Now that I have added “breast cancer survivor” to my bio, it’s time to get back to writing.

I’ve been doing the final edits on my current novel, Grandpa’s Keys. I have to say, I’m loving what I wrote. Except when I had brain fog and wrote the same three chapters twice! I must have thought the material warranted multiple appearances! Caught the problem and now I only have one version in my manuscript.

Please let me introduce the main character, DEA Agent Sa-li Ma, the leader of a multi-jurisdictional task force. Ma, as he is known to his friends, is a 6’2″ Chinese-American born and raised in San Francisco.  He’s at least a sixth-generation American, but he’s not certain how many generations preceded him. Not that it matters. He’s in his early forties.

As the novel opens, Ma is a widower with a five-year-old daughter, Maggie Rose. His wife was an FBI agent who was killed by a drunk driver a month before the story unfolds. Ma and his daughter are in the process of moving from San Francisco to Roanoke, VA where he will head up a task force chartered with stopping the drug trade coming north on I-81 and illegal guns going south through Virginia towards Mexico.

Ma’s task force consists of three FBI agents, an ATF agent, and himself. Besides the feds, he is supposed to have local representatives from the State Police and Roanoke City Police. This doesn’t go smoothly, because several of the locals resent the arrival of the feds. It’s Ma’s challenge to balance the task force, identify the local bad guys, and set traps to capture him. All without knowing a soul when he arrives in Roanoke.

Ma meets a local attorney who manages his late wife’s grandfather’s estate. Got that? Two people who are important to the story are dead before page one. Ma learns that part of his inheritance is a box of keys. Another is a series of letters hidden around the grandfather’s house which supposedly contain clues to the identity of the bad guys.

All of this while he still grieves the loss of his wife, tries to help his daughter through her grief, and gets them both settled in to a new town. While Ma may feel like a stranger in a strange land, it’s Maggie Rose who becomes his guiding star and helps ground him simply by being five.

So, you have the first two main characters in Grandpa’s Keys, Ma and Maggie Rose. In my next post I’ll introduce another member of the federal task force and his family.

Are you interested yet? As I finish my final edits, I hope to tease you into wanting to read the book.

Oh, and the boys are back in town. See picture.