Listen each Friday, January 18 through February 8 as Linda Rodriguez of Kansas City discusses her point of view as author of the Skeet Bannion mysteries featuring a campus detective of Cherokee heritage. Radio Readers BookBytes are heard at 7:45 a.m. during Morning Edition and again at 6:44 p.m. during All Things Considered.
Born in a small town in Kansas, then taken as an infant to San Diego, Linda lived most of her childhood on the move, following her career-Navy father around—except for three pivotal years in Oklahoma with her paternal extended family, followed by high school graduation in Kansas.
After marriage and three kids, she went back to college and received a BA and MA from the University of Missouri—Kansas City, where she spent many years as an administrator, mostly running the UMKC Women’s Center. That job gave her many great pleasures, including serving on the planning committee and as co-convener of one of the critical area caucuses at Women 2000: Beijing Plus Five at the United Nations.
“I had always wanted to be a writer and novelist, but life got in the way,” Linda says. “I wound up scribbling poetry in spare moments between childcare, work, and school. I became a poet, but my poems always had a story somewhere in them. The narrative impulse dies hard.”
Health problems eventually forced her out of the university career, but it opened the door to writing full time. She published two books of poetry, a cookbook, had two poems read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, and won several awards. “Then I took a deep breath and jumped into the fiction pond,” Linda says. Her novel, Every Last Secret, won the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, was a Barnes & Noble Mystery Pick, was featured by Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book Club, and was a finalist for the International Latino Book Award.
Linda says, “When I started writing my Skeet Bannion series, I wanted to explore Skeet’s character. She, like so many of us, is a good person still tangled up in family issues from her childhood. Skeet stars in my second novel, Every Broken Trust, which was a selection of Las Comadres, as well as in the third novel, Every Hidden Fear. I want to spend more time with her and with my invented town of Brewster, Missouri which takes from so many small towns in Kansas and Missouri that I’ve known.
I love mysteries set in small communities where the detective is a real part of the whole. With Skeet, I have that—and yet, she’s not quite completely a part of it since she always holds a bit of herself back. I don’t know if Skeet will ever get over that. I’ll have to write it to see.”
While writing is her first love, Linda also enjoys knitting lace shawls, spinning alpaca and sheep wool, weaving tapestries, and gardening with herbs and native plants. She is the president of the Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, a founding board member of both The Writers Place and the Latino Writers Collective, and a member of the Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. She’s also part of the Kansas City Cherokee Community and the International Thriller Writers.
Linda lives in Kansas City, Missouri with her husband, Ben, a Plott hound named Dyson, and about a million books.
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/p/home.html
Linda Rodriguez’ Skeet Bannion series:
Every Last Secret
Every Broken Trust
Every Hidden Fear