About The Book
The Fourth of July isn't going at all as Kim Claypoole expected. It starts with a bang, including a run-in with a dead body, and ends with her juvenile delinquent nephew, Little Bucky, disappearing from her double-wide trailer on a souped up Suzuki.
When Little Bucky fails to return and no one seems concerned but Claypoole, she sets out to find her wayward nephew. Nothing ever goes easy for Claypoole, and her investigation soon involves several trips to Krispy Kreme, a visit to Jesus Our Savior Bible Camp and some nasty encounters with a series of backwoods characters, including hillbilly counterfeiters and a major league Smoky Mountain dope dealer. In the midst of this chaos and while Claypoole is desperately trying to keep a rocky romance on track, her kooky mother and redneck cousin Alonzo show up for a surprise visit. Relatives, murder and love—all ingredients in a recipe for Deep Trouble.
Links to Purchase
Book Excerpt
It was almost near high noon on the Fourth of July and already as hot and humid as east Tennessee gets. I’d just turned the air conditioner to frigid and was contemplating going back to bed when a tall intruder pushed open the back door and let it bang against the wall.
“Let the games begin,” he fairly shouted. My restaurant partner and sometimes best friend Ted Weber, all six feet four of him, stood in my doublewide trailer’s kitchen. He was wearing purple plastic flip-flops, cut-off jeans and a tank top that read, ‘Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me.’ His thinning hair was slicked back like he’d just gotten out of the shower.
“Ever hear of knocking?” So much for going back to bed. “We’re way past formalities, Claypoole,” Ted said, helping himself to a bottle of Bud from the fridge. “How do you live like this, girl?” Ted made a sweeping gesture at my sink full of unwashed dishes.
“Easy for you to say,” I said, slouching down onto the couch. Ted lived year-round at the Mountaineer Motel in Pigeon Forge with maid service, fresh towels and those little packets of coffee provided daily. That is, when Dorie wasn’t pissed off at him. Dorie was the head housekeeper and she and Ted had a thing going on for years. They seemed to gravitate to one another when either ofthem had a lull in their sex lives. “You going to bring me a beer or what?”
“That’s the spirit,” Ted said, fetching another Bud.
Ted flopped down next to me on the couch and handed me the sweaty beer bottle. He picked up a motorcycle magazine from the coffee table and absently thumbed through it. Lately, I’d been fantasizing about buying a bike, specifically, a brand new Ducati Streetfighter. However, no one in their right mind should spend that kind of money on a toy.
“I had one of these once,” Ted said, pointing out a picture of a vintage Honda.
“Dumped it on a hairpin turn. Burned the skin right off my ass. Lucky I didn’t end up as an organ donor.” Ted tossed down the magazine. “Hey, I picked up fried chicken on the way over. I’m ready to roll when you are.”
I had almost accidentally on purpose forgotten that Ted and I had talked about going tubing on the Fourth of July. I’d been entertaining the notion of other holiday activities like hanging around in my air-conditioned doublewide and working out with my TV remote until I exhausted myself and fell asleep on the couch.
December Giveaway
About The Author
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| Jean Erhardt |
I was raised in the small rural town of Amelia, Ohio, about twenty five miles out of Cincinnati. My younger brother and sister and I had a pony, a horse, many great dogs and a couple of motorcycles. We raised a lot of hell. My father served in The Big One at 17 and, after riding a motorcycle around Europe, became a lawyer and later a judge. My mother worked as a homemaker and nurse, a skill she had to use a lot with all of the injuries my siblings and I subjected ourselves and one another to.
I wrote my first mystery story when I was in fourth grade. It was about a kid a lot like me who heard strange noises coming from the attic and became convinced that the attic was haunted. Eventually, the mystery was solved when she investigated and found a squirrel eating nuts in a dark corner. It wasn't a terribly exciting conclusion, but my teacher gave me an A anyway.
As a teenager I worked at a lot of different jobs. I worked at a gift shop in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which is a frequent locale in my books. I was a swimming instructor and a lifeguard where my primary goal was to never get wet. I did a stint in a stuffed animal gift shop at the Kings Island amusement park where I actually sort of met the Partridge Family when they shot an episode there. After
graduating from high school, I went on to attend Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee, a stone's throw from the Great Smoky Mountains. There was some more hell raising at college and I made some very good friends and occasionally we have our own private reunions.
In high school and college I played basketball and I graduated from Maryville College with a degree in Phys Ed. I went on to teach at Amelia Junior High, the same junior high that I had attended. There was something a little weird about passing by my old school locker every day when I walked down the hall as a teacher. Plus, some of the teachers I'd had back when I was in junior high were
still working when I started to teach. Some of them had been none too fond of me as a student and I don't think they were much fonder of me as a teacher! I coached the girls' basketball and volleyball teams which was the best part of my job.
In my late 20's I moved to the West Coast to get a broader perspective on life or something like that. I ended up working in retail security, or loss prevention, as it is now known, at an upscale Northwest retailer. I kept getting promoted and with each promotion, the job became less and less fun. It was a lot more fun catching shoplifters than sitting in endless meetings and crunching budgets. After ten years of that, I quit to try my hand at some serious writing. I wrote two books of fiction (not mysteries), Benny's World and Kippo's World, as well as a book of not-especially-reverent poetry called A Girl's Guide to God
and numerous short stories, articles and poems which have appeared in The Sonora Review, The Quarterly, Word of Mouth, Blue Stocking and 8-Track Mind.
After that, it was time to go back to work. I got my private investigator's license and hung out my shingle. At first, I took a lot of the cheaters cases.
It seemed to me that if a guy thought his woman was cheating, he was usually wrong. On the other hand, if a woman thought her guy was cheating, she was almost always right. Eventually, I moved on to take mostly criminal defense investigation work which often involved trying to figure out what the client did and didn't do and then minimize the damage of what they usually did do. There were so many crazy ways that people could get themselves in trouble. In one case, the attorney I was working for represented a wife who had gotten so enraged about all of the time and affection her husband lavished on his pet iguana that she shot the poor iguana and killed it. The husband was furious and wanted the district attorney to press charges. The wife was eventually charged with reckless endangerment and took a pretty sweet deal because even the DA felt sorry for the fact that she was married to such a schmuck.
It was an interesting ten years. Somewhere in this time period I began to write the Kim Claypoole Mystery Series, which was a great distraction and a lot of fun. I liked the idea of having many of the same characters appear in each book.
So here I am now, working on the fifth book in the series.
