The HBS Author's Spotlight SHOWCASES Pamela Fagan Hutchins' New Book: Fighting for Anna.
Pamela is an award-winning and best-selling romantic mystery/suspense and hilarious nonfiction writer.
Fighting For Anna
What Doesn't Kill You, #8 - A Michele Romantic Mystery
Author: Pamela Fagan Hutchins
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Tightly plotted and fast-paced, this romantic head-scratcher dives into 80s pop culture, a reclusive religious community, and high stakes politics.
Michele retreats to the country while her teens are away for the summer, to write the memoirs of her elderly neighbor Gidget—a reclusive former Houston art gallery owner—and learn how to be alone in the wake of her husband’s death. But when Gidget dies unexpectedly, she leaves everything to Michele except a bequest to a daughter no one knew existed. Suddenly, Michele's country quiet is shattered, and half of Texas shows up: some to help, some to contest the will, and others to make sure the mystery daughter is never found alive.
Excerpt from Fighting for Anna
Chapter One
An airborne string mop charged at us, a white curtain of deranged fringe. But of course it wasn’t a mop—it was a dog, and its squatty legs pumped hard, propelling its low, elongated body, with its tummy barely clearing the ground. I smelled it, too—a coppery, foul scent—and I tensed from years of experience with animals in my father’s Seguin veterinary practice. Yet, the dog looked familiar, and I was more respectful than scared.
“Get back.” I put my arms out to either side of me, as if that would protect my teenagers from whatever the terrified little dog brought our way. “A scared animal is a dangerous one.”
I heard the eye-roll in my seventeen-year-old son’s voice. “We’re not babies anymore, Mom.”
I glanced at Sam. He had the Lopez coloring but his father’s height. Over six feet and muscular in a zero-body-fat kind of way. He had on khaki shorts and an Astros T-shirt, and his dark brown hair flopped across his forehead.
The dog panted and darted in front of me, and I caught a glimpse of one eye open wide, its white rounded. “Hey, I know you, don’t I?” I said, as if she would understand me.
I did remember her, from the neighbor’s. Gidget. That was the name of the neighbor. An oddly seventies-sounding name for an oddly endearing woman. The dog’s name also started with G. I ran through possibilities quickly. Gretel. No. Gretchen. No. Gertrude. Yes, that was it. Which was another oddity, like the names for the woman and the dog were reversed. I’d fallen in love with Gertrude last spring, when Gidget invited me over to her little white farmhouse. She’d asked me to help her write her memoirs, since I was an editor and a published author. I’d agreed—charmed by the woman and intrigued by her years as the force behind a hip Houston art gallery—then forgotten about it in the wake of my mother’s death.
Until now. A flush rose toward my face. Ugh, memory problems, on top of hot flashes, fatigue, and allover body pain. But no, my gynecologist insisted it couldn’t be early onset of menopause at forty-one. He’d offered me birth control pills and antidepressants, but no empathy.
Annabelle spoke in the high pitch of a teenage girl, although at eighteen she was rapidly approaching womanhood. “Is it hurt?”
Okay . . . add trouble focusing, like on the crazed dog and my kids, to my list of symptoms.
Sam snorted. “It’s so ugly it hurts. What is it? Some kind of mash-up between a wiener dog and a sheep dog?”
I raised a brow at Sam, but secretly added pug to his list. “She might be hurt, Belle.”
The dog stopped in front of me, yapping frantically, like it was talking directly to me. Something was wrong with her eye, really wrong, but the little canine was whirling in circles by then. Between that and all her hair, I couldn’t get a good look at it. Was the reddish brown in her dreadlocks blood?
“What is it, Gertrude?” I crouched and held my hand toward her, palm up.
She reversed course with her back end turning separately from her front, like an articulated bus.
“Oh my God, did you see her turn?” Sam leaned over, laughing.
“She’s so cuuuute,” Annabelle squeaked, clapping her hands.
Gertrude sprinted into the woods, away from the three of us and the dilapidated summer camp travel trailer dubbed the “Quacker” by Sam because of the brand name Mallard emblazoned on its side. Stopping once, Gertrude looked back at us—one eye wonky—as if to say, “Hurry up, already.”
She tugged at my heart. “I’d better go after her.”
“I’m coming, too,” Sam said.
“You dropped your phone, Michele,” Annabelle said from behind me. “Some guy named Rashidi is texting you. Who’s Rashidi?” she called.
I pretended not to hear her, because I sure wasn’t going to tell her that a gorgeous Virgin Islander I’d met at my friend Emily’s wedding in Amarillo wouldn’t quit texting me. I hadn’t answered him, so I’d hoped he’d stopped. I wasn’t ready. I might never be ready again.
“Aren’t you coming?” Sam yelled back to Annabelle.
I heard her feet start up after us. Breakfast and too much coffee sloshed in my belly. I had a head start on them both, but even though I’d done an Ironman triathlon less than a year before, my conditioning was no match for their youthful athleticism. Sam played elite high school baseball, and Annabelle was headed to the University of Texas on a swim scholarship. And both were about to leave me alone for the summer, as of today—Sam working a summer baseball camp that moved around the country, and Annabelle getting a head start on the fall in Austin. I couldn’t think about it without my eyes leaking, so I forced it away.
The little dog had wheels, and the distance between her and us grew. We thrashed through the bushes and brush like a herd of stampeding cattle, my snake-proof pink-camouflage cowboy boots adding to our thunder. I tried not to think about snakes. Snakes in the grass, snakes hanging from trees, snakes under bushes. Copperheads, rattlesnakes, water moccasins, and coral snakes, all native to south central Texas, something I’d have to get past if I was going to make it through my summer in the country. Mongoose, mongoose.
Gertrude dashed under the bottom of the barbed-wire strands at the three-way juncture of poles and fences that marked the edge of our property and the two parcels adjoining it. A new metal sign had been affixed to the outside of Gidget’s fence, but facing the next property over from ours. It read FUTURE SITE OF HOU-TO-AUS LONESTAR PIPELINE.
We skidded to a stop, and I put my knee-high boot on the bottom wire and pulled up on the middle one. “Here.”
Annabelle ducked through, using one hand to hold her mass of long, curly blonde hair off her pink tank top and out of her face. Sam followed. They started running again.
“A little help, please?”
Annabelle understood me first. “Yeah, thanks a lot, Sam,” she teased. She mimicked my actions with the barbed wire.
I’d never been past our fence, and only up to it once or twice. When I’d visited Gidget, I’d driven on a dirt road that wound an extra two miles before cutting back to her place. I crouched, my butterfly pendant falling out of the top of my shirt and swinging forward to smack me in the teeth. I lunged under the higher strand into new territory, catching the back of my shirt on a barb. I heard a tiny rip, but I pulled through anyway. A piece of trash on the ground caught my eye, and reflexively I grabbed it and stuck it in my jeans pocket to throw away later.
“You’ve got a hole,” Annabelle informed me.
It was an old Hotter’N Hell Hundred T-shirt from a bicycle race I’d done with Adrian, Annabelle’s father. The ruined shirt was just another piece of him slipping away, a tiny sliver of my heart excised and gone.
Gertrude had stopped, and she was barking at us, her voice a cattle prod.
“Hold on, Lassie, we’re coming,” I said.
Neither kid laughed, my humor a few decades removed from theirs. We ran on through gray-trunked yaupon holly trees that scratched us up as much as the barbed wire, and I wished I had a coat of fur like Gertrude’s to protect me from it. The thick vegetation was pretty from a distance, but up close it gave me the willies. Poison ivy, spiders, and the aforementioned snakes and yaupon. It was dark back there, too, the cedar, mesquite, and oak creating a canopy made denser by thorny vines and bee-attracting honeysuckle.
Sam turned around and ran backwards. “So, where are we—” His words were interrupted when he hit the ground with an “oomph,” butt first, palms next.
“Are you okay?” I extended a hand to him.
He lifted one of his up, and it was covered in something brown and mushy. He waved it back and forth in front of his face, sniffing. “Gross.”
I withdrew my hand.
“What is it?” Annabelle leaned toward him, then backed away quickly. “Ew, poop.”
“Help me,” Sam said, shaking his hands to fling it off.
Gertrude started barking at us again.
“Sorry, son. I’ve got to see about the dog.”
“Yeah, me, too.” Annabelle giggled.
“No fair!”
“Wipe it off on the ground and the leaves.” I laughed, and Annabelle skipped. Literally, she skipped, and it warmed me inside.
Sam caught up with us. The scent of something rotten flooded my nose. At first I thought it was Sam, but it was dead animal stink, not manure stink. A few running paces later it started to recede. I didn’t want to know what it was. There were lots of critters out there, and all lives had an expiration date. We just didn’t have to face it personally in modern society very often. Or at all, most of us. Another thing I’d have to get over to survive my summer.
My breaths were coming in short pants now, and I couldn’t hear anything except the yips and barks of Gertrude. She broke from the tree line, and I saw Gidget’s clapboard house in the clearing. Gertrude scrambled toward it, running full-out. I wanted to stop and put my hands on my knees, but I kept going. Sweat trickled down my temple and onto my cheek. Annabelle was in front of me and Sam a good ten yards in front of her. A gate was ajar in a picket fence that could have used the attention of Tom Sawyer. Gertrude entered with Sam hot on her heels. The dog bounded onto the porch and disappeared.
My stress meter inched up. What had the dog so frantic?
Sam stomped up the wooden steps and came to an abrupt halt. He leaned forward, then stood. “You guys, there’s a broken window with blood on it, and the dog jumped through it and ran inside.”
Annabelle joined Sam, and I caught up with them. The porch sagged under our weight.
My heart was booming, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions that would upset Sam and Annabelle. I knocked but there was no sound from the house, and no one came to the door. “Gidget?” I called.
Nothing.
I took a step to the left and pressed my nose against the intact upper half of the window, my feet crunching the broken pieces on the porch. I shielded my eyes with my hand, trying to see past the glare of high morning sunlight against glass.
"What is it?" Annabelle asked.
I scanned the room. Gertrude suddenly appeared and rushed the window pell-mell, her bark piercing. I jumped back, falling into my stepdaughter. She stumbled a little, and I righted myself.
“I’m not sure,” I said. I braced myself, hands on the window frame, paint coming off in dry flecks on my palms. I brushed them off on my jeans and tried again. This time I was able to follow Gertrude with my eyes, and they led to the right, in front of a coffee table and faded tweed couch. A bundle of worn clothing lay piled on the wood floors, twitching. Hands and feet and a gray-haired head protruded from the bundle, and blood trickled from Gidget’s forehead into a pool beside her.
Author Genre: Mystery, Romance, Humor And Comedy, Non-fiction
Website: Pamela Fagan Hutchins - Holding Nothing Back
Author's Blog: Pamela Fagan Hutchins
Pamela F. Hutchins - Employee Relations
Twitter: @PamelotH
E-Mail: pamela@pamelahutchins.com
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Author Description: Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes award-winning and bestselling romantic mysteries and hilarious nonfiction, and moonlights as a workplace investigator and employment attorney. She is passionate about great writing, smart authorpreneurship, and her two household hunks, husband Eric and one-eyed Boston terrier Petey. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound, if she gets a good running start.
Author's Book List
Hell to Pay
- What Doesn't Kill You, #7 - An Emily Romantic MysteryA pulse-pounder full of humor and heart, the latest in the What Doesn't Kill You romantic mystery series.
Big-haired paralegal and former rodeo queen Emily has her life back on track. Her adoption of Betsy seems like a done deal, her parents have reunited, and she’s engaged to her sexy boss Jack. Then client Phil Escalante’s childhood buddy Dennis drops dead, face first into a penis cake at the adult novelty store Phil owns with his fiancée Nadine, one of Emily’s best friends. The cops charge Phil with murder right on the heels of his acquittal in a trial for burglarizing the Mighty is His Word church offices.
Emily’s nemesis ADA Melinda Stafford claims a witness overheard Phil fighting with Dennis over a woman. Before he can mount a defense, Phil falls into a diabetic coma, leaving Nadine shaken and terrified. Meanwhile Betsy’s ultra-religious foster parents apply to adopt her, and Jack starts acting weird and evasive. Emily feels like a calf out of a chute, pulled between the ropes of the header and the heeler, as she fights to help Phil and Nadine without losing Betsy and Jack.
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Earth to Emily
- What Doesn't Kill You, #6 - An Emily Romantic MysteryParalegal and former rodeo queen Emily only wants two little things. The first is to adopt Betsy—the girl who has stolen her heart but could be deported to Mexico at any time. The other is a second chance with her boss, Jack, a smolderingly hot and mysterious criminal defense attorney in Amarillo who runs his family’s horse ranch in New Mexico on the side.
But before Emily can dare to hope for either (or both), the obstacles between them and her mount: two runaway teenagers, an aging exotic dancer, and a dead trucker torpedo a dinner with Jack. She and Jack catch their client—who’s charged with assaulting an officer—selling stolen goods. And to top it all off, Betsy’s zealously religious and overly protective foster parents sic some questionable cops on Emily to destroy her reputation.
Emily just wants to silence all the noise and focus on her priorities: Betsy and Jack. But then the phone rings. It’s the two runaways, with an enormous secret and a desperate plea for help. They convince Emily that she’s the only one they can trust, forcing her into a horrible choice: risking the lives of these two teens, or jeopardizing her own chance at a life with the two people she cares about most.
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Heaven to Betsy
- Emily #1When a dead body swan-dives from a balcony into the pool at a wedding, gossip comes to a halt about disgraced paralegal and former rodeo queen Emily—whose husband left her for a woman who turns out to be a man. Enter Jack, a secretive attorney and sexy mix of cowboy and Indian. She refuses to work for him, until she learns about the disappearance of the six-year old daughter of his notorious client Sofia, the wedding shooter, who is also an illegal immigrant. Emily feels a strange affinity with the girl and launches a desperate search for her. Bodies pile up in her wake across Texas and New Mexico as the walls around her own secrets begin to crumble, and the authorities question whether the child is anything but a figment of her imagination.
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Going for Kona
When her husband is killed in a hit-and-run bicycling accident, it takes all of Michele Lopez Hanson’s strength not to burrow into their bed for the rest of her life. But their kids need her, and she promised herself she’d do the Kona Ironman Triathlon in Adrian’s honor, and someone seems to be stalking her family, so she slogs through the pain to keep herself on track. Her dangerously delirious training sessions become a link between her and Adrian, and she discovers that if she keeps moving fast enough to fly, she can hold onto her husband—even as she loses her grip on herself and faces her biggest danger yet.
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Finding Harmony
- Book #3 in Katie & Annalise SeriesFinding Harmony takes you on a high stakes dash through the islands, with laughs and voodoo balancing out the mix.
Katie’s already on edge when a dead guy shows up at Annalise and shady locals claim there are slave remains in the foundation, but when Nick doesn’t come home to her and the kids, she’s ready to lose it. A frantic Katie launches a Caribbean-wide manhunt, calling on Kurt, her stoic, steady father-in-law, and Collin, her badass big brother, to help her search air, land, and sea for her husband, who may be in very big trouble indeed.
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What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?
- Writing & PublishingWho knew indie publishing could be this much fun? Whether you have published before or are contemplating your first book, Pamela Fagan Hutchins makes an overwhelming field manageable by presenting tried and true how-tos and a myriad of resources, including the marketing plan that got her debut novel national distribution - all with her tongue firmly planted in her cheek.
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Leaving Annalise
- Katie & AnnaliseOne unexpected and hotly fought-over little boy, two dead bodies, and a series of home vandalisms throw Texas attorney turned island chanteuse Katie Connell into a tizzy. Juggling all of this, Bloody Mary cravings, baggage, and the bad guys too, she waffles between the jumbie house that brought her back from the brink and the man she believes is the love of her life.
Book Trailer: Leaving Annalise
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Saving Grace
- Katie & Annalise SeriesKatie Connell is a high-strung attorney whose sloppy drinking habits and stunted love life collide hilariously during a doomed celebrity case in Dallas. She flees Texas for the Caribbean and escapes professional humiliation, a broken heart, and a wicked Bloody Mary habit, but ends up trading one set of problems for another when she begins to investigate the suspicious deaths of her parents on the island of St. Marcos. She’s bewitched by the voodoo spirit of an abandoned house in the rainforest and discovers that she’s as much a danger to herself as the island’s bad guys are.
Most people prefer my personal Saving Grace “trailer” which was just me being silly.
Book Trailer: Saving Grace
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The Clark Kent Chronicles
- ADHD & AspergersA Mother's Tale Of Life With Her ADHD And Asperger's Son
They’re the parents who other people secretly believe must be doing a crappy job, the ones whose children don lacrosse gloves to weed the flowerbed, won’t turn in their homework, and throw age-inappropriate tantrums in public. They’re the parents one frayed nerve short of a breakdown as they scrub off the giant perceived “L” for Loser from their foreheads, turning for help to every source they can think of, because their kids just don’t respond like other kids, because their kids aren’t like other kids. The very brains of their children are wired differently, and the disciplines, motivators, and strategies that are supposed to work on them, according to conventional wisdom, don’t.
These are the parents of children on the ADHD Spectrum, and most of them have used up their Phone a Friend Lifeline and just want a little understanding and the hope of shared knowledge from someone else who has survived a life like theirs. They are parents like Pamela Fagan Hutchins, whose son, dubbed “Clark Kent the WonderKid,” has ADHD and Asperger’s Syndrome.
Pamela takes readers on a heart-wrenching and hilarious road trip from toddler to adulthood with Clark Kent and his family, sharing their collective wisdom and empathy along the way.
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How To Screw Up Your Kids
- Divorce and StepparentingBlended Families, Blendered Style
Married couples with children divorce 40% of the time. In less than three years after that divorce, chances are both mom and dad are remarried, and probably each to someone who has kids of their own. The single most explosive and divisive issue in those marriages? Stepparenting.
Wouldn't it be nice if we all lived in a bubble gum and sugar plum world where, without a ripple on Lake Placid, kids embraced stepparents and appreciated their contributions? Where stepsiblings didn't compete for attention and argue over favorites and fairness? Well, we don't.
So what we need when stepparenting is a good plan. A plan for blending, or blendering if you will, the disparate stepchildren and their parents into a chunky smoothie of stepfamily goodness. How To Screw Up Your Kids helps the parents everyone predicts will fail prove all the naysayers wrong. Through the use of practical human relations principles and the author's achingly honest and often hilarious stories, readers will learn to envision and instill a unique set of family values and culture into their new household, and by God, have fun doing it
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Hot Flashes And Half Ironmans
- Women's Health and TriathlonMiddle-aged Endurance Athletics Meets The Hormonally Challenged
Women get older, dammit, and sometimes it sucks, especially for women who pride themselves on athleticism and an adventurous spirit. Hot flashes. Weight gain. Sleepless nights. Yes, it can be hard, but middle age doesn’t have to be a flashing red stop light. It’s perfectly acceptable for women of a certain age, a certain level of hormonal imbalance, and a certain amount of cellulite to don spandex and even enter the rarefied sport of endurance triathlon.
In fact, there’s a huge advantage to aging: much of the potential competition drops out in favor of the couch and a remote control. And the endurance high? The elation of dietary purity and discovering you can have arms like Madonna? The Zen of goal attainment? Better than a good Shiraz buzz. Once you get past the ugly mood swings, chafing on your girly parts, and a “kill your own mother” craving for sleep and a hot Cinnabon, that is.
Pamela Fagan Hutchins has been there and done that, with lessons learned and sense of humor (usually) intact. She completed her first triathlon at 39 and her first Half Ironman at 40. She has her eye on an M-dot tattoo in 2014.
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Author Recommended by: HBSystems Publications
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