Featured Interview With Janet Martinez
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Indiana and raised in Illinois. I now live in Cordova, Tennessee, which is a suburb of Memphis. I came here to teach, but have recently retired from education.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I don’t know. I’ve always been a reader. My best Christmas gift ever was a set of books about triplets called “The Three Bears” or something like that. I think I was about six at the time. I started writing short stories in grade school. I think my mother was the only one who read them and, of course, she loved them. Being my mom, she wouldn’t have told me if she thought they were awful.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books. I’m a big fan of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch. I also like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Grisham. Dan Brown is also a favorite, though I have to admit I think his best book is “The Da Vinci Code.” I watch the History Channel and H2 and it absolutely fascinates me that they have “scholarly” discussions of fact v. fiction in “The Da Vinci Code.” Sometimes I just want to yell at the TV that the book is a NOVEL, which means it’s FICTION. Get over it! I don’t really have a favorite genre. I read almost everything. I’m not too keen on romance novels, though. I’m sure who inspires me. I’m inspired by every good book I read.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Before I became a teacher, I spent just over twenty years working for lawyers. Some of them are really obnoxious and have no people skills. When one of them would make me really angry, I’d go home from work and write scenes killing them off. My last book, “Drop Dead Killers”, uses some of those scenes. There is a female serial killer who is killing lawyers in an effort to ruin a particular law firm. She’s looking for revenge against one of the lawyers and thinks it would be too obvious to just kill him. She wants to make him suffer before she actually kills him. There are two detectives, David Graham and Alexis Hamilton, charged with finding the killer. Alexis has her own agenda, though. She’s in love with David and wants to make sure no other women infringe on what she considers her territory. David doesn’t have a clue about how she feels, and thinks it’s strange when Alexis starts tailing him when he starts dating Cassandra. He becomes suspicious when he confronts Alexis and she denies following him.
If you count the scenes I wrote when I worked for lawyers, the book took me about twenty years to write. If you count actual writing where I knew it was going to be a book and actually worked at it, it took me about a year to write.
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