Elephants' Graveyard - Softcover

My favorite fan feedback was a guy who named his dog after my heroine (now that's a compliment) and a safari outfitter who asked how long I'd been in the business.  But especially all the complaints that I kept people up till 2 in the morning, unable to stop reading!
Lynn Leakey became a fan. She's an American woman who went off to Kenya and ran a safari company.  She could have been the model for my heroine.  She found only one mistake in Deadly Safari (a bird call you wouldn't hear in that camp.)
I was very proud when a Kenyan medical student asked, "How do you understand so much about us?"

My mother was a tremendous reader and mystery fan, and I followed in her footsteps.  When I wrote Deadly Safari, I had just finished reading every novel by Nero Wolf, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.  Deadly Safari is actually an country house mystery transposed to a safari.

Why Africa? My father was a combat photographer who saw all the front line action of World War II starting at Omaha Beach. Back home, it was hard to find work as a cameraman, so my Dad took a six month assignment doing wildlife filming in Kenya when I was small.

I grew up on the wonderful stories he brought back.  I wanted to be like him. Put my love of mysteries and my love of African adventure together, and a few decades later, when I put pen to paper, it was to create my African wildlife mysteries starring Jazz Jasper, an American woman running a safari company.

By that time, Africa was more than just stories to me.  I joined the Peace Corps right after college and a few weeks later found myself in Senegal, where I was to live for the next year in a village down near the Guinee border, where we could hear shelling at night from their civil war.  Elephants Graveyard contains many elements from this Peace Corps experience, other adventures gleaned from the memoirs of early African adventurers and biologists, and of course, a healthy dollop of imagination.