Susie Black’s complimentary Swimwear Fit Guide will certainly come in handy with summer just around the corner. Click the link at the bottom to grab your copy!

Death by Surfboard is the third book in The Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series. The submitted manuscript took me about five months to complete. Set in the competitive Los Angeles apparel industry, Death by Surfboard is the story of how one man’s life of lies, delivered by smoke and mirrors, cost him everything. No one is more stunned than Mermaid Swimwear sales exec Holly Schlivnik when a fisherman hooks her unscrupulous colleague’s battered corpse attached to a surfboard and hauls it onto the Washington Street Pier. The ME ruled Jack Tyne drowned, but “had help dying”, and Holly’s boss is wrongly arrested for the crime. To save the big cheese from a life behind bars, the wise-cracking, irreverent amateur detective dons her sleuthing hat to find Jack’s real killer. But the trail has more twists and turns than a pretzel, and nothing turns out the way Holly thinks it will as she tangles with a clever killer hellbent for revenge.

Like the protagonist in my Holly Swimsuit Mystery series, I am a ladies’ swimwear sales exec. From the beginning of my career, I have kept a daily journal that chronicles the quirky, interesting, and often challenging people I’ve encountered as well as the crazy situations I’ve gotten myself into and out of. The journal entries are the foundation of all my writing. The most critically important skill a sales exec must have to succeed is to be a good storyteller. Fortunately, I’ve been telling stories since I learned how to talk. Since I’d never written a novel before, the only thing I knew to do was to apply the same story-telling skills I’d successfully used hawking bikinis to writing a tale. Lucky for me, both types of stories require the same construction: A beginning, a middle, an ending, and most important of all…a point of view.  So, it turns out that showing a line of swimsuits is no different than plotting a manuscript. Both need some planning, but there is a need for flexibility. So, I am neither a planner nor a pantser. I am in between. I plan the beginning and the ending, but I allow my characters to take the storyline from the middle to the end. Of course, the characters know they must not monkey with the ending I’ve devised. Generally, they behave…or face being written out of the story or worse…killed off.  

One thing I’d been told over and over as a sales exec was to know your product inside and out.  I heard the same thing when I started writing cozy mysteries: write what you know. If you don’t know it, either do the research and learn it or don’t dare to write it. Whether you’re an author or a sales exec, you’re selling yourself, and readers, like buyers, can sniff out a phony in a heartbeat, and then you and your story are toast. So, where did my story ideas come from? I paid attention to the mantra. Write what you know. With a dollop of imagination, a pinch of angst, and a decades-long career chocked to the gills with juicy characters, I had more stories in my daily journal than time to write them.

I don’t have a set writing schedule. I write when my creative juices start flowing. I sometimes write for four hours straight and other times only for an hour. Since I am a night owl, I rarely write in the morning. I came to write in the cozy mystery genre because I love solving puzzles. My parents would certainly confirm I have always asked a lot of questions, and I am naturally curious (some narrow-minded people say I am nosy…go figure…LOL). So, writing mysteries was the natural next step for me to take. Who could push a sales exec to dream of murder and mayhem? Who else but a pain in the patootie buyer or an unscrupulous colleague? After concluding a rather challenging conversation with a co-worker whose ill-conceived actions had put both me and our company in a precariously dangerous position with our biggest customer, I silently wished him a slow and painful death as I imagined how good it would feel with my hands around his scrawny neck, squeezing the life out of him. While the notion of knocking off a colleague whose carelessness threatened to destroy the company we worked at was wildly appealing, a horizontally striped prison uniform would make my petite body look like it was the product of a barbershop pole and a fire hydrant having a child. The viable alternative?  Writing humorous murder mysteries set in the Los Angeles garment center. Brilliant and cathartic! In one fell swoop, eliminate a pain-in-the-patootie colleague, avoid life in prison, and still get the order. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Named Best US Author of the Year by N. N. Lights Book Heaven, award-winning cozy mystery author Susie Black was born in the Big Apple but now calls sunny Southern California home. Like the protagonist in her Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series, Susie is a successful apparel sales executive. Susie began telling stories as soon as she learned to talk. Now she’s telling all the stories from her garment industry experiences in humorous mysteries.

She reads, writes, and speaks Spanish, albeit with an accent that sounds like Mildred from Michigan went on a Mexican vacation and is trying to fit in with the locals. Since life without pizza and ice cream as her core food groups wouldn’t be worth living, she’s a dedicated walker to keep her girlish figure. A voracious reader, she’s also an avid stamp collector. Susie lives with a highly intelligent man and has one incredibly brainy but smart-aleck adult son who inexplicably blames his sarcasm on an inherited genetic defect.

Looking for more? Contact Susie at:

Website: www.authorsusieblack.com

E-mail: mysteries_@authorsusieblack.com

As a thank you for reading about Susie and her debut series, here is a free swim suit fit guide:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7lerp4cy1al2j0l/CHOOSING%20THE%20RIGHT%20%20SWIMSUIT.pdf?dl=0