stores due to the publishing cost, it's going to get a lot more attention, marketing and such, being available to 71,000 bookstores and libraries and not just online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and it will be featured at a number of large Christian trade shows.

Having two books that both went to #1 at Amazon, with The Book of Barkley being a featured Indie author in Kirkus Review Magazine as well as winning a major International Literary award, was a big help in pitching it to them. Mom says she can't automatically expect this one will do that well, lightning may not strike thrice, but I hope that her friends will enjoy the story, and the message. (And she really hopes the Chicago library folks that had her over for a big book club event with lots of wine will ask her back!)  But when she finished it, she said the practice of the first two really helped her make this one deeper and richer, while still including the zany humor that adds humanity to a deep rooted message.

Storyline: Rachel Raines is orphaned after putting off college to care for ailing parents. Finally she's off to a major city university and the fun loving, young party girl has better things to do then go to church, even if a good student. She inherits her only relative's tiny home in a small town in the middle of nowhere a few months after graduation. She wants to stay in the city, but that house is the only place she has any memories of her family, her childhood home sold to pay for medical bills, burials, and her continued education.

Armed with a Criminal Justice degree and top grades from a prestigious university that should have taken her to the FBI, she finds her self as a rookie patrol officer in a town that has no coffee baristas, no single men her age and the only local restaurant has a giant plastic cow on the roof and scrapple is probably the "soup of the day". Well, there was one single man, but he broke their date after she arrested him.

But small town doesn't always mean safe and she's caught up in a unexpected meth lab bust, and in one moment of violence, her whole life changes, as does her look at her future and her faith.

It will be different then my previous books, fiction and obviously, a Christian theme. a hopeful and gentle  one, stressing the values of self reliance, working together as neighbors, and commitment to family and faith as we were raised. The main characters have firearms, faults, and the Constitution on their wall, and I hope the ride won't be too dull.

Lord willing, it should be published before Christmas.

Mom's dad, at 96 is not doing real well, so she's going to print a copy and put it in a binder and send it to him next week but he was very proud at the news.