Now available from Montlake Romance is the romantic suspense novel Black Diamond, book two in the Wilds of the Bayou Series by author Susannah Sandlin.
eBook 1, Wild Man’s Curse, on Sale Through the End of October
for $1.99 at Amazon
The author has taken a few minutes out of her busy schedule for a Q&A about her newest novel.
When did you become interested in storytelling?
Until six or seven years ago, I was a career journalist, so I have been a storyteller since I co-founded my high school literary magazine more years ago than I care to admit. I wrote my first novel in 2009 as an exercise in turning my own experiences as a New Orleanian during Hurricane Katrina into a fantasy story. I got hooked on fiction-writing as I stumbled my way through that first book, and just kept going!
What was your first book/story published?
That first novel was also my first published novel Royal Street was the first in the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series and was published under the name Suzanne Johnson. Book five in that series comes out next month! I was incredibly blessed to have gotten a great agent and then get published my first time out.
What inspired you to write Black Diamond?
I began a new series, Wilds of the Bayou, this past spring with Wild Man’s Curse. The series is about a team of wildlife enforcement agents (i.e., highly trained game wardens) working in rural, bayou- and marsh-covered Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Each book features a different agent, a different case, a different romance, so they can stand alone. I knew I wanted to write about agent Jena Sinclair, a rare female game warden, and began reading about the rash of dangerous synthetic opioid drugs coming into the U.S. these days—“bath salt drugs,” they’re called. I started thinking about how someone might try moving drugs into and through this rural parish, which sits halfway between Houston and New Orleans, and then how my wildlife agents might get caught up in it. Add a mysterious, reclusive hero, and Black Diamond was born!
What character in Black Diamond is the most/least like you, and in what ways?