Spotlight of The Novel The Arizona Triangle by Sydney Graves. On Sale 10/22/24 (#mystery)

THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE

 By

Sydney Graves

 

In the vein of bestselling novels by Sue Grafton, comes a debut detective novel about loyalty, love, and the legacy of trauma, featuring a young, queer, hard-boiled private eye whose latest case takes her deep into her own complicated past.

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This is award-winning writer Kate Christensen’s highly anticipated noir read published under the pen name Sydney Graves

 

Acclaimed, award-winning writer Kate Christensen (Welcome Home, Stranger, The Great Man, and others) has always wanted to write a mystery. With the publication of her first detective novel THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE. The first book in a brand new series written under the pen name Sydney Graves, she joins the ranks of writers such as Sue Grafton, Sara Gran, Tana French, Ann Cleeves, and Janet Evanovich, whose books feature beloved, tough-talking female protagonists.

On the cusp of forty, Justine Bailen, better known as Jo, works for an all-female detective agency based in Tucson, Arizona. While staking out a cheating spouse, she learns that her long-estranged best friend from childhood, Rose, is missing, and that Rose’s mother wants to hire Jo to find her. This case is all kinds of wrong for Jo, but she has no choice but to head back to her hometown, an hour north and a world away from Tucson.

Back in Delphi, Jo learns that her high school boyfriend, Tyler—who is probably part of the reason her friendship with Rose went south—is the cop assigned to the case. It doesn’t take long for Jo to realize that he’s all mixed up in it, too. To have any hope of learning the truth about Rose’s disappearance, Jo must finally face the demons she thought she’d escaped.

Readers of THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE will be immersed in Jo Bailen’s life, the cases she is working, and the atmospheric world that the extremely talented Sydney Graves has created.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sydney Graves is a pseudonym for Kate Christensen, an Arizona native and the author of eight novels, most recently Welcome Home, Stranger. Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has also published two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her essays, reviews, and short pieces have appeared in a wide variety of publications and anthologies. She lives with her husband and their two dogs in Taos, New Mexico. For more, visit: https://katechristensen.net/

 

THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE

By Sydney Graves

Harper Paperbacks/ HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN: 9780063379992

$18.99/$23.99 Can.; Trade Paperback Original; 304 pages

 

Pre-order the Book on Amazon

 

 

THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE – BEHIND THE BOOK

By Sydney Graves (Kate Christensen)

 

I wrote my new novel THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE between drafts of my last novel Welcome Home, Stranger for pure fun, to distract and entertain myself during the COVID lock down. I also wrote it to fulfill a decades-old yearning to write detective fiction. The first draft came out extremely fast, and then after two more drafts to fine-tune and polish it, I sent it to my editor in hopes that she would like it enough to acquire it.

The name Sydney Graves is an intentional literary alter-ego. I’ve been an avid reader of detective fiction since I was a teenager, and I love the cloak-and-dagger aspect of writing under an assumed name. It seems fitting for the genre. 

Before I knew what this book was about, I knew where it would be set. I grew up in Arizona and have a lot of history there. It is a very particular place; one I know well and deeply love. Hiking in the foothills of Mt. Lemmon north of Tucson a number of years ago, near the town of Oracle, I was struck by what an ideal setting this would be for a murder mystery. And so the book began to take shape in my head, born out of a sense of place rooted in my home state. My private-eye protagonist Jo Bailen emerged more gradually. Unlike Jo, I am not half-Mexican, but many of my friends growing up had Mexican heritage, and I have spent a lot of time in Mexico. And I'm intrigued by the idea of a woman who is both mixed-race and bisexual, both at home and an outsider in many worlds—the ideal identity for a private eye.

In the course of solving the mystery, I wanted Jo to grapple with her heritage, her estrangement from her white mother in the wake of her beloved Mexican father’s death, and her attraction to both men and women. As I wrote, I felt her own identity and the case she’s investigating dovetailing like interlocking pieces of a puzzle. 

I’m not finished with Jo by a long shot. In fact, I’m about to start writing her next mystery, Saguaro City, and I hope her ongoing intertwined professional and personal lives will become a series. In writing these books, I’m paying homage to all the great detective-series writers whose work has delighted and thrilled and inspired me for decades; the likes of Sue Grafton, Tony Hillerman, Raymond Chandler, Dick Francis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Janet Evanovich, Sara Paretsky, Robert B. Parker, Sara Gran, and of course, the grande dame of them all, Agatha Christie. 

 

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