This book has had a hard time getting interest because it's such a nontraditional romance. It really needs nontraditional readers to give it a try as it's not so much a simple romance as also a story of adventure. In fact, the more I look at romances, the more I wonder if any of my stories qualify. I once though they were because they are stories of a man and woman meeting, falling in love or trying for a second chance at love, human sexuality, but always, in the midst is something else, a theme, problem, or issue that really is as important as the love story.
When I was submitting manuscripts to publishing houses, I always ran into this problem of their need to fulfill genre expectations. That often meant heroine in trouble. Man saving the day. I didn't like that kind of story to read or to write.
Desert Inferno is a western with a strong emphasis on the love that I feel for Southern Arizona and set in a part of it that I know pretty well. Jake is a U.S. Border Patrolman, and an unusual hero because he's a man most people consider ugly. Well a lot think the desert is ugly also. Beauty often is in the eye of the beholder and in Rachel's eyes, he's beautiful as is the desert country that surrounds her.
Rachel is a strong woman, successful as a landscape painter, independent in her thinking, but it really is love at first sight for her when she sees Jake. He feels a woman as beautiful as her will never be for him; and so their story begins.
It would be a love story like so many others except for what else is happening. Jake has an old enemy, one who wants to kill him. Rachel's father, owner of a big ranch but in trouble financially, has gone into business with that man smuggling Mexican antiquities into the United States . What he didn't count on was it would also involve murder.
The cover is one of those I have tweaked again and again but think maybe this time I have it as it will stay.
February 7th is a good chance to give one of my hybrid romances a try for free. You might learn you like something you didn't expect; and if you don't, you didn't put out any money. ;) I am sure learning a lot through this whole process. Marketing is a LOT harder than writing is all I can say.
