Thursday Thirteen--things about Flo Fitzpatrick

Kate says: soon after I got The Call from Kensington, someone told me about Flo, who sold on the same day--both of us sold because of the NJRWA conference. No wonder I have pleasant associations with the woman. I'm going to feature authors on Thursday and it makes sense I'd start with Flo since we started together.

1. Flo Fitzpatrick was born in Washington DC (just like me!) and is tired of officious DMV type people who see her birth certificate and want to know which state the District of Columbia is in. (just like me!) . . . She doesn't update her webpage often enough.

2. Her Kensington books are Ghost of a Chance and Hot Stuff, a book she wrote in a couple of months. (About the same time I was writing my book in a month, only she was smart enough to read her contract so she got started earlier.) Hot Stuff got a 4.5 GOLD star review at RT and was nominated for best 2005 Romantic Suspense. She has another book, Sweet Dreams, with Harris and Hilliard.

3. She's trying to decide if she should call herself a romantic mystery writer of comedy or a comic mystery romance writer. Or something. Some combo of those words.

4. She has two dogs, Huckleberry and Lucy. She calls them border collie wannabes. Because of Lucy, Flo has to buy extra shower curtain liners. Lucy shreds them during thunderstorms or fireworks.

5. Flo has a Masters in Theatre, a Bachelors in Dance and wants to get into the cabaret scene. She often sets her books in the theatre because she knows that world.

6. She's currently living in New York half a block from a great park for the dogs.

7. Well, damn. I was cleaning this stuff up but then hit publish by accident, so now I'm going to just use the funky note form she sent me. Lazy Kate.

8. Flo is working on: My agent is contacting publishers for what we plan to be the first in a mystery series, so I'm working on book two of that series, but also have a few chapters of a time-travel, plus a women's fiction featuring a "mid-life" heroine. The series will be fun. My heroine, Pepper Ryan, "hears" ghosts - through music.

The first book is set in Prague, where Pepper bonds with the ghost of a flute player who created a truly magic flute for Mozart' s opera, The Magic Flute. Naturally, the musician was murdered 200 years ago, and the flute - poof! Vanished. I've created a sidekick for Pepper named Bambi, who looks like a 6'2" version of Cher, and the sense of humor of Shrek mixed with Jack Sparrow and the smarts of a Mensa president. I'm excited about this - ready to get to book two!

9. Favorite movies: Too many to list, although I can't go wrong with anything with Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. And I love Galaxy Quest and Kate and Leopold (except for Meg Ryan's hair) and Shrek 1 and 2 (haven't seen 3) and Pirates of Caribbean 1 (haven't seen 3 and 2 needed more Johnny Depp!)

10. Favorite actors: Kevin Costner KLINE (see comments) is right up there on my OH YEA! List with Mr. Depp, Hugh Jackman, Colin Firth and Ryan Gosling.

11. Favorite authors: All the 'oldies' like Mary Stewart and Helen MacInnes and Daphne DuMaurier. All-time favorite though is Elizabeth Peters aka Barbara Michaels. I re-read all of these ladies all the time, but when I'm really down, I grab Elizabeth Peters's Jackie Kirby or Vicky Bliss series and sack out with a bag of chips and ignore the rest of the world. I can't seem to just read one of the series when I do that though. Have to go all the way through both.

12. Hot Stuff is optioned for film (so is an unpubbed manuscript, Cold as Ice.) Kate says: We're not sure what that means, but we do like the way that sounds.

13. Flo's current new release, Haunting Melody is an ebook at Cerridwen

here's a blurb:

2007: A week ago Melody was designing costumes for an off-Broadway show, wlking her dog in the rain and dealing with a ghost in her apartment. She never imagined she'd travel through time and land in the New Amsterdam Theatre, circa 1919. She never thought she'd be labeled a spy for a tabloid newspaper by a handsome, arrogant stagehand.

1919: A week ago Briley MacIntyre was painting set pieces for the latest Ziegfeld Follies production. He never expected to find a spunky red-haired beauty lurking in the wings of the New Amsterdam Theatre. He never believed he could fall for a girl he's convinced works for Broadway Brevities, the local scandal rag specializing in nasty gossip about theatre folk. Melody and Briley never anticipated they'd be thrown together to track down missing Follies company members. Or that they'd uncover a mysterious and deadly cult dedicated to the Egyptian god Ptah. Neither Melody nor Briley ever dreamed they could fall so deeply in love with someone out of their own time. Someone who would chase away the ghosts of their pasts. They never thought they were in danger of losing their lives.

Go on, read an excerpt. You know you want to.