Year of the Dog has less suspense than my other books. It’s a romantic comedy suspense more on par with The Lone Rice Ball and Single Sashimi. Here’s a snippet that I wrote:
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Mari Mutou wouldn’t have rammed her SUV into the sleek, expensive-looking Audi if her brother-in-law hadn’t been cheating on her sister. Really, it wasn’t her fault.
And if she’d been running late, as she usually did, she wouldn’t have even noticed the fire-engine red Corvette parked on the edge of the real estate agency parking lot, much less the two people in it. She’d have sped past it on her way to meet her potential dog training client.
But for once in her life, she arrived early for her appointment with Jim Tong, who had asked her to meet him at his workplace during his lunch hour. Her SUV hustled into the lot, looking for a shady spot under a tree or, barring that, next to a new-ish luxury car, whose owner would be less likely to ding her new teal-green paint job.
She found a good spot all right. Good viewing spot for the couple smooching in the Corvette. She couldn’t see the face of the blonde woman, but she got an eyeful of the forty-ish man macking in the middle of the day in plain view of everyone. Really, some people had no shame about PDA …
Wait a minute. She knew that man.
That man was William. Her brother-in-law. Her sister’s husband of fifteen years.
What was he doing with that woman?!
Crunch! The truck jerked as if she’d run into something.
Oh, no. She had.
Her stomach clenched like a wrung-out rag. She was going to be sick.
She had hit a really nice car, from what she could see of its back end. Black racing-type. Expensive. And an extremely irate owner.
“What are you doing? Weren’t you even looking?” The man had barely any of the local pidgin accent in his crisp voice. He had Asian features (Japanese maybe? Or Korean? She wasn’t very good at being able to tell) but his short, softly waving hair was so dark a black it almost looked blue. Average height, but broad shoulders and a lithe, athletic grace as he walked—no, stomped toward her car. His hazelnut-colored eyes were irked and flashing, and a muscle pulsed in his strong jaw. In fact, he reminded her of a certain K-drama star ...
“Hello? Anybody home?”
“Huh?” She blinked, and visions of a painfully beautiful Korean movie star with his hair blowing in an artful wind dissolved into the angry real estate agent (she guessed—this was a real estate agency parking lot) who was making his immaculately tamed locks stick up at wild angles from pulling at it with long-fingered hands.
Oh, right. Fender-bender. Focus, Mari.
***
Year of the Dog releases in the anthology Danger in the Shadows on May 13, 2025. So you won’t have to wait very long to read it!
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