The Joys of Binge Reading

New York Times and USA Today best-selling author, Sharon Sala is a queen of romantic suspense with more than 130 books published in multiple genres, but particularly she concentrates on writing small town romance and thrilling romantic suspense.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And on Binge Reading today, we’ve got a real treat. Multiple award-winning author Sharon Sala talks about her latest two releases; Don’t Back Down, her new romantic suspense and a new series, and the small town romance The Next Best Day.

She also talks about her remarkable gift for dreaming the stories she writes and the native American heritage from two great grandmothers she is happy to claim as her own.

Our Giveaway this week

Our giveaway this week is free genre fiction on Kobo, a fantastic range of popular genre fiction from top authors. Take your pick, whether you like mystery, romance, sci-fi or audio books, all of them freely available for a limited time.

That includes Poisoned Legacy Book #1 of my Of Gold & Blood mystery series. And we’ve also got a Box Set 30% Off Sale.

Visit the following link(s) to see the promotion: https://www.kobo.com/p/free-ebooks! If you live in a country that isn’t included in this promotion, you may have trouble accessing the download link. If this happens, change the flag at the top of the Kobo homepage to one of the included countries to see the sale link properly.

FREE GENRE FICTION DOWNLOAD

BOXED SET 30% OFF SALE

I’ve got the first three books in Of Gold & Blood included; that’s Poisoned Legacy, Brother Betrayed and Double Jeopardy – all available in a Boxed Set E-book at 30% off

Visit the following link(s) to see the promotion: https://kobo.com/p/august-boxset-sale! The promo code for this campaign is: AUGBOX.

bOXED SET SALE 30% OFF

And remember if you enjoy the show, leave a review so others will find us too.

Links to things mentioned in the episode

Dinah McCall: https://www.fictiondb.com/series/prophecy-dinah-mccall~37613.htm

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/40571.Dinah_McCall

Dreamcatcher: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71819.Dreamcatcher

The Survivors: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243251.The_Survivors

There’s A Squirrel in the Attic: https://www.amazon.com/Theres-Squirrel-Attic-Sharon-Sala/dp/0989628671

Killers of the Flower Moon: (Books) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon movie: (Due for release later this year) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon_(film)

John Harte: https://www.johnhartebooks.com/

The Last Child: (John Harte): https://www.amazon.com/Last-Child-Novel-John-Hart/dp/031238033X

Where to find Sharon online

Website: www.sharonsalaauthor.com

Blog: https://www.facebook.com/sharonsala

Contact: https://sharonsalaauthor.com/contact/

Introducing Sharon Sala romance author Sharon Sala – Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award author of romance and romantic suspense

But now here’s Sharon. Hello there, Sharon, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Sharon Sala: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: You’re a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author, you’ve got 132+ plus books published in seven different genres, first published in 1991, and you still have a passion for writing 40 years later. What drives that passion?

Sharon Sala: Oh, I don’t know. I always loved storytelling. I was a reader from a very early age and a dreamer. I just daydreamed. Everything in my sleep was dreams.

It’s like going to the movies when I go to bed.

I just wanted to put them on paper and share them with people who like to read.

Jenny Wheeler: And so, did you start writing at a very young age?

Sharon Sala’s latest books

Sharon Sala: No. I was just an avid reader. It was probably the early 80s when I first thought about it, and I wrote two books and put them under the bed and never did another thing with them until the mid ‘80s. And then I got serious about it.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. We’ll get into that story a little bit later on, but we’ll focus on your most recent books. Although I mentioned the seven genres, you have focused very strongly on romantic suspense and contemporary romance, probably mostly of a sweet and small town nature.

And your latest romantic suspense series is one called Secrets and Shadows. You’ve just started a new series. You’ve got multiple series, I might add.

And it’s set around the Pope family in Jubilee, Kentucky, a small mountain town. Could you introduce us to the Popes and to Jubilee? This is going to be a series. Do you know how many books it’s going to be yet?

Sharon Sala: Yes, I just finished the fifth and last book last week, and I’ve been editing all week and I’ll turn it in.

There are several groups of Popes, but everybody who lives on Pope Mountain is interrelated from being early day settlers. The first Pope that you run into in Book #1. his name is Cameron Pope, and then the second book is about Aaron Pope, and he’s a cousin, and that family has four brothers.

They are Aaron, and Sean, and Wiley, and Brendan,

Don’t Look Back – #1 in Secrets and Shadows

Jenny Wheeler: And that fifth and final book, when will that fifth one actually come out?

Sharon Sala: Oh, golly. I don’t know. Probably let’s see. This is going to be 23 to come out in 2024. I’m guessing unless they cram all 3 of them in the last year. in 2024, I would say the 5th one, from the way Sourcebooks has been stringing them out, will probably be published in the first part of 2025.

Jenny Wheeler: They launched quite a long time after you finished writing them. You probably can barely remember writing them by the time they come out?

Sharon Sala: Sometimes… I keep a very detailed journal in each book I write, even when they’re not connected. And it’s easy for me to go back and thumb through my journals and find details and remember.

Jenny Wheeler: The one that we’ll be talking about a bit today is Don’t Look Back. That is book one. But the second one, Last Rites, has just come out. Now,

Cameron Pope is the kind of foundation person you might call it, for the series.

He has been a Special Forces agent in Afghanistan for 10 years. He’s returned banged up like a lot of those men were by their experiences and relishing being withdrawn from society.

And he meets this woman, Rusty Caldwell, who he had a very fleeting meeting with before he went overseas.

She’s had a pretty remarkable career of her own, parallel to his while he’s been away. Tell us a bit about Rusty and Cameron and their relationship.

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Sharon Sala: Sure. Cameron was going to his second tour of Afghanistan and Rusty is a undercover FBI agent and she was going to another one of her jobs and they meet by chance in a hotel lobby and find an instant attraction.

And they agreed not to even give each other’s names because they knew it was going to be a one night thing.

And she called him Soldier Boy. And he called her Angel. And they had the one brief night and parted and were sorry that they lost touch with each other.

They both regretted it the minute they were apart that they hadn’t exchanged names.

But here we are, maybe four years later, and they meet again because the FBI -we call them the feds here in America – the FBI has sent Rusty into the town of Jubilee to help investigate what has turned out to be human trafficking.

Cameron has become like one of the heads of the Pope family. He’s the oldest of the Popes still living.

There’s many older Popes, but they’re all women and grandmothers and aunts. So Cameron’s the main guy here and Rusty is the main woman in his life and they reunite and it’s really good, but they’re also working together to solve this big crime wave that is going through this tourist town.

And Cameron has a most remarkable dog. A white giant German shepherd named Ghost, who he connected with in Afghanistan.

It was just a little puppy and the puppy followed him everywhere and every time they moved, Ghost went with him. And he taught himself to sniff out bombs. So Ghost was a soldier with Cameron in Afghanistan and when he came home, he was Cameron’s buddy for life.

They have a really great relationship. My readers love them.

Ghost – a remarkable white German shepherd

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s wonderful. Do you have animals in your books quite often? From the way you wrote about him… it felt like it. I loved Ghost too.

Actually I myself had a white German shepherd many years ago now, but yeah, I loved Ghost. And then in Last Rites, you introduce the second member you talked about, Aaron.

And that’s got terrific reviews. I looked up some of the reviews and people are already raving about it. They use words like ‘emotionally wrenching,’ ‘sensually appealing,’ ‘edgy and suspenseful,’ ‘hopeful, and endearing.’

That you managed to do all of that in one book! Give us an idea of what happens with Aaron in that Book #2 that’s just out.

Sharon Sala: Sure. To start it off their mother, Shirley was a Pope before she married and the boys have not been raised on Pope Mountain,

She has four sons and her husband was very abusive. And then he committed a crime, and wound up in prison for life.

Shirley and her sons were having a very difficult time existing in this town where they had grown up because of his reputation, so they decided to move home and change their name to her maiden name again.

So, here comes Shirley Pope and four new Popes back to Pope Mountain. Aaron was a police officer in Conway, Arkansas, where they lived before and after their father committed such atrocious crimes, they were ostracized and Aaron lost his job.

He finally goes back to work again as a policeman in Jubilee and finds his place there.

Sharon Sala – an action adventure junkie

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. What do you enjoy about romantic suspense?

Sharon Sala: I’m an action adventure junkie. I would watch Terminator 20 before I’d watch one more Bridget Jones Diary. I like the action. I like the drama. I like that there’s justice.

I always have to have good winning out over evil. I never let the bad guys get away with anything. I have no problem killing them. None whatsoever. It’s really good work.

I don’t never have to see a psychiatrist because I just get it all out in the books. Get rid of them that way.

Aaron meets a really sweet woman who helps them solve an almost 200-year-old mystery in their family.

When she finds a journal that belonged to the first Brendan the tragedy in that story, I won’t tell it all because I don’t want to give it away, is that they didn’t know until they found the journal that Brendan’s little Chickasaw wife had gone up a mountain to pick berries one day and never came back down.

They never knew what happened to her. She disappeared. And so that journal helps the family in this day and time solve the mystery and find her remains. And Last Rites is putting her to rest.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s fantastic. Now you change gears when you move to the other solid stream of your career and that’s the romance. The most recent book in your romance stream is The Next Best Day.

That’s a warm hearted second chance romance about a school teacher who has a very tough beginning in life and a solo dad police officer.

They both had their wounds in life and they meet in a small town in the South. I wondered if writing those books gave you a great, like almost a holiday going to the beach, after the romantic suspense.

Sharon’s romance always has drama

Sharon Sala: I do like to switch up genres. It’s relaxing to do that. And it gives me a fresh aspect to start from.

My daughter is the school teacher. She’s the 4th generation school teacher in my family. I skipped it. I’m the one who didn’t become a teacher, but I patterned the heroine in that book after my daughter’s life.

And after the things that they go through, like there is a lockdown.

There’s a school shooting in that book. There’s tragedy in that book. There’s betrayal in that book. I can’t write just a romance.

My stuff will have drama in it regardless, even no matter what they call it, I’m going to have drama in a story.

I just can’t not.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fabulous. There’s lots of dialogue, both Sam Youngblood’s girls, the police officer’s two young girls, plus the children in the classroom.

Terrific dialogue with the kids, really snappy, smart dialogue from these kids. And it has got a real ring of truth to it. I wondered if you saw a lot of children in your life or whether you’ve observed your daughter, but that comes through very strongly.

The truths that come from children

Sharon Sala: I’m a mother and a grandmother of four, and I helped raise my niece after my sister died. I’ve been surrounded by children all my life.

I worked at a public school for eight years. And my daughter has been a kindergarten and pre K teacher – that’s four year olds, five year olds, six year olds for her entire teaching existence, a little over 25 years,.

I hear her stories all the time. I know these kids forwards and backwards, and this is just true of their innocence in answering, they don’t lie, the truth comes out whether you’re ready to hear it or not.

That I know.

Jenny Wheeler: No filter, as they say,

Sharon Sala: Absolutely none. Sure,

Jenny Wheeler: And Sam Youngblood? obviously the name indicates that he’s got Native American descent, although the story doesn’t really go into that in a long, big way.

And I noticed that you mentioned with Last Rites that a Chickasaw wife is involved and you’ve got some Native American background yourself. Do you like to include Native Americans in your stories?

Sharon’s Native American heritage

Sharon Sala: Back in the day if there was a Native American in a romance book, then it was within a tribe, and in this day and time, they’re everywhere.

It stands to reason that a policeman could be a Native American just like he could be an Italian, or a or a Jewish person, or a Baptist preacher, you just don’t know, and it shouldn’t matter, you know what an ethnicity is for a character, at least not to me, and I’m very proud of my Native American heritage.

I don’t have enough blood to belong to tribal stuff anymore, but I have a great grandmother who was three quarter Cherokee and another great grandmother -both on my daddy’s side, who’s Cree.

She was from the Canadian, from the northern tribes. So those are my ancestors. And then my daughter, my granddaughters all belong to the Muskogee tribe.

So here in Oklahoma, to be Indian is normal. There’s way more sometimes and than people know, and we’re just milling around and walking around and everybody just sees what they see, and I just want them to know that. Indians are regular people. They don’t live on reservations here.

We don’t have teepees and whatever, we’re just people. And I want them to just be people in my stories and honor them.

Jenny Wheeler: You have honored that tradition yourself in several non-fiction books you’ve written, and I’d just like to ask you about how that heritage might have influenced your writing and the way you approach it.

Sharon Sala: I know that my daddy was the storyteller of the family. He was one of six brothers, and our family was huge, it was like a clan.

Every time we’d get together, he was the one who was telling the jokes and telling the stories. And his brother would say, ‘Doc, tell about the time…’ and daddy would start a story over again.

I know that storytelling is a traditional part of Native American tribes, oral history is how history is kept. And so I like to think that’s me continuing the bloodline of storytelling.

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Sharon Sala – Romantic Suspense Queen