Author Spotlight: Kris Bock Kicks Off Our 2026 Spotlights with Her New Cozy!

What a treat to have fellow Tule author Kris Bock as my first guest in the Author Spotlight for 2026. Kris is an amazing mystery writer and keeps me totally intrigued with every book. Her romances are also great fun! Kris Bock writes mystery, suspense, and romance, often with smart, snarky heroines finding adventure (sometimes against their will) in the Southwest. She lives in New Mexico where she enjoys hiking with her husband and playing with their ferrets. Quick Fun Fact: Kris also writes The Felony Melanie series with her brother, scriptwriter Douglas J Eboch, who wrote the original screenplay for the movie Sweet Home Alabama. If you haven’t discovered Kris’s mysteries, go here and get started. You’ll be so glad you did!

Take it away, Kris…

Thanks, Nan. Happy to be here as 2026 takes off.

One of the fun side effects of being a writer is that you get to research lots of unusual things. A Facebook memory from five years ago had this:

Just an ordinary Internet search history:

Is it legal to tap someone’s phone

what type of fingerprint scanner do phones use

What does a crime scene really look like

how much drugs can you have in Arizona without being charged as a dealer

good names for bars

gangster talk

That was from researching Something Deadly on Desert Drive: the Accidental Detective humorous mystery series book 2, and yes we writers sometimes worry about the FBI showing up at the door wondering what we’ve been up to! But they have probably learned to recognize a writer’s search history.

In Buried in Betrayal, the latest Reluctantly Psychic Murder Mystery, I learned about license plate tracking.

Is It Legal?

Yes, but The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 means the average person can’t simply walk into the DMV and get personal information on drivers. The person requesting access “must have a legitimate reason for tracing license plate numbers to obtain the owner’s or another person’s information. Police officers, attorneys involved in civil or criminal cases, debt collectors, and investigators have viable reasons for requesting information from a license plate.” (Source)

How Is It Done?

If someone does have a legitimate reason for tracing license plates, they might be able to track someone moving across the country, due to automated license plate readers that provide Street level surveillance. (Yes there are Threats Posed by ALPR.)

Here’s an excerpt from Buried in Betrayal where Petra’s new acquaintance – possibly a murder suspect, possibly a new friend – explains how they track someone across country.

   As we walked into town, Cary looked around, smiling, a bounce in their step. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a town this small before. Oh, that’s not an insult.”

“No, it’s really not. I know what you mean. I moved here from Seattle, so it surprised me at first too, but I like it now.”

“That’s cool.” They studied me curiously.

But I didn’t want to answer questions—I wanted to ask them. “You said something about tracking Wayne’s license plate. How does that work?”

“Oh, well. It’s a little complicated. First you have to get the license plate number. The DMV won’t just give it out, but fortunately a woman he’d visited had a doorbell camera that gave us a clear enough image. Then there are these license plate recognition systems across the country. They’re mostly used by the police, insurance company, skip tracers—people like that. They can find out where people live or visit a lot.”

“You mean if you know a license plate number, you can find out where the vehicle is?” I’d heard privacy was largely a myth, but that was shocking.

“Sort of. They can search by the plate number and map the sightings. You’d have to get really lucky to have a hit in the last hour or so, but you can track patterns. Of course, there have to be sightings. But it’s not like Wayne Knowles would know where the cameras were or imagine that we’d track him that way.”

“Do we have these cameras in our town?” It was hard to believe, Bonneville being so small.

“Only a couple. But we knew where Wayne started and which direction he was going. We had some hits farther east, then one here, then nothing for a day. Since he hadn’t been spotted farther along route sixty, I started looking at city traffic cams, social media pages, that kind of thing, for the small towns in the area, until I spotted his car. Once I knew it was on this end of town, I had to search in person. He’d hid it well, but not well enough.”

“You went above and beyond for your great-aunt. I guess you two are close.”

Cary looked down. “She’s the only person in my family who cared about what I wanted. I would do anything for her.”

Including kill? Now we had a motive for Cary, who had admitted to being near Shelley’s house. They didn’t seem the type, but was I being fooled by their youth and apparent sweetness?

They shot me a glance. I’d been silent for half a block, thinking. I scrambled for something to say so as not to make Cary nervous about my interest. “How common are these cameras?”

“They’re all over. At schools, hospitals, public parking lots, gated apartment complexes, tollbooths, on traffic light poles. They work better when there’s good lighting, but some have infrared or night vision. They can even be mounted on vehicles. Lots of police cars have them. In big cities, anyway.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. Kind of scary.”

“It absolutely is. The technology can be abused to track people who visit political rallies, union halls, or immigration clinics. It has been used to target certain communities, like areas around mosques or gay bars. The cameras can be hidden, too, disguised to look like traffic cones or plants. Sorry, I sound like an essay. I learned a lot I didn’t know before all this happened.”

“I’m not sure I like this system, but I guess it helped you.”

“Yeah, it made me feel sort of dirty using it, when I found out all about it. A lot of the data is held by private companies. Not that I necessarily trust the government more. Either way, it doesn’t seem right that people who haven’t been accused of a crime can be tracked that way. Like most things, it has good and bad possibilities. It has been used to find abducted children, so it’s not all bad.”

Right. In this case, the license plate tracking system had allowed Cary and the women to find Wayne after he scammed them.

Had it also led to his murder?

As this shows, I found a way to have a private citizen become a licensed PI in order to track someone, because I needed a way to bring a bunch of murder suspect into town. And now you know what I know about this rather scary system!

Get the whole story in Buried in Betrayal: A Reluctantly Psychic Murder Mystery (Book 3):

In the Reluctantly Psychic Mystery series, a quirky loner who can read the history of any object with her touch gets drawn into mysteries at the museum of oddities where she works.

Buried in Betrayal

A geologist with an unwanted psychic gift, a man on the run, a dead body and a friend accused of…murder?

Geologist Petra Cloch can touch an object and sense the emotions of the people who’ve held it before. Although her paranormal powers are a burden, they’ve helped her solve several crimes and make friends in her new southwestern small town. She’s enjoying settling into her new job when her landlord, Shelley introduces an “old friend.” Wayne seems cagey. He wants to keep his visit a secret and has recently adopted an energetic dog “for protection.”

When Petra stumbles over Wayne’s dead body, suspicions quickly turn to murder, with Shelley the prime suspect. Petra and her friends investigate and quickly uncover a slew of suspects, scams and motives. Petra’s psychic abilities alone aren’t enough to reveal the true killer. To clear Shelley, Petra will need all of her cleverness, the help of her found family, some luck, and the dog that seems to have adopted her.

Fans of cozy mysteries with supernatural twists will fall in love with this humorous and heartwarming psychic sleuth. Learn more or order the Reluctantly Psychic Mysteries.

In the Accidental Detective humorous mystery series, a witty journalist solves mysteries in Arizona and tackles the challenges of turning fifty. The Furrever Friends Sweet Romance series stars the employees and customers at a cat café. Watch as they fall in love with each other and shelter cats. In the Accidental Billionaire Cowboys series, a Texas ranching family wins a fortune in the lottery and discovers winning the lottery causes as many problems as it solves. Kris also writes a series with her brother, scriptwriter Douglas J Eboch, who wrote the original screenplay for the movie Sweet Home Alabama. The Felony Melanie series follows the crazy antics of Melanie, Jake, and their friends a decade before the events of the movie.

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