Getting Real - Medium Rare, Book 2, Ramos Family Trilogy

For the past four or five years I’ve been writing stories about Konigsburg, Texas. It’s a Hill Country town with lots of hunky guys and strong women. It’s also imaginary, which makes it really easy to write about. Need a winery outside town? No problem. Need a hideout for some inept bad guys? Got it. Towns you invent can provide you with everything you need just when you need it. All you have to do is remember what you called that street the last time you had the heroine walk up it.

But when I decided to do a trilogy of stories about a family of mediums, I didn’t want to set them in Konigsburg for a lot of reasons. I wanted someplace real and someplace spooky. Someplace you could actually visit if you were curious, and a place you could believe harbored a ghost or two. I settled on San Antonio’s King William District, one of the town’s oldest surviving neighborhoods (some older San Antonio districts were wiped out in disastrous floods). And there went all the convenience of having my very own town to play with.

You see, when you’re dealing with a real place, you have to respect the real details. For example, I couldn’t make up street names anymore. King William has streets and they have names. If I wanted my characters to walk along the river I had to specify that they were walking along Washington and not, say, Riverside. And they had to cross the river over real bridges, not something I concocted for the purpose of getting them over the water (fortunately for me, King William has the Johnson Street Footbridge—a really cool way of getting across the San Antonio River).

Moreover, I needed to be true to the way King William actually looks, its mixture of Victorian limestone mansions and smaller, woodframe houses from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This wasn’t hard when I lived in San Antonio—all I had to do was take a drive through the District to get a feel for it. But now I live in Colorado, and reminding myself about what the District looks like required finding photos on line of the things I needed to see (for a taste of King William, you can check out my Pinterest board).

Fortunately for someone who wants to write about the district, King William is a full service location. Along with the Victorian mansions, perfect for ghostly visitations, it also has the Blue Star Arts District with its cafes and galleries and the Southtown district with its boutiques and funky clubs. And I was able to create a few things without doing to much damage to reality. My characters love to have dinner at funky cafes along the San Antonio River, for example, and I’ve created a couple that fit the bill.

In the end, I enjoyed my stay in King William a lot. I hope you’ll stop by and visit sometime, or at least visit my family of mediums.

Here’s the blurb for Medium Rare, Book 2 in the Ramos Family/Medium Trilogy, released tomorrow by Berkley InterMix:

Medium Rare

There are no skeletons in her closet…only ghosts

Rose Ramos was a reference librarian, until she inherited her grandmother’s house—and the family talent for connecting with the other side…

Moving into the lovely Victorian in San Antonio’s King William District is a dream come true for Rose—and also a nightmare. That’s the only explanation she has for the man hovering above her bed. But Skag is a ghost who’s been part of Rose’s family for generations. And now he’s all hers.
When Evan Delwin, a reporter out to debunk the city’s newest celebrity, posts an ad looking for a research assistant to investigate a famous medium making his home in San Antonio, Skag suggests that Rose apply for the job. Delving into the dark side has its own dangers for Rose—including trying to resist Delwin’s manly charms. But as the investigation draws them closer together, the deadly currents surrounding the medium threaten to destroy them all…

And here's a quick excerpt:

His lips drifted down the side of her throat, leaving liquid heat and need where he touched. His hands moved along the sides of her body, stroking lines of fire along her breasts, her belly, her hips.

“Rose,” he murmured against her ear, “Rosie.”

A deep ache began throbbing low in her body, and she cupped her hands on either side of his face, pulling his mouth back to hers.

His lips moved against hers again, his tongue slipping in. She tangled her fingers in his hair, rasping her own tongue along his.

Her heart rate accelerated almost painfully. Her clothes felt too tight, and there were far too many of them. She wanted to pull them off and toss them at her feet. No, she wanted him to pull them off and toss them—anywhere.

She moved her hands to his chest, fingers tugging at the buttons on his chambray shirt. His hands moved to her waist, jerking her T-shirt free and moving to the button on her shorts.

Something hard hit the window with a shuddering thump that seemed to echo throughout the room.

She jerked back from his embrace as Helen galloped into the room beside them, snarling at the curtains.

“What the hell?” Evan flipped his shirt back over his chest, but not before she’d seen a sizzling expanse of muscle and dark hair.

Well, damn!

She turned to check the front windows. A crack ran down the entire length of one of them, smaller cracks radiating from the center.

Helen danced in front of the lacy sheers, barking frantically now.

“Helen, cut it out,” Rose murmured, moving beside her. The fog still swirled, silvery and dense, just beyond the glass. She leaned forward.

A large black object ricocheted off the window next to her, shuddering the glass in the wooden frame.


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