It’s Official! I Am Now a Mystery/Crime Writer!

Share

Yes, it’s true. I have sold my first ever mystery / crime novel to Pegasus Books—or rather my amazing and inestimable agent has. So, I have now stopped pinching myself and am ready to squee loud and long.

My first Gina Miyoko Mystery—THE ANTIQUITIES HUNTER—will release on October 2, 2018 in hard back.

Let me tell you a little about Gina Suzu Miyoko. She’s five-foot-two, gamine, and weighs eighty-nine pounds in a soggy trench coat. The nickname “Tinkerbell” (or “Tink” for short) has followed her from high school. It’s hard to imagine her riding a Harley named Boris, or packing a baby blue Taurus .357 Magnum. She does both. She’s Gina Miyoko, private eye.

Gina’s is a highly functional if quirky family. Her Japanese-American father, Edmund, is a retired police detective. He’s also the chairman of a Bay Area Sherlock Holmes Society, chews the stem of a Meerschaum pipe that he never lights, and wears a deerstalker cap while reading the mystery novels to which he is addicted. Her mother—a professor of Slavic culture and folklore at SFSU—carefully maintains a thick “moose and squirrel” accent (thicker, Ed Miyoko claims, than when he met her) writes tragic poetry, directs a local theatre group, and collects materia magica from all over the world. This includes a vast collection of obereg (Russian for good luck charms) one of which she insists Gina carry whenever she embarks on a case.  

From these two characters, Gina has inherited a curious mixture of cultural and religious influences, a passion for law enforcement, and a penchant for Russian and Japanese arcana that gives her a unique slant on reality. Styling herself a Russian Orthodox Buddhist, Gina tells herself she’s purely pragmatic, but when it comes to pursuing a case, she hedges her bets—there is always an obereg somewhere on her petite person. Oh, and she wears a signature tattoo on her right hip—a Russian Orthodox Buddha.

She may look like a doll, but his exotic, Hog-riding, pistol-packing young woman is not to be judged by her stature.

Next time—more on Tink’s first major adventure.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *