ALI MUST THREAD THE NEEDLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.

Mateo Vega, a one-time employee of Ali Reynold’s husband, B. Simpson, has spent the last sixteen years of his life behind bars. According to the courts, he murdered his girlfriend. But Mateo knows that her real killer is still on the loose, and the first thing he’s going to do when he gets a taste of freedom is track him down.

After being granted parole, a wary Mateo approaches Stu Ramey of High Noon Enterprises for a reference letter for a job application, but to his surprise, Stu gives him one better: He asks him to come on board and work for B. once again. Just as Mateo starts his new job, though, chaos breaks out at High Noon—a deadbeat tenant who is in arrears has just fled, and tech expert Cami Lee has gone missing.

As Ali races to both find a connection between the two disappearances and help Mateo clear his name with the help of PI J.P. Beaumont, tragedy strikes in her personal life with lives hanging in the balance.

I write murder mysteries. When Unfinished Business started out with a brutal, decades old murder committed in the wilds of Montana, I wondered where I was going with that. (No, I don’t do outlines.). The next character I met was a convicted killer named Mateo Vega, in a Washington State correctional facility. I encountered him for the first time on the day before he was to be paroled after serving sixteen years for second degree homicide. Wait a minute. Wasn’t I supposed to be writing an Ali Reynolds book? Aren’t they set in Arizona?

Finally Ali and her pals at High Noon Enterprises showed up. And what do you know? Business is booming, and they’re on a hiring spree. It turns out that paroled guy now living in Seattle worked for B. Simpson, Ali’s husband, when he was running another tech company long before he and Ali met. Although Mateo had confessed to second degree homicide in order to avoid the death penalty, he had maintained his innocence ever since. Finding out for sure called for a cold case investigation into his conviction, and that was when I finally made the connection. I just happen to know of someone in Seattle, a retired homicide cop named J.P. Beaumont, who’s been working with a volunteer cold case squad.

There was a problem, though—a serious problem. I have two publishers. The Beaumont, Brady, and Walker Family books and characters are handled by HarperCollins. Ali Reynolds books belong to Simon and Schuster. It’s the publishing world's equivalent of Romeo and Juliet’s Montagues and Capulets. Eventually I was able to negotiate a peace treaty between them, and Beau shows up in all his first-person glory to make an important contribution to the story.

People new to my books may be shocked when the old guy, a stranger to them, sticks his nose into the story; longtime readers will be surprised and happy to see him. I know I was.

JAJ