About the Book
Book: A Storm of Doubts
Author: JPC Allen
Genre: YA cozy mystery
Release date: March 1, 2024
Her dad said nothing could hurt their relationship. But what if he isn’t her dad?
Summer gets off to a rocky start for twenty-year-old Rae Riley when the ex-wife of family friend Jason Carlisle claims their youngest child isn’t his and Rae’s con man uncle Troy returns to Marlin County, Ohio. Rae is already at odds with her father, Sheriff Walter “Mal” Malinowski, over her desire to help people in trouble. When she extends that help to Troy and Jason’s ex-wife, Ashley, she and Mal clash even more.
Then Ashley disappears, and Jason and his brother Rick are the main suspects. As Rae and her aunt Carrie, a private investigator hired to protect Jason’s kids, work to discover what really happened to Ashley, Rae wrestles with Troy’s insinuations that she may be calling the wrong Malinowski “Dad.”
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About the Author
JPC Allen started her writing career in second grade with an homage to Scooby Doo. She’s been tracking down mysteries ever since. Her Christmas mystery “A Rose from the Ashes” was the first Rae Riley mystery and a Selah-finalist at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference in 2020. Her first Rae Riley novel, A Shadow on the Snow, released in 2021. Online, she offer tips and prompts to ignite the creative spark in every kind of writer. She also leads workshops for tweens, teens and adults, encouraging them to discover the adventure of writing. Coming from a long line of Mountaineers, she’s a life-long Buckeye.
More form JPC
Readers Deserve a Reward
I may be unusual, or just plain weird, but thinking of my ending first is the common way I approach a new story. It seems to help me to know my destination before I set out on the adventure of writing a story. I can take any number of routes to reach my destination and wandering around and exploring detours is a lot of the fun of writing. But by keeping my destination in mind, I don’t get lost. Or at least, not easily.
The other thing I keep in mind about my ending is that it’s a reward for the reader. I’m relatively new to publishing and not well known. So when readers take a chance on one of my stories, I believe it’s my job to reward their risk with an atypical, satisfying ending. Now I do work hard to make the whole story satisfying with things like an attention-grabbing opening and tension-building scenes. But endings, I think, are special to readers. This is the part that lingers in their minds when they close the book–whether it’s a sense of satisfaction, like the pleased feeling you have after a delicious meal, or anger or exasperation because the ending let them down.
I work to make all parts of the ending satisfying–the climax, denouement or wrap-up, and the last lines. For the climax, readers of my mysteries deserve more thant just the good guys solving the puzzle and catching the bad guy. I plan an action-packed, suspenseful climax that has readers living the final confrontation with the main character and it resolves itself in a way that, I hope, surprises readers.
Denouements are so critical to mysteries, when the detective explains how he solved the case. But they can also be deadly dull because the explanation needs to be thorough to meet the expectations of mystery fans. So in A Storm of Doubts, I split up the explanation–a lot of it is revealed during the climax, so I don’t bore readers by piling up a discussion of the solution in one chapter.
The final scene and last lines are areas I spend a good deal of thought on. Even if this scene was my inspiration for the entire story, how it plays in my head and how it plays on the page are two very different things. I also think the last scene and lines have a certain rhythm to them, like the final bars of a song. My job is make the scene round off the story without staying too long in it.
So when you read A Storm of Doubts, I’d love to know what you think of the ending. Because you do deserve a reward.
Author Interview with JPC
JPC: Most of my characters are special to me. Like a doting mother, I find it hard to choose just one. But Rae's father Mal and her great-grandfather Walter are two of my absolute favorites. They are very complicated with many layers to their backstory and personalities, and it's a joy to release them into a story and see what they will do. In many ways, I haven't created them. I've discovered them, especially Walter, and that's a delight for any writer of fiction.
Q: Do you have a favorite quote from this novel?
JPC: I have several, but I think my favorite is this one from Mal, the sheriff of their county. "But I'm a parent, Rae. I do dumb every day."
I can't explain this quote because it comes at the end of my novel, but I love it because I've faced this realization with my kids. For example, when my youngest was 3, he didn't like sleeping in his bed. So he made a pile of blankets on the floor and slept on that. One night, he was acting up and not settling down to sleep. I yelled, in all seriousness, "Go to your nest!" I've taken action that seemed so necessary at the time, but then when I look back, I think, "Good grief, did I really do that?"
Q: What do you hope readers take away from this novel?
JPC: It depends on what they want to take away from it. If readers want an entertaining mystery they can escape into, I provide that. If they want to live the mystery with Rae and her family, I provide that. If they want to go deeper, the book has a theme of trust and about how, when we're pushed to the wall, we have to decide whether we will believe what our Father has said.
Q: How many bookshelves are in your home?
JPC: I love this question! And since I'd never thought about it before, I had to go count. Most of the shelves are in our loft overlooking our living room. These line one wall. We have 7 sets of shelves, totaling 48 shelves. My youngest has 1 bookshelf in his bedroom. Then there are various stashes of books in drawers and under and around beds, along with a shelf of baby books I can't part with in the basement. There's the book table, where I used to keep library books, which eventually migrate under beds. And the butternut table I got from my grandparents, which holds several Bibles and other religious books. Actually, just about any horizontal surface in our house can count as a bookshelf.
JPC: You can follow me at Amazon, Goodreads, Bookbub, Facebook, either on my author page or Rae Riley Mysteries page, and Instagram. To get my latest writing news first as well as exclusive stories and giveaways, sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar of this page.
Blog Stops
Stories By Gina, May 4 (Author Interview)
Book Reviews From an Avid Reader, May 5
Artistic Nobody, May 6 (Author Interview)
Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy, May 7
Jodie Wolfe – Stories Where Hope and Quirky Meet, May 8 (Author Interview)
The Lofty Pages, May 8
Beauty in the Binding, May 9 (Author Interview)
Library Lady’s Kid Lit, May 10
Guild Master, May 11 (Author Interview)
Locks, Hooks and Books, May 12
A Reader’s Brain , May 13 (Author Interview)
For Him and My Family, May 13
Texas Book-aholic, May 14
For the Love of Literature, May 15 (Author Interview)
Debbie’s Dusty Deliberations, May 16
Vicky Sluiter, May 17 (Author Interview)
Giveaway
To celebrate her tour, JPC is giving away the grand prize package of all four books in the Rae Riley mystery series, a $25 Amazon gift card, and an Ohio tumbler with lid filled with buckeye candies!!
Be sure to comment on the blog stops for nine extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.
Link for giveaway: https://promosimple.com/ps/2b587/a-storm-of-doubts-celebration-tour-giveaway
