My “Thrilling” Fiction

Way, way back—after I wrote The Spy Who Kissed Me and while I was still working on Do Wah Diddy Die—I wrote a thriller called The Last Enemy. 

I was looking through it not long ago and had some “feels” as memories came flooding back. 

The Last Enemy is my second published novel, so if you’ve been reading my later stuff and picked this up, you might feel a bit of those “feels,” too. 

How The Last Enemy (and the rest of the Lonesome Lawmen series) are a bit different from my current books:

1. Darker tone—though still with a sense of humor. When I wrote them, I was still finding my writing “legs,” my style, and my voice. 

2. More violence. I never wrote as gory as some authors, but compared to my Big Uneasy books, there is a lot more blood splatter. 

3. While these books close the door on any sex scenes, I think the sexual tension is higher, as is the angst. 

I’m very proud of the series, which were picked up (for a time) by a library publisher. But I made the conscious decision to move away from thrillers and such. I wanted to find a middle ground between my slapstick comedy-romance-suspense (The Spy Who Kissed Me and Do Wah Diddy Die) and these thrillers.

So that’s how the Big Uneasy came into being. So here are some ways my current mystery series is like the Lonesome Lawmen:

1. A strong sense of humor to lighten the tension.

2. Thrilling and often high adventure action and adventure, but without the darker tones.

3. Way less gore and lower body count.

I realized I love writing action and adventure, which is how I veered into time travel and scifi, but that’s a different blog post. 🙄

Will I ever write more in the Lonesome Lawmen series? I’m honestly not sure. When I was browsing through The Last Enemy, I missed the characters! But for me, time is always an issue, too. 

I’m currently writing two main series (The Big Uneasy and Project Enterprise), with a side series (Out of Time). And I have a list of other books I’d like to write if I live long enough. For instance, my Uneasy Future series (set in future New Orleans) is on that list. 

I am always interested in reader feedback, but in the end, it is often economics that informs some of my project choices. I always write a book that I’d want to read, but I also have to take into account whether readers will buy it. 

If you want to “encourage” me to write a particular book or another book in a series, you can do that by sharing that book with other readers. And of course, I love getting reviews, which make me feel good and also tell advertising sites that readers love my books so they’ll give. me ad space. 

If you’ve read this blog this far, thank you! And if you haven’t yet, I hope you’ll give my Lonesome Lawmen a look to see if they are something you’d like to read.

Perilously yours,

Pauline