Spitfires Are UsAvery Flynn
There are some book heroines who I love and admire. They’re strong and smart and more than a little intimidating. I’m talking about you Anita Blake, who is completely kick ass and I love but who would scare the crap out of me if we met in real life.
Then, there are those heroines who I want to sit down with at the bar because I know I’m going to laugh, commiserate and snark the night away. This is where Bridget Jones and Sookie Stackhouse come into play.
So when I was crafting Claire Layton, my heroine in Up a Dry Creek, I knew I wanted the second kind of heroine. Claire reminds me a lot of a friend I had in college who was a complete spitfire, the first up for karaoke and who always had your back. Man, that girl made many a Friday night into an event. But, back to the fictional Claire.
If Claire Layton was an animal, she’d be a red-headed Chihuahua. Small, feisty, not afraid to take on the big dogs and liable to get in way over her head. After finding her boyfriend in bed with her best friend, she swears she’ll never let another man have the power to break her heart again. Determined to find a new life for herself, she puts her business degree to good use and fulfills a childhood dream by starting The Harvest Bistro, in her rural hometown of Dry Creek, Nebraska. After she discovers a customer dead in a dumpster, the killer demands she find the victim’s phone and flash drive or face fatal consequences.
Enter the ying to her yang: Jake Warrick, a cocky and mind-numbingly hot private investigator, becomes Claire’s unlikely ally in the search. Here’s Jake’s first appraisal of Claire.
“She'd walked in with flames shooting out the ends of her auburn hair, her chocolate-brown eyes blazing. Dressed in a dark purple dress that wrapped around her tight body, highlighting her large breasts, his body responded to the fierce pixie. Strongly. He couldn’t stop from stoking her inferno. Her heat had spread to him and turned any thought of his mission to ash. A more cautious man, his father would say a smarter man, would have handled her gently. But he hadn’t been able to do that. He’d had to push to see how hot she could burn. Pretty damn hot.”
Cue the fireworks. Jake just wants to solve the case and get out of this hick town, but the diminutive and curvaceous Claire turns his plan upside down as they uncover a more complex crime than they ever imagined. The two bicker and banter like Tracy and Hepburn caught in a whirlwind of intense sexual attraction as they try to find the killer before it’s too late.
Yep, Claire is totally my kind of girl: fierce, loyal, smart and funny. I hope after reading Up a Dry Creek, you’ll want to sit down and have a beer with her, too.
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I want to thank Avery for taking the time to write that great guest post for us! And be sure to look for my review of "Up a Dry Creek" in the future!
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Happy Reading!
~!~ Amanda ~!~
My contest for two copies of "Reality Stinks" by Ashlynn Monroe ended Thursday night, and I was supposed to post the winners Friday morning, but I have been extremely sick this weekend, and I'm just now beginning to feel much better. My sincerest apologies to the winners and to Ashlynn for putting this off so long!