Summer Time

It's my favorite! Shorts and painted toe nails. Bike rides and beach reads. Life slows, yet somehow feels fuller. The early sunrise and late sunsets makes living long and easy. This summer marks my second year of retirement. Like all good things, it goes fast - too fast. And, per usual Lyn, I have a long list of what I want to do with these short months of high skies and temperatures. Time with family, a week at the beach, a girls trip, time to make memories with friends and family, and lots of reading and writing.

I'm also trying something new to me, and I know you'll all be surprised. I'm writing two books at the same time.

Book two of Hidden Among Secrets. It's coming along, I'm five chapters in, and here are a few secrets that I'm sharing FIRST with you. Subscribed Members will have access to chapter snippets when they are fully edited - probably in July.

Book Two - Hidden Among Strangers

(a maybe title for now)

Four Years Later - Gianna and Seth are still engaged. For reasons she can’t fully explain, Gianna keeps pushing back the date and dodging every attempt at wedding planning. Even with a child together—and despite the fierce, almost reckless passion that still burns between them—she won’t commit. Their three‑year‑old daughter, RosaluAnn—Rosi—is the center of their world. She’s the fragile thread holding their complicated love together. But just as Gianna finally decides she’s ready to say “I do,” tragedy steps in and shatters everything.

Stella’s life has transformed as well. Her days as a Philadelphia public defender are over, and she is now serving as an elected state senator in Harrisburg. When Pennsylvania U.S. senator, Madeline Clark, vanishes without a trace, the governor appoints Stella to fill her seat. The public is told it’s a routine political move, but inside Capitol Hill, whispers suggest the senator's disappearance wasn’t random—and that choosing Stella, Clark's longtime friend and Stella's mentor, was no coincidence.

Meanwhile, Trinity is living in a small rooftop apartment in New York City, three floors up from Kerry and André. Here, she begins to carve out a fragile sense of freedom—something finally separate from the shame and control that once defined her. But everything shifts the night she crosses paths with a stranger on the subway, a man whose brief presence unsettles her in ways she can’t explain. The mysterious woman Andre' obsessively paints on the dozens of canvas hidden in his studio is somehow connected, and Trinity finds herself pulled into a triangle of danger and intrigue. What unravels next makes the secrets from Hidden Among Secrets (Book One) look tame.

The Substitute

My second writing project—another domestic suspense novel—is completely separate from the Hidden series. It’s called The Substitute. It's shorter than Hidden and very fast‑paced. Darkly funny, and threaded with unnerving twists, it centers on a murder that will leave readers guessing until the final reveal.

Teachers deserve a day off, right? That’s what substitutes are for. But they're not real teachers—everyone knows that. But still, they trusted her to step in for them, just for a day… or two. Trusted her to follow their lesson plans. To teach their students. To slide in and out of their routines without question. But she was clever—so clever that no one noticed what she noticed, or what she quietly kept to herself, until it all fell apart.

When a teacher at the high school is found dead, suspicion, blame, and fingers immediately point to the substitute. But every teacher in that building is hiding something—secrets tucked into the very spaces only she moves through. Alone in their classrooms, she sits at their desks, rifles through their files, reads the notes they tear to pieces and toss in the trash. She pockets the missing items no one ever reports—keys, hall passes, family photos of vacations, children, the dog. She studies the scribbles in their planners, the passwords curling on sticky notes, the private messages accidently left open on screens. She knows the smell of their coffee mugs, the stains on their carpets, the gossip they trade in the faculty room, and the threats they mutter under their breath when no one else is listening. And she knows that every one of them had a motive for murder. But of course, so did she.

Not sure if there will be a July blog with all the writing I'm doing. Hoping The Substitute will be finished by September and Hidden, Book Two, will be another January release. Subscribe today, then drop me a line about your summer plans. Hope they include a spicy beach read hotter than the sand beneath your feet. Keep turning those pages.