Dime  Sheppard is very excited that her first novel is coming out this week, Dime is a writer and former barista, film student, waitress, Spanish teacher, vineyard labourer, bilingual interpreter and marketing manager. She has a degree in English literature, and also spent seven years working for an NGO, mostly in South America.

This means she has diverse skills: she can string a sentence together, and she can also pee in the desert while fending off a baby goat, cook a delicious meal for thirty people with little more than potatoes and oregano, kill a mouse with her bare hands (or a brick, anyway), dig a bogged truck out of metre-deep mud with a broken teacup, and shower in cold water in the dead of winter without a murmur.

She loves reading, swimming, and laughing at her dog (who is ridiculous), and she has a weakness for flat whites and fried dumplings and loves a perfect beach day.

Dime describes her first novel as being a smart and witty romance with the main  character being  crime novelist, Evie Howland.

Evie is meant to be planning a wedding to adorable billionaire Daniel Bradley, but she is seriously snarled in the sixteenth book of her successful crime series.

In fact, her characters  are becoming almost impossible to wrangle: NYPD detective Carolyn Harding is volatile after a messy divorce, and Detective Jay Ryan has that heated look in his blue eyes again. They’re both sick of being written. And frankly they’re getting a little…physical. Evie is beginning to wonder if she’s ever going to finish Book Sixteen and get them back into fiction where they belong.

But when a disturbingly familiar homicide surfaces in the city papers, it seems as if other, darker characters might have crossed the fiction frontier too. In which case, Evie is in a lot of real-life trouble.

If she’s going to survive it, Evie must face her own worst fears, and learn that real love can be the best way of writing her own story. But can she change the ending?

Dime says that readers familiar with Janet Evanovich’s action-packed Stephanie Plum novels, or Mary Stewart’s stylish romantic suspense should enjoy her book. She says that she is hard at work on the sequel.

Dime Sheppard’s CRIME WRITER comes out on Friday October 1, 2021 and will be available in paperback and e-book, and everywhere online where you can buy good books.

Lynne Lancaster’s review of the novel is the next post.

 

 

Crime Writer is her first novel, and its sequel is coming soon.