Author Spotlight: Liz Flaherty’s in the House

Y’all know how much I love it when my bestie comes to visit! Well, she’s here today with her new release, Pieces of Blue, Book 1 in the Colors, the Harper Loch Trilogy. Check it out–you’ll fall in love with Maggie and Sam, the little dachshund Chloe, and Harper Loch, Michigan.

Liz Flaherty has spent the past several years enjoying not working a day job, making terrible crafts, and writing stories in which the people aren’t young, brilliant, or even beautiful. She’s decided (and has to re-decide most every day) that the definition of success is having a good time. Along with her husband of lo, these many years, kids, grands, friends, and the occasional cat, she’s doing just that. Find her on Facebook or her blog, Window Over the Sink. A girl just can’t have too many friends! https://linktr.ee/lizflaherty

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Thanks for having me, Nan. Your blog is one of my favorite places to visit.

Occasionally … maybe I mean often … something that comes along with the Yippee! syndrome that signals the release of a new book is the unexpected crunch-and-gasp of heartbreak.

There can be several reasons for this—no reviews or bad reviews, low sales or no sales, general lack of interest from whom you thought would be your readers, things not working out with your publisher.

The last possibility happened with Pieces of Blue. Its reviews were good, its sales seemed good to me, the interest level was good. But the publisher closed and the timeline for publication with its replacement was too long for me. The rights were reverted and with that reversion went my dreams for Colors, the Harper Loch Trilogy.

Except that in my experience, most dreams don’t die—they change. Pieces of Blue is back again in ebook and paperback. Patches of Red and Shades of Green will introduce themselves in summer and fall of 2026.

While my dreams did some changing, some sighing, and some strong-arming, they’re still coming true. My writer’s heart, while scarred, is once more intact. I hope the Harper Loch Trilogy touches your reader’s heart as well.

Pieces of Blue

Life comes in shades of blue…

Self-imposed loner, Maggie North, has worked for bestselling author Trilby Winterroad her entire adult life, starting as simply his assistant and ending up as his ghost writer. Through ups and downs–including a divorce from an abusive husband–he has been the one person on whom she could always rely. So when Trilby dies suddenly, Maggie finds herself adrift, not sure what she’ll do or where she belongs in the world any longer. And the confusion continues when she discovers he’s not only left her his beloved dachshund, Chloe, but a house she knew nothing about, on a lake she’s never heard of.

It only takes one visit for Maggie to fall in love with both the house and the small lakeside community. The longer she’s there, the safer she feels and the more her life begins to expand…as do her feelings toward her friend and Trilby’s attorney, Sam Eldridge.

But is she really safe? Or are the glistening pieces of her new life about to shatter as an old danger returns?

Amazon   D2D

EXCERPT

He turned his hands and lifted mine. “I love that you play,” he said. “Do they still hurt?”

“Sometimes, but it hurts more not to play.”

“We need to find something out.”

I knew what he meant before he let go of my fingers and drew me to him. I didn’t object when I slipped off my stool or when he tilted my face up to his and kissed me with years’ worth of wondering and searching. I didn’t know how much of the wash of feeling and longing was his and how much was mine, but I did know the emotion flowed through me like Rapunzel’s hair in drawings—long and silky and curving.

Emotion and something else. Longing and something else. He leaned back, just a little, meeting my eyes and smiling into them. “So, Maggie North, what’s this you say?”

I shook my head, laughter rippling up and surprising me. “I didn’t say anything.”

He cupped my face in his hands—oh, the warmth. I didn’t think I’d ever be cold again—and tilted his head for that firm, gentle mouth to take mine again. We were in our fifties, experienced kissers. I understood the jumping around inside and the skittery dance of my heartbeat. I understood the sudden sensitivity of my breasts, that I could feel their weight inside my bra. I got it, as he held me ever closer and deepened the kisses we shared, how precious this zero-dark-thirty time was. I understood the depths of the itch.

I dipped my head, laying it against the shoulder of his sweatshirt, then raised it again to have my turn at taking his lips and tasting. Like me, he’d brushed his teeth before coming to the kitchen, and he tasted of toothpaste and coffee and … oh, sweetness.

“Plundering,” I murmured against his mouth.

He drew back again. “Huh?”

“I’ve written it,” I explained. “We’re plundering each other’s lips.”

“Nah. Plundering is stealing stuff so you have to go to court and I can get you thrown in jail or keep you out depending on how much you want to pay me.”

I burst into laughter, knowing his integrity much too well to go for that one. “It’s that, too, but when—”

“We’re just deposing each other a little bit. Checking out witness reliability and all that. I think you’re a fine material witness.” He interrupted himself to kiss me again. I very nearly moaned with the pleasure of it. I held it back, but a whimper escaped, and he chuckled as he bent his head to kiss the hollow of my neck inside the soft cowl of my sweater. His breath was warm and fast, the feel of his lips on my skin some glorious word I hadn’t figured out how to write yet.

“Yes, ma’am. A fine one.”

What was he talking about? “A fine what?”

“Witness. Material.”

“Oh.”

“For when I go plundering.”