THE DEADLY BUDDHA--Kate Conway Thriller No. 2 is available now on Amazon

Trapped into writing the life-story of an Oscar-winning Welsh heart-throb, investigative reporter Kate Conway can’t avoid falling in love with the guy—despite discovering the ghastly truth about his conniving mother and her diabolical lover in their quest for The Golden Buddha of Anyang.

Will Kate and her father unearth the final piece of evidence before the Malibu wedding?

THE DEADLY BUDDHA has museums filled with intrigue, swimming pools filled with temptation, a Welsh city filled with disappearing witnesses, crazed helicopter rides—and a 16-year-old Chinese charmer named Zookie, whose sensual body hides the secret of where the billion-dollar Buddha is buried.

CALL A MEETING

When my first novel started to drag I decided to call a meeting. Things were bogged down and I wasn’t sure why. So I sat the major characters down at an imaginary table and asked them what I should do to kick start The Lion and the Eagle, my novel about the Revolutionary War.

The villain was the loudest. Colonel Shrewsbury wanted more page time. He was madly in love with the heroine and wanted a longer love scene. He also wanted me to spend more time in portraying his good side—the love he held for his scullery maid mother banished from the Royal Castle following the episode in the broom closet with the King.

The hero was nice about it. Oliver Morrison  told me he wanted to grow up much faster so we could see and feel more of his hatred for Shrewsbury for killing his mother at the church picnic when he was seven.  He wanted to make sure Emily, the heroine, was at the picnic so she’d be a witness to the cross he carried (literally) after his mother’s death.

Emily was the boldest. She said if she was conflicted by her love of two men she wanted to come out of it with flying colors. She wanted a visible reminder of her rejection of Shrewsbury just before the story’s violent end. When she gallantly suggested he carve his initials in her left breast, how could I refuse?   

We all get stuck now and then.  And we all have our special ways of digging out. Whether it was brilliant or naïve, it worked back then and it still works today.

A Novel About The Korean War?

I was working on my sixth novel and had just finished a single chapter detailing the major character’s being sent to Korea while serving in the U.S. Army. I did this with the full realization of what a friend had told me some years earlier.

He had written a whole novel about the war and had landed an agent who was having a hard time finding a publisher. Finally my friend got his first real clue as to the problem when his manuscript came back for the last time. Atop the submission letter written by his agent were just three words signed cryptically by the latest publisher to reject it.

"Sorry, wrong war."

Huh?  All I could think about was Richard Condon’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, James Michener’s THE BRIDGES OF TOKO-RI, and, more recently, James Brady’s THE BOYS OF AUGUST.

But I was forced to realize that publishers can have prejudices even when it comes to wars and that unpublished novelists have no choice but to pay attention—at least until either we gain the clout that comes with being published or the ability to be cunningly brilliant. 

Kate Walbert in THE GARDENS OF KYOTO deftly weaves a spell about a romance that takes place in the mid-1950s while citing a single but graphic incident during the war in Korea. Her writing and the mood it creates is absolutely intoxicating. I keep the novel handy for inspiration.

And I’m keeping alive my own major character’s experience during the Korean War. All I did was add the scene where his best friend was riddled by enemy machine gun bullets and died in his arms.