Guest Blogger: Kim Smith, Author of Buried Angel

Shannon Wallace is finding trouble in the most bizarre places these days, but not as bizarre as the ones her sidekick Dwayne Brown is finding. When his friend, Bubba, is found stuffed in a cooler in his flower shop, the hunt is on to find his killer.

Could it be Bubba’s sister who is now his heir, or maybe one of the flower shop guys who worked with Bubba? You can be sure the dreadful duo of Shannon and Dwayne won’t rest until they have helped South Lake’s police department, and the Hispanic hottie investigator, Sal Ramirez, find his man. Or was that woman?

Inspiration Comes From the Strangest Places

by Kim Smith

It’s interesting to note that when I wrote Buried Angel, I had no idea that some of it would be situated in a cemetery, the least popular place on earth for this author. Cemeteries in the south are pretty cool places, however, and worth noting that they are sometimes set up as historical landmarks due to the famous persons buried in them.

South Lake, Mississippi is a fictional place. I made it up from knowledge of a couple of places near where I live. Likewise, Scott’s Funeral Home and Cemetery is a fictional place from several similar places nearby.

I have used the small cemetery on the corner of two really busy streets, the funeral home in the middle of a small town, the cemetery where my parents are buried, and the funeral home where my mother-in-law was memorialized.

The catalyst that sent me off to write this book was when I was on the way to a doctor’s appointment and ended up behind a hearse. The thing that came to my mind was, why on earth do they put curtains in a hearse? They doll them all up and make them look pretty. For what purpose? It isn’t like the passengers care!

This led to Shannon Wallace and how she would ask that very question and how she would react if she had to work in a cemetery. Followed closely by how Dwayne would react to the exact same thing. As we all know, Dwayne Brown would rather die than be near the dead!

The problem with this scenario was, I had a lot of experience being the bereaved and none being the behind-the-scenes person in such a situation.

So what do you do?

Invent!

This is the neat thing about being a writer. You do not have to have a specific place to write about. Use what you already know. What your memories are about a place or places and embellish on them.

Scott’s cemetery is a very busy place in the book. A lot happens there and my poor characters are subjected to a lot of things there that I pray have never happened in any cemetery or funeral home.

In fact, as research for the book, I made sure that enough of the info was accurate so that the invented parts would seem real.

Believe me, no humans, dead or alive, were injured in the making of this book!

Kim Smith is the author of the zany, Shannon Wallace cozy mystery series available now from Red Rose Publishing. You can visit Kim’s website at http://www.kimsmithauthor.com/.

This guest post first appeared at The Book Connection.

Guest Blogger: Kim Smith, Author of Avenging Angel

Today's guest blogger is Kim Smith author of Avenging Angel: A Shannon Wallace Mystery: Book 1

Shannon Wallace is having a bad hair week.

She’s been ditched by her job, dumped by her boyfriend, and implicated in his murder.

When she finds out her very private video collection is missing from the crime scene, it is all out war to find the disks before the cops do. The problem is, the killer has them. And he’s watched them.

Now Shannon’s at the top of his most wanted list.

In this post, one of the potential suspects is interrogating Shannon Wallace to try and get into her head and see what makes her tick:

In the interrogation room waiting area, I watched as they brought in a sexy brunette wearing cut-off shorts and a Purple Wave tee shirt. She looked around at all of us and the questions were evident in her eyes.

“What’s with you?” I asked her. I was pretty sure she was a mistake. The guy had been stabbed. Not a murder of choice for a woman. “You don’t look like you’d kill a flea.”

She made a face. “Gee thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Another fellow, a muscular African American man, nodded at me. “Yeah, they reaching now, ain’t they? I mean she obviously ain’t guilty of murder.”

“You the man’s woman or what?” I asked, conversationally.

She rearranged her butt on the hard plastic chair. “Or what.”

I kept looking at her, waiting for her to answer why she was brought in. She dropped her gaze to the dirty concrete floor.

“I get it. You got caught hanging out around the apartment, and the cops decided to go hard on you.” She was probably the dead dude’s neighbor.

This brought her head up and her eyes flashed like twin blue sapphires. “Oh, you’re good, yes indeed. You think you know everything, but you don’t know squat.”

I couldn’t imagine what had triggered this reaction but determined to find out. “You must be the nosy neighbor caught in the act of checking out the traffic going in and out and the cops got ticked at you.”

She shrugged. “Think what you like.”

Oh yeah. I had finally found the story. “What? You’re a reporter? You stick a mike in the wrong mug?”

She laughed derisively. “Whatever.”

She looked like she might unload some details. I pushed a little harder. “It’s okay, lady. We’re not telling anyone your secrets. For all you know we’re the killers here. Are you a little scared?”

“Not even a little,” she said. I could tell by the way she avoided looking me in the eye that she was lying. Not that the man and me looked very deadly. Not that she would know that.

“So? What got you in here?” I lifted my cuffed hands and waved at the room.

Resolving to admit to the guilty part, she said, “I sort of let myself into the apartment and ran smack into a cop. Apparently, they don’t take to strange people storming onto their crime scenes. “

My pal and I hooted with laughter, maybe a little too long because she frowned. The door to the inner room where police interrogators waited opened and the grumpy Hispanic detective glared out at us. “Wallace, get your ass in here.”

She took a deep breath and hauled up out of the chair. “If either of y’all is the killer, I don’t want to know. But trust me, I have a photographic memory and I will check out the wanted posters before I leave here to see if you are there. See ya in the funny papers,” she said.

Kim Smith was born in Memphis Tennessee, the youngest of four children. After a short stint in a Northwest Mississippi junior college, during the era of John Grisham’s rise as a lawyer, she gave up educational pursuits to marry and begin family life.

After the birth of her two children, she gave up working outside the home for the more important domestic duties of wife and mother. During those years, she began thinking of stories to entertain herself and pass the time. Before long she started telling her husband about her stories and he assured her she could write a book if she really wanted to. She put the idea away once she landed a job as a network administrator for a small corporation, and together the Smith’s started their own video production company.

Writing was a dream, hidden but not forgotten, and soon Kim began to talk again of trying her hand at it. She played with words, and wrote several poems, one of which was picked up for an anthology.

When she decided to try out her hand at mystery writing, she discovered her true love and niche in the writing journey. She has since had four short stories, and her first mystery novel accepted for publication.

Kim is a member of Sisters in Crime, and EPIC. She still lives in the Mid South region of the United States and is currently working on her second book in the mystery series.

You can visit her website at http://www.kimsmithauthor.com/.

This guest post first appeared at The Book Connection.