Her “Loss” Is Our Gain

Congratulations are due January Magazine editor and Rap Sheet regular Linda L. Richards, whose new novel, Calculated Loss, hit bookstores yesterday. The third entry in her Madeline Carter series (following 2004’s Mad Money and 2005’s The Next Ex), Calculated Loss finds day trader and amateur sleuth Carter being drawn to Vancouver, British Columbia, by the reported suicide of her ex-hubby, celebrity chef Braydon Gauthier. However, when she hears that Gauthier did himself in with a last repast of poison-packed duck à l’orange, Moroccan couscous risotto, and a “big, beefy Shiraz,” Carter has no doubt that this wasn’t a case of suicide. But nobody takes her suspicions seriously, so it’s up to our heroine to dig through the leftovers of Gauthier’s life for proof of foul play.

Writing in her personal blog, Richards muses on the otherworldly experience of welcoming one’s new book into the world:

There is something extraordinary about holding in your hands--or seeing in a library or bookstore, or hearing about from readers, or reading about on the Web or ...--this whole thing that started life as a thought, or not even. It started out as a shadow of a thought, a half a handful of ghosts of ideas. And then one day, a box arrives. A box of ideas earthbound in the form of a book. It’s a little like magic: poof! And there you are.

An excerpt from Calculated Loss can be found here.