Finding Susan

http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Susan-Dakota-Kahn-ebook/dp/B00M7MHI8G/

You can't go home again.... 

Kate Becker is back in town-- but she's also lost and hurting and searching for answers. She covers up with a smart mouthed attitude, especially around small town cop Blake Spanner, the guy who jilted her at prom. But she needs his help. She's looking for Susan, her missing sister, and her reception ranges from weird to resentful, egged on by a curiously psychic duck. Can she and Blake sift through the clues and find out what happened to Susan... before it's too late?

This was the first book I completed as Dakota Kahn - though it's not a full book, more of a novella. And it has a kind of tangled history. You see, it was initially written to be a collaboration with a long-time romance author of my acquaintance. As often happens, we both got too busy with other projects to really do the collaborating...

But there was something about Kate and Blake that I found irresistible to write about. The thing is, I'm not really a romance writer. It's not my natural wheelhouse, and while I have nothing but respect for the people who can work in that genre, it ain't me, babe.

Where I saw the potential for Kate and Blake was as a kind of on-going series where you could keep the same characters, where you could have their relationship evolve more slowly, since it wasn't the central point of the book. And where you could have what was, for me, the fun part, the character interaction.

So that's where Kate & Blake have ended up, in a new series set in their small-town where they both have come back after stints in the big city. Are the new books direct follow-ups to Finding Susan?

No. That's why some characters introduced in Finding Susan simply will not be coming back into the world of Whispering Pines, and why the central plot-line of Finding Susan doesn't become central to these new cozies. To put it in other terms, if a book series is like a TV series, Finding Susan is an initial pilot that didn't get picked up by the network. Kate & Blake vs The Ghost Town is the new pilot, reshot, recast, but with the same lead actors.

There won't be any follow-ups to Finding Susan, and you certainly don't need to read it to make sense of the new books.