I’m delighted to have fellow author Anne Louise Bannon as my guest today. She’s a prolific writer with several series published and some new ones coming out very soon. I asked Anne to tell us about her protagonist, her writing style, and her latest book. Please welcome Anne with a comment, and don’t forget the clicks and buy buttons.

Kathleen: It’s time to get your protagonist out of her/his comfort zone. You want to present her with a challenge, and you’ve given her the following choices: climb Mount Everest; run a Marathon; trek across the Sierra Desert with a tribe of nomads; or sail around the world alone. Which would she choose?

Anne: Wow. The challenge of this question is that I have so many protagonists, most of whom would choose something different. I could see Maddie Wilcox, from the Old Los Angeles series, set in the 1870s, climbing Mount Everest. She wouldn’t like it much, but she’d do it just to show that a woman can. On the other hand, there’s Sid Hackbirn, from the Operation Quickline series, and he would definitely train for a marathon since he runs every day for at least an hour.

Kathleen: If you had an argument with your protagonist, who would win and why?

Anne: Maddie Wilcox would win easily. It’s not just that she’s brilliant, she has the strength of her own convictions that I lack.

Kathleen: How long have you been writing? What was the motivating factor that got you started?

Anne: It’s more like, when haven’t I been writing? I wrote my first novel the summer I turned fifteen. My mother had been on my backside about all the daydreaming I was doing. So I decided to write down the voices and characters in my head. She couldn’t bust me for daydreaming if I was writing about it. The next thing I knew, I had a novel.

Kathleen: What do you want most for your readers to come away with after they read your books?

Anne: Satisfaction. They’ve enjoyed a good story (I hope) and maybe found something to think about.

Kathleen: What was the oddest job you ever had?

Anne: Probably the one I have now. I collect planning documents for a commercial real estate developer. It’s a lot more interesting than you might think. I am seriously going to write a mystery where the final clue is hidden in a planning document. Some of that is that I work with the City of Los Angeles’ Planning a lot, and you do get studios submitting plans to build sound stages or re-zone an area so that they can have in-studio audiences. Another interesting request for a zoning change came from a defense plant that wanted to have child care on-site. In 1942. That was fascinating.

Kathleen: Tell us about your latest book.

Anne: I’ve got a couple of things coming out (as usual). The end of April will see the book release of the second in my time travel series, Time Enough. It continues the story of Robin Parker and her brother, Dean, that I started in But World Enough and Time, in which they encounter a young woman, Elizabeth, from the Seventeenth Century being brought forward in time by Roger York. In Time Enough, Robin tries to get Dean and Elizabeth settled in our own time, then goes to the future where Roger is in some serious trouble, thanks to attempting to bring Elizabeth forward.

But the big release is in June when Running Away to Boston will come out. It’s a thriller about Jannie Miller, who finds people using all sorts of hacking but then gets drawn into a ragtag band of ethical hackers trying to bring down an evil corporation that is releasing a virus designed to bring the American economy to its knees. It’s also a mother-daughter story as Jannie is finally reunited with her mother, who turned up missing in a tornado when Jannie was a girl.

Finally, From This Day Forward, the next Operation Quickline story starts on my fiction blog in early May. Sid and Lisa are finally getting married, and if the wedding isn’t crazy enough, their honeymoon gets hijacked by their spy business.

Kathleen: Name three authors you recommend and tell us what you like about their writing.

Anne: Dorothy L. Sayers, brilliant and thoughtful writing, and you can’t help but fall in love with Lord Peter Wimsey.

Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series. She completely gets Amelia’s voice, and the stories are delightful.

Pamela Samuels Young. She takes ripped from the headlines situations and makes wonderful mysteries from them.

Kathleen: What themes do you regularly employ in your writing?

Anne: I had never realized this until someone pointed it out to me, but family is a major part of my story-telling. When I started the Old Los Angeles series, I intended that Maddie’s family would be, for all intents and purposes, gone. Her louse of a husband is dead. But, dummit, her household became her family. Lisa’s family sucks Sid in, and he becomes a part of that family. In my time travel series, my characters’ parents turn up. It’s just all over.

I also sometimes write about finding yourself and what you can do.

Kathleen: What is the most challenging area for you as a writer?

Anne: Visuals. I am not a visual person. I hear my stories when I’m writing and often have to go back and really work on setting a visual description.

Kathleen: What motivates you to write?

Anne Louise: I can’t not write. It’s how I hide from things like the Pandemic. It’s when I feel best about who and what I am. Even when I was focusing on my non-fiction for a lot of years, I was still writing and even got in some fiction writing.

Kathleen: How did you develop the idea for your most recent work?

Anne: That would be Just Because You’re Paranoid, the latest in the Operation Quickline series of cozy spy novels. They’re spy novels in that the main characters, Sid and Lisa, are operatives for an ultra-top-secret organization and cozies in that the focus is on their relationship, and the violence is largely off-stage, as is the sex. I first wrote Just Because You’re Paranoid in 1983 or’84, so I don’t recall entirely how I developed that idea. It just seemed to be a natural part of the larger story and is kind of fun in that I finally got to deal with a coincidence that I set up in book one, That Old Cloak and Dagger Routine.

My most recent Old Los Angeles book, Death of an Heiress, which came out last June, happened because I was pondering the idea of the most obvious suspect, in this case, the heiress’ brother, actually being the least likely to kill her because he’d already stolen her fortune. It was also fun because while I was reading the Los Angeles newspaper at the time, I discovered that there was also a measles epidemic going on in the pueblo.

And here’s a blurb from Just Because You’re Paranoid

It doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you

Lisa Wycherly and Sid Hackbirn find themselves up against a relentless enemy and are about to get the shock of their lives in book nine of the Operation Quickline series. First, there’s the wedding. Not Sid and Lisa’s, but her cousin Maggie’s, where Sid and his son, Nick, raise all sorts of eyebrows.

Then there’s the attempt on Sid’s life. Then Sid and Lisa’s good friends are recruited into their top-secret organization. Then there’s Lisa’s sister being jealous, and a new house getting close to being ready, Sid and Lisa’s own wedding to work on, and Nick bringing home every bug there is at his new school and sharing it with his parents.

Being highly-trained top-secret counter-intelligence agents will only help so far as the circles of family complications ripple outward. Sid and Lisa try to cope with the multiple surprises as they train their two friends and track down a ruthless killer determined to take both of them out.

Author Anne Louise Bannon’s husband says that his wife kills people for a living. Bannon does mostly write mysteries, including the Old Los Angeles Series, the Freddie and Kathy series, and the Operation Quickline series. She has worked as a freelance journalist for magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She and her husband, Michael Holland, created the OddBallGrape.com wine education blog, and she co-wrote a book on poisons. Her latest novel is book four in the Old Los Angeles series, Death of an Heiress. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. Visit her website at AnneLouiseBannon.com or follow her on Facebook, (https://www.facebook.com/RobinGoodfellowEnt/).

Links AnneLouiseBannon.com or follow her on Facebook, (https://www.facebook.com/RobinGoodfellowEnt/)

Buy buttons. https://annelouisebannon.com/just-because-youre-paranoid/

To find out more about Anne and her books, listen to the to podcast: The Cozy Sleuth