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We hope you enjoy this fun interview withe the lovely Betty Webb!

Elise Cooper: How do you feel about ending the series?

Betty Webb:  Very sad, since Lena is the daughter I never had.  I have two boys and wanted to write her as I was, a tomboy.  She came to me in a dream one night in which she told me the story of her life that included the entire last sentence of this book.   Because I am taking the loss of Lena so hard I have decided to make the protagonist of my next possible series her great, great grandmother who has the same temperament as Lena.  

EC: This quote is included in the book’s first page, “[No] matter what a waste one has made of one’s life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.”  Do you agree with it?

BW:  Most of it, but let’s rephrase it by saying just about everybody can find some kind of redemption except for politicians and those that give away their humanity like serial killers and Nazis.  These people without any compassion are truly lost. I think redemption has more to do than just with forgiveness, but also includes starting a new life.  In the book someone does get redeemed, and the cult uses it a ritual to redeem the sins of their followers.

EC:  You also give a shout out to the American Indian?

BW:  I came out here in 1982 from New York City, and moved next door to the reservation that I talk about in my books all the time.  I can actually walk to the reservation. Every day when I used to work at the newspaper I would have to drive through the reservation.  I shop at the grocery store that all the Pima Indians shop at. I even made one of my characters, Lena’s boyfriend Jimmy, a Pima Indian.  I wanted to show that some of the nicest resorts were put up by the Pima Indians. I saw buildings on the reservation go from shacks to pretty nice homes. When I first started writing my stories, none of the other writers talked about the Indian tribes of Scottsdale.  I learned about them while working for the newspaper where I wrote stories on how they fought to put up casinos even though the then Governor Fife Symington was against it.  They won because of the overwhelming public support.

EC:  What about the cult?

BW:  Evil takes all sorts of forms.  The guy who heads the Kanati Spiritual Center is an old, old enemy.  I wanted to show how people can have deep religious beliefs; yet, at the same time they were not absolved from their evil.  In this story, the cult was actually starving people, which actually happened with a cult. This guy starved to the bare bones these women who he chose for his spiritual wives.  I read an article about it and decided to use it in this story.

EC:  Your next book projects?

BW:  I just cannot let Lena go.  I am thinking of writing a prequel when she was eighteen.  There were four months between when she started at ASU, with a full scholarship, and when she had to leave foster care.  I think there could be a book in that. I am also writing, Panda of Death, as part of the Gunn Zoo series. But it is about the Red Pandas, not the black and white.

THANK YOU!!

ABOUT THE BOOK

“In Jones’s electrifying 10th…Scottsdale, Arizona, PI Lena is approached by Harold Slow Horse, one of Arizona’s leading artists…[and] gets on a trail that leads her at long last to answers about her troubled past…” —Publishers Weekly

At the age of four, Scottsdale private eye Lena Jones was shot in the head and left to die on a Phoenix street. After her rescue, she spent years in the abusive foster care system, never knowing who her parents were and why they didn’t claim her. When Desert Redemption begins, she still doesn’t know her real name.

Lena’s rough childhood–and the suspicion that her parents may have been members of a cult–keeps her hackles raised. So when Chelsea, the ex-wife of Harold Slow Horse, a close friend, joins a “new thought” organization called Kanati, Lena begins to investigate. She soon learns that two communes–polar opposites of each other–have sprung up nearby in the Arizona desert. The participants at EarthWay follow a rigorous dietary regime that could threaten the health of its back-to-the-land inhabitants, while the more pleasure-loving folk at Kanati are dining on sumptuous French cuisine.

On an early morning horseback ride across the Pima Indian Reservation, Lena finds an emaciated woman’s body in the desert. “Reservation Woman” lies in a spot close to EarthWay, clad in a dress similar to the ones worn by its women. But there is something about her face that reminds Lena of the Kanatians.

While investigating, Lena’s memory is jolted back to that horrible night when her father and younger brother were among those murdered by a cult leader named Abraham, who then vanished. Lena begins to wonder if either EarthWay or Kanati could be linked to that night, and to her own near-death. Could leaders of one or both shed light on what had happened to Lena’s mother, who vanished at the same time as Abraham?

All these mysteries are resolved in Desert Redemption, the tenth and final Lena Jones case, which can also be enjoyed on its own.

 

Chapter One!

 

Happy Saturday Share!