Author Spotlight: Liz Flaherty Has a New Release!

Y’all know how much I love to share favorite authors and books with you. Today is particularly special because not only is Liz Flaherty one of my very favorite writers, she’s also one of my very best friends. She’s here this week with her newest release, Patches of Red, book 2 in Colors, the Harper Loch Trilogy.

Retired from the post office, Liz Flaherty spends non-writing time sewing, quilting, and doing whatever else she wants to. She and Duane live in the old farmhouse in North Central Indiana they moved to in 1977. They’ve talked about moving, but really…40-some years’ worth of stuff? It’s not happening!

She’d love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com or please come and see her.

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads | BookBub

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Secrets

Thanks for having me here today, Nan. I know you’ve been waaay busy lately, so being a good friend, I added to it with a guest post, right?

I tend to have secrets in every story I write. I did not do this on purpose. Backstory is a not-always-popular thing, plus it’s hard to keep up with it, so I really liked the idea of my H & H being born on the first page without a colorful past or any hang-ups left over from that past. Much less secrets. Because there’s a problem with secrets.

They’re often not believable.

Our job, as everyone who’s ever typed Chapter One and then slid into a pool of anxiety knows, is to suspend disbelief. Normally, I don’t have much trouble with this. My people aren’t all that extraordinary, because I want readers to easily identify with them. They’re seldom rich, seldom gorgeous, seldom thin … you get it. But then, when I think I have the believable part down pat, here comes the secret. And the whole credibility thing goes right out the window.

Why? Who said that? Oh, okay, it was several of you. Well, look at it this way. Take a look back at your own secrets. Don’t look too close because sometimes it hurts, but how many of them are all that believable? Maybe yours are, but maybe they’re ones that people would respond to with I would never do that or What is she, an idiot? or Not likely! or One conversation, just one, would have cleared the whole matter up.

Thought so. I have to admit, some of my characters’ secrets are ones that draw those comments (occasionally from me), but even though they’re things you wouldn’t want to have happened or you would have handled differently, that doesn’t mean they’re any less likely. Because our secrets are part of our lives, bumps in the road from our past. They matter.

Ellie Wentz finds secrets after her father dies. Patches of Red tell us how she handles them. Ellie’s one of my favorite people from Pieces of Blue, Book One of the Colors series, but she meets Jess Grant in her story, and … oh, my, he’s a favorite, too.

I hope you like them.

GIVEAWAY: How do you feel about secrets in stories? Have there been any that stuck out in your mind? Speaking of secrets, I have a surprise package for lucky commenter! Thanks for coming!

Patches of Red

He’s handsome but can’t even remember her name. She’s pretty, but her finickiness drives him crazy. And yet …

After twenty years as a nurse practitioner in the same practice, Ellie Wentz gives notice. When office politics interferes with her job, it’s time to get a new one. When her son and daughter-in-law buy her house and she has sold and given away everything else that’s not attached to her heartstrings, she packs up what remains and goes to Harper Loch to spend time with her best friend. She’ll decide what to do and where to go from there. No matter how much the handsome friend of her friends annoys her.

Jesse Grant comes to Harper Loch to help out his niece for a few weeks. He’s retired from the navy, his boys are grown, and he’s at loose ends. But he really likes the little lake community in Michigan—he thinks he might stay. Long widowed, he has no interest in getting married again, and neither does the redhead he can’t seem to avoid. And yet again …

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Excerpt:

She found Mom’s wedding ring right away, too. It wasn’t the diamond circlet Dad had given her for an anniversary … maybe the twenty-fifth … but the slim white gold band they’d started with. Ellie slipped it onto her little finger—her hands resembled her dad’s more than her mom’s—and sat and looked at it. She had the diamond one, too, but this one somehow meant more. This was the one bought by the young, hopeful lovers, not the successful real estate team they’d become.

She sorted out the sapphires—Mom would want Maggie, who loved blue, to have them—and set aside the others. Selena and Jan and their daughters would have a good time making their choices.

A few aprons were neatly folded in the tote. Delighted, Ellie got up and put one of them on. Like her mother, she always wore an apron in the kitchen. Neither of them had ever been the best cooks in any group of two or more, but Mom had been the sloppiest and Ellie the tidiest—which explained the aprons, although Ellie seldom needed hers.

At the bottom of the tote was a folder. She recognized it as one from the real estate office, one of her dad’s. All the partners had specific colors. The tabs would have clients’ last names on them, addresses of listings, or occasionally something cryptic.

Something like the name Declan.

Where had she heard that?

She lifted the folder out. It was heavy, full enough that she was surprised the contents hadn’t been divided into more than one receptacle.

In the background, Jimmy Stewart’s voice hoarsened in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Soon the corrupt senator portrayed by Claude Rains would speak out against him on the senate floor and the betrayal would nearly break young Jefferson Smith, the character played by Stewart. It was her favorite part of the movie. It had been Mom’s, too. They used to watch it sitting together on the couch with popcorn. Dad waved off their sentimentality, but he watched it, too. Or maybe watched Mom watching it. They were attached at the hip.

Weren’t they?

Buy links:

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