Where the Bones Are Buried by Jeanne Matthews - Interview Partners In Crime Blog Tour

Welcome to my stop on the Where The Bones Are Buried Blog tour.
Enjoy all the blog tour details and my interview with Jeanne Matthews.
Then be sure and enter the Rafflecopter giveaway below for a box of books!!!

Where the Bones Are Buried

by Jeanne Mathews

on Tour March 1-31, 2015

Book Details:

Genre: Mystery
Published by: Poisoned Pen Press
Publication Date: January 6, 2015
Number of Pages: 288
ISBN: 9781464203466
Purchase Links:

Synopsis:

Dinah Pelerin has finally put her life in order. Living in Berlin with her boyfriend Thor, she has landed a job teaching Native American cultures at the university. She’s never felt happier. And then her Seminole mother Swan shows up with a crazy scheme to blackmail a German tax dodger and dredges up a secret Dinah has kept hidden from the IRS and from straight-arrow Norwegian Thor, a former cop now with hush-hush international duties.
Germans harbor a century-long fascination with the American Wild West and American Indians. Some enthusiasts dress up as Indians and adopt Indian names. Like Der Indianer Club which has invited Swan to a powwow where she plans to meet her blackmail victim. Dinah tries to head heroff, but arrives at the scene too late. A man has been killed and scalped and Swan quickly becomes the prime suspect. Torn between love for her mother and dismay at her incessant lies, Dinah sets out to find the killer—hoping the killer doesn’t turn out to share her DNA. But Swan isn’t the only liar. Everyone is lying about something. Margaret,Swan’s dead ex-husband’s former wife, come to the city with Swan. Dinah’s teen-age “ward.” Thor. Especially Dinah. Ghosts of Germany’s terrible history haunt Berlin while she faces exorcising a hateful ghost of her own.

Read an excerpt:

Chapter 1
Dinah Pelerin wasn’t used to waking up happy and it scared the daylights out of her. She pulled the blanket to her chin and snuggled close under Thor’s arm. They had known each other for almost ayear, but had moved in together just three weeks ago. With every passing day, her confidence grew that she’d made the right decision. She cared about him more than she’d cared about anyone in a very long time, but the people she cared about had a habit of turning into liars or dying. Thor was too honest to lie.
She said, “I wish you didn’t have to go. It’s not fair. I haven’t learned my way around the city yet and the only person I know besides you is the wacko across the hall.”
“You have a dozen Berlin guide books and street maps and Geert isn’t a wacko. He’s the resident caretaker. If the lights go off or the furnace dies, tell him and he’ll take care of the problem. Anyway, I’ll only be away for five days. Norwegian Intelligence can’t function without my unerring wisdom.”
“Can’t you send your unerring wisdom to them in an email?”
“I’m glad you’ll miss me, kjære, but I have my orders.” He looked at his watch and sat up. “I need to be at the Embassy in an hour. I’m picking up two diplomats who will join me on the flight to Oslo.”
“Just my luck to fall for alatterday James Bond, forever charging off to save the nation.” She placed a hand over her heart. “I could not love thee dear so much loved I not honor more.”
He kissed her in a particularly melting way, then rolled out of bed abruptly and headed for the shower. “Hold that thought.”
“You’re a tease, Thor Ramberg.”
“Like Bond, I leave them begging for more.”
“Them?”
He didn’t hear. The bathroom door snicked shut and she slipped on her robe and padded into the kitchen to make coffee. Rain pelted against the windowpanes and the pedestrians on the Niederwallstrasse down below carried umbrellas and wore their collars turned up like KGB operatives. Until the Wall fell in 1989, this street and the area for miles around was Soviet-dominated East Berlin. Since that time, the Germanys had reunified and Berlin had reinvented itself as the cultural and financial hub of Europe. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the KGB weather.
She shivered. If September was this cold and dreary, she didn’t want to think what winter would bring. But in spite of the gloom, she’d never felt so happy. It seemed that the stars had aligned and for the first time in living memory, every aspect of her life clicked perfectly. Thor was wonderful, her new job asguest lecturer on Native American cultures at Humboldt University was a plum, and the weather aside, Berlin was one of the most exciting cities she’d ever visited. She tried to put the thought of all this happy synchronicity out of her mind lest the gods grow jealous and snatch it away.
She brought in the International Herald Tribune, poured herself a mug of the local Einsteinbrew, and sat down at the kitchen table to read about the turmoil in Greece and Pakistan and Kenya. The world seemed fragmented, a jigsaw of violent factions that refused to fit together and fanatics willing to do anything in furtherance of their cause. She worried about Thor’s work carrying out counterterrorism missions on behalf of his native Norway. He’d almost been killed in Greece last June while investigating a ring of arms traffickers. She had encouraged him to go to law school or return to a less hazardous police job in Norway. But he was a patriot and he craved adventure. She had learned not to try and argue him out of his dream job as an international sleuth.
He breezed into the room in a dark suit and tie, bringing with him the ferny scent of Fitjar soap. With his deep brown eyes and almost black hair, he did look a bit Bond-like – a cross between Sean Connery and Genghis Khan. He was descended from the Sami people of Arctic Scandinavia and he loved cold weather as much as she hated it. He poured himself a cup of coffee and glanced out the window. “Museum weather. You should go to the Pergamon this afternoon. The Gates of Ishtar will start your anthropologist’s juices flowing.”
“It’s on my list.”
“And there’s a market in the platz with local fruits and vegetables and flowers.”
“I’ll check it out.” His tie didn’t need straightening, but she pretended it did, standing ready for a kiss that would have to last her for five days. “I’ll probably spend the day preparing for my first class. I know that most Germans speak English and the ones who sign up for my class will be fluent, but I don’t want to use too many Americanisms or too much jargon.”
“Most Germans under the age of fifty have studied English in school. Even those who say they speak ‘only a little English,’ can talk politics like a senator, which by the way is the German word for senator.”
He was so relaxed and reassuring. Too relaxed? She felt a frisson of superstitious fear. “You will be careful, won’t you? Don’t let the bad guys sneak up on you.”
“I’m off to Oslo, not Kabul.”
Her iPhone erupted in a concatenation of percussive plinking.
Thor took a quick swallow of coffee and set down his mug. “Answer your xylophone. I’ve got to run.”
“No, wait…” she turned toward the phone.
“I’ll call you.” His kiss landed in her hair somewhere in the vicinity of her left ear and he hurried out the door.
Frustrated, she picked up the phone. “Hello.”
“Dinah, is that you? It’s your mother. Your friend Margaret and I are in the Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta waitin’ for our flight. What’s that number, Margaret? Here it is, Air France, seven seven-oh. Don’t we change planes somewhere, Margaret?”
“You’re coming here? To Berlin?”
“What? Good heavens, that’s too little for me to read, Margaret. Anyhow, we’ll be arriving this evenin’ at…what? Can that be right? All right, tomorrow evenin’ at eight-thirty at TXL, which we think is the name of the airport. If you can come get us and put us up for a few days, that’ll be just lovely.”
Dinah fought back a groan. “How long do you plan to be here?”
“That depends, baby. We have a little detective job we need you to help us with.”

Jeanne, hi welcome to The Reading Frenzy. This is a great premise for your novel.
Tell us a little something about it.

At the end of my fourth book, Her Boyfriend’s Bones, Dinah heads to Berlin with her lover Thor, a Norwegian counterintelligence agent assigned as liaison to the Berlin police.  She lands a job teaching Native American cultures at Humboldt University and has never felt happier.  But suddenly her Seminole mother Swan shows up with a crazy scheme to blackmail a German citizen, the ex-partner of her dead ex-husband.  Swan’s dangerous game results in two attempts on her life and threatens to dredge up a guilty secret Dinah has kept hidden from Thor.  The plot thickens when a man is found murdered and scalped in a public park and Swan becomes the prime suspect.  Driven by filial loyalty, Dinah sets out to clear her mother’s name, but her deepest fear is that she may be the killer, after all.

Jeanne the book blurb says that Germans have a fascination with the American Wild West and Native Americans.
Is this a reality, like how popular our Country Music is in Europe of is it just for the benefit of the novel?

It is absolutely true.  Many aficionados have formed der Indianer clubs in which they dress as Indians, adopt Indian names, collect Indian artifacts, and gather for drumming ceremonies and powwows.  Some go so far as to live in teepees in their back gardens, sew their own deerskin clothes, and eschew all technology.  At first, I thought this obsession was a bit nutty, laughable even.  But when these people speak of their affinity and nostalgia for the Comanches and Apaches of long ago, they are touchingly earnest.  It’s an astonishing subculture that defies both time and geography.  Since Dinah is a cultural anthropologist and also part Seminole Indian, the phenomenon seemed a perfect motif for another of her foreign exploits.

Jeanne this novel takes place in Germany.
Did you travel there to conduct research?

Yes, I always visit the countries that I write about.  From the beginning, I intended that Dinah would be a world traveler and journey (along with her creator) to foreign lands.  Her last name, Pelerin, means “pilgrim” in French.  There is an armchair travel aspect to

my books, as I enjoy incorporating some of the interesting cultural and historical information that I learn into my stories.  I went to Berlin in September, 2013, the time in which Where the Bones Are Buried is set.

Jeanne like so many authors your bio reads like a who’s who of careers.
Where did your love of writing stem from.

I do have a somewhat checkered past.  As it turns out, each of my careers has required a different kind of writing.  I wrote advertising copy for a while and, believe me, it’s not easy to make an automatic egg brooder sound glamorous or a can of Alpo sound delicious.  I taught English, Journalism, and Drama to high school seniors, which called for lots of writing and lots of correcting of students’ writing.  And for twenty years, I worked for lawyers and drafted interrogatories and requests for production of documents.  My heart grew weary from all the empty legal phrases and boilerplate.  But through it all, I kept on reading good books, which is how I fell in love with words as a child, and how I learned how satisfying good writing can be.

Jeanne your series star Dinah is an archaeologist.
Why did you choose to give her this profession?

Dinah is fascinated by mythology and the stories that ancient peoples invented to explain the workings of the universe before science came along with all the answers.  Volcanoes, earthquakes, solar eclipses – these things awed and terrified people and gave rise to an impressive array of gods and goddesses.  Dinah has done a few archaeological digs, but her broader interest in cultural anthropology – which is basically the study of humankind and the differences between and among various societies.  That’s the real reason she loves to travel.     

Jeanne you got a great review from Publishers Weekly
What’s your personal feelings on reviews?
Do you read them all, some of them, none of them.

I read some of them.  I try not to get a swelled head over the good ones or break down sobbing at the not-so-good ones.  Of course I’m always pleased when someone says he’s enjoyed one of my books.  But as every writer knows, the reading experience is subjective and not everyone is going to love your particular style or genre.  The important thing is for the writer to love what she’s writing.  Without that passion and enthusiasm for your subject, it’s not worth your time – or anyone else’s.

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.
Good luck with the novel!

Author Bio:

Jeanne Matthews was born and raised in Georgia. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Journalism and has worked as a copywriter, a high school English and Drama teacher, and a paralegal. She currently lives in Renton, Washington with her husband, who is a law professor.

 

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Giveaway:

This is a giveaway hosted by Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tours for Jeanne Mathews & Poisoned Pen Press. There will be one winner of 1 Box of Poisoned Pen Press books including Where the Bones Are Buried. The giveaway begins on Feb 28th, 2015 and runs through April 3rd, 2015. Tour Reviewers are also eligible to host their own giveaway for an ebook copy of Where the Bones Are Buried. All individual giveaway winners must be sent to Gina at Partners in Crime no later than April 3, 2015. a Rafflecopter giveaway
 

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