Love Bytes welcomes to the blog author Don Travis visiting us to promote his new release “The City of Rocks, A BJ Vinson Mystery.

Welcome Don 🙂

Valuable Boot Heel Area Duck Missing… Ducknapping Feared

At least in Don Travis’s novel The City of Rocks

 

Love Bytes, thank you for hosting a guest post for the third novel in my BJ Vinson Mystery Series, The City of Rocks. This is the third time you’ve been gracious enough to help me introduce my books… the first two being The Zozobra Incident and The Bisti Business. The fourth novel called The Lovely Pines is going through the publishing process at DSPP as we speak. The fifth, Abaddon’s Locusts, is birthing on my OneDrive… well, maybe it’s more in the gestation process.

 

I’ve had fun developing this series and creating the gay confidential investigator B. J. Vinson and his companion Paul Barton. In this novel, we see more of the fetching Paul as he becomes intimately involved in the case as you will see from the book’s Blurb:

 

Confidential investigator B. J. Vinson thinks it’s a bad joke when Del Dahlman asks him to look into the theft of a duck… a duck named Quacky Quack the Second and insured for $250,000. It ceases to be funny when the young thief dies in a suspicious truck wreck. The search leads BJ and his lover, Paul Barton, to the sprawling Lazy M Ranch in the Boot Heel country of southwestern New Mexico bordering the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

 

A deadly game unfolds when BJ and Paul are trapped in a weird rock formation known as the City of Rocks—an eerie array of frozen magma that is somehow at the center of the entire scheme. But does the theft of Quacky involve a quarter-million-dollar duck-racing bet between the ranch’s owner and a Miami real estate developer, or someone attempting to force the sale of the Lazy M because of its proximity to an unfenced portion of the Mexican border? BJ and Paul go from the City of Rocks to the neon lights of Miami and back again in pursuit of the answer… death and danger tracking their every step.

 

Now to the obligatory bio on the author…me. There are a limited number of ways of saying I’m a transplanted Okie who went to Texas for his college, Germany (compliments of the US Army) for adventure and Colorado for my first permanent job. Then my professional life led me to New Mexico, a wonderful place I try to showcase in my novels. In between came life events such as childhood tuberculosis which left me believing I couldn’t participate in sports and other activities my contemporaries enjoyed. That more or less set the tone of my entire life.

 

For a glimpse of the book, I have selected the Prologue, where the action begins on a summer night in Southwest New Mexico’s Boot Heel country.

*****

PROLOGUE

M Lazy M Ranch in the New Mexico Boot Heel

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The thief froze as a string of sharp yips hammered the quiet night. He’d darted both big Dobermans that were now sleeping soundly out at the fence, so this yapper must be a house pet. A light flashed briefly as the back door opened. A fur ball with pointed ears bounded down the steps and made straight for him. The feisty canine latched onto his pant leg and whipped it back and forth, growling furiously. A growl was preferable to a bark, so he dragged his dog-impeded leg like a zombie in some old Hollywood movie.

As he reached the poultry pen, all hell broke loose. A single quack built into a raucous caterwauling. Someone must have flipped a switch up at the house because brilliant light suddenly flooded the enclosure. He reeled backward, stunned by a sea of white. Ducks. Dozens of ducks. Hundreds. How was he going to find the right one?

The dog attached to his pant leg shifted its grip and closed on his ankle. Cursing, he gave an involuntary kick, sending the pooch over the fence. The ducks scattered, opening a circle of dark earth around the confused mutt. The pup transferred its attention to the birds and began a joyful chase, dashing this way and that, parting its panicked prey in dizzying waves of undulating white, creating a living kaleidoscope of shifting shades and shapes.

Then he saw her. In a coop all by herself. Like she waited to turn into a swan or something. A clamor from the house galvanized him into action. He vaulted the fence, threw open the cage door, and dragged her out by the neck. He ignored the claws raking flesh from his forearms as he fled through a horse corral at the back of the pen. He made it to the cover of some shrubbery before the ranch came alive. Moments later a woman’s agonized wail rose above everything.

Remembering he needed to deliver the duck alive, he loosened his hold on the feathery neck. The bird immediately set up a loud protest that could have awakened the dead but wasn’t enough to overcome the clamor of the hundred or so other birds. He turned and headed for his pickup. Best get out of there before Millicent Muldren’s drovers filled him full of lead.

 

*****

I sincerely hope that provides enough of a hook to make you want to read more. Here are some links to me and my writing:

Don Travis is a man totally captivated by his adopted state of New Mexico. Each of is mystery novels features some region of the state as prominently as it does his protagonist, a gay former Marine ex-cop turned confidential investigator. Don never made it to the Marines (three years in the Army was all he managed) and certainly didn’t join the Albuquerque Police Department. A loner, he fulfills his social needs by attending SouthWest Writers meetings and teaching a weekly writing class at an Albuquerque community center.

Blog: dontravis.com

Email: dontravis21gmail.com

Facebook: dontravis

Twitter: @dontravis3

And here is the blurb and the DSP Publications buy links:

A BJ Vinson Mystery

Confidential investigator B. J. Vinson thinks it’s a bad joke when Del Dahlman asks him to look into the theft of a duck… a duck named Quacky Quack the Second and insured for $250,000. It ceases to be funny when the young thief dies in a suspicious truck wreck. The search leads BJ and his lover, Paul Barton, to the sprawling Lazy M Ranch in the Bootheel country of southwestern New Mexico bordering the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

A deadly game unfolds when BJ and Paul are trapped in a weird rock formation known as the City of Rocks, an eerie array of frozen magma that is somehow at the center of the entire scheme. But does the theft of Quacky involve a quarter-million-dollar duck-racing bet between the ranch’s owner and a Miami real estate developer, or someone attempting to force the sale of the Lazy M because of its proximity to an unfenced portion of the Mexican border? BJ and Paul go from the City of Rocks to the neon lights of Miami and back again in pursuit of the answer… death and danger tracking their every step

Amazon

DSPP Publication

Barnes and Noble

Kobo

 

Again, thanks to Love Bytes for permitting this guest post. And a tip of the hat to DSP Publications for bringing out the book.