Clouds at Sunrise

This week I begin, as promised, to tell you about my new romantic voodo mystery, Dying on the Edge.  It is available at Wheatmark Bookstore, http://www.wheatmark.com/bookstore for $18.95,  free shipping and handling.  It’s taking a bit longer than usual to go on Amazon and Kindle, but will be on,  I would guess, within the next two weeks.  It is taking longer than I had anticipated.

Today, I had planned to have photos of  front and back covers on this site, but the person handling it has hit a slight snag.  Photos will be up within a day or so.  Today, I’ll just give you a bit of information and tomorrow I’ll give you the copy from the back cover that is a true description of the book’s storyline.

Dying on the Edge is set in an imaginary city on the east coast between NewYork and Boston.  It is  April 1992  and I chose a detectives team to work this story because they were very much a part of the 90′s police scene.  The story begins with a prologue depicting a woman reminiscing about her time in Haiti seeking voodoo spells to kill a rival whose husband she intends to have. It is multicultural and so, multiracial.  Several socioeconomic levels are depicted, and I think you’ll like the variety.

I have a slogan with this story and it’s more or less true:  Dying on the Edge is Written in Blood — Mine!  It is a story of universal truths and treachery, of warmth and tenderness, of betrayal and lusts beyond reason.

Wednesday the excerpts begin, along with, I hope, the book photos and you can judge for yourself.  Later, there will be a trailer posted on this site.

I look forward to seeing you here.  Take  very good care.

Some Updates on Dying on the Edge originally appeared on Francine Craft on June 28, 2010.

Little Shaniya Davis

Few things have caught my troubled attention like the Shaniya Davis case.  This little five-year-old’s background is pretty well known, and the fact that she was raped, strangled, and abandoned by a monster her mother had sold her to as a sex slave is well known too.  The funeral drew 2,000 or more mourners and a famous sports star paid for her funeral.

Yes, I weep and others weep for another of God’s little angels, but how long will our tears last?  And what will we do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again?  I’ve done articles of abuse of all kinds, because any abuse demeans the human spirit and human life.  I got little response.  I belong to Child Prevention Abuse organizations.  Do you?  I certainly hope so.

Shaniya’s mother is a monster who should never have become a mother.  Yet she has another seven-year-old daughter and is pregnant with a child by her present lover.  Monster or not, her life goes on.  Detectives say she sold Shaniya into sex slavery to pay off her bills.  You have only to look at the photos of the child in her last days to know she was being wretchedly treated.  Her hair is neglected, her suffering is plainly mirrored on her face.  This child was being looked after, or rather neglected, by someone from hell.

Shaniya’s father and aunt were of another race, yet photos show that when she was with them, she was well cared for and shone like a little diamond.  Could they do nothing to stop the viciousness this child suffered?  The father said she was the result of a one-night stand, and her mother pleaded that she wanted to be a mother to the girl.  Could no one read the clues?  Didin’t anyone know?

The murderer, Mario Andrette McNeill, has a fancy name and a fancy persona, drugged and grinning in some photos, his deed of rape and murder is infamous enough to make us cry unto Heaven.  I feel like retching endlessly when I think of him and my rage is terrible.

As caring citizens, we must unite to do something about the scourge of child molestation and murder so prevalent now in this land.  Six children have been killed in this area by three women in the past year.  All women showed signs of being deranged.  Why were the children still with them?  We must pray, but prayers alone were never meant to be the answer.  God gave us free will to act, and act we must, or we are going down a path of no return, of evil personified and a world in which no one of us is safe.

Tears For Shaniya Davis originally appeared on Francine Craft on December 2, 2009.