SAY HELLO TO MARILYN (F.M.) MEREDITH

Welcome to Marilyn Meredith,
Our Virtual Book Tour Guest Blogger Today,



Author Profile:
The author of over 20 published books, besides the Rocky Bluff P D series, Marilyn Meredith’s mysteries include the award winning Deputy Crabtree series. She writes in other genres as well such as Christian horror and historical family sagas.

She was an instructor for Writers Digest School for over 10 years and served as an instructor at the Maui Writer's Retreat, and serves as a judge for many writing contests.

Marilyn is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, the Public Safety Writers’ Association, and EPIC, and has been a featured speaker and been on panels at mystery conferences and groups all over the country. She's spoken at schools, libraries, service and social organizations and writers organizations.

On the personal side, Marilyn has been married for over 55 years to the sailor she met on a blind date. They raised five children and enjoy spending time with their 19 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.

WHAT SMELL OF DEATH IS ABOUT:

A missing child, strange burglaries and the inexplicable murder of a mother and her daughter disrupt the peaceful beach community of Rocky Bluff, CA. Officer Stacey Wilbur, first on the scene of both murders, assists Detective Doug Milligan with the investigation and finds herself breaking her long-standing rule to never date anyone who rocks for Rocky Bluff P.D.

HERE'S WHAT MARILYN HAS TO SAY TO US TODAY:
How privileged I feel to be joining such great authors!

I read some of the posts and realized that down deep we all have a lot in common—the need to add more details to the drafts of our works-in-progress and to exercise, to name a couple.

Today, I’d like to give you and your readers some background on how I came to write the Rocky Bluff P.D. series, Smell of Death in particular, and why I’m using F. M. Meredith as a pseudonym.

First about the pseudonym. When I wrote the first book in the series, Final Respects, I realized that a great deal of the story was told from a male point-of-view. In an effort to interest male readers, I decided if I used a non-gender name. Unfortunately, the publisher didn’t have a clue what I wanted and put my photo on the back of the book, ruining my plan. However, I’ve continued using the name for the rest of the books in the series. It’s kind of fun to autograph books with F. M. Meredith a.k.a. Marilyn Meredith.

The first home we owned we only had to pay $100 down. This was in the ‘60s. Consequently, all of our neighbors were people with low paying jobs: sailors (my husband was career Navy), firemen and police officers. We partied with the men and their wives, our children played and went to school together and I socialized with the wives. I had a first-hand view of how the job affected the police officers’ families and the family crisis affected them on the job. At the time, I had no intentions of writing about them.

Later on, my daughter married a young man who became a police officer. She didn’t like hearing his stories, but I did. He’d come off his graveyard shift and come to my house for coffee and I listened intently. Eventually I went on a ride-along with him. I also went on ride-alongs with other officers. I sat in on the change of the shift and when the officers learned I was a writer, they began telling stories. Many of these stories have ended up in my books.

Many of the same characters appear in each book, though different ones are spotlighted. In the latest, Smell of Death, Officer Stacey Wilbur and Detective Doug Milligan are the heroine and hero. The peace of the beach community of Rocky Bluff is disrupted by a missing child, a stalker of a teenager, strange home burglaries, and two murders. This series is as much about the Rocky Bluff P.D., the officers and their personal lives, as the solving of crimes.

Smell of Death can be purchased from my website or Amazon.com

Thank you for your time.

F.M. Meredith a.k.a. Marilyn Meredith

Visit me at http://fictionforyou.com