After the craziness of the Iowa straw poll, where the ostensible winner lost and the GOP front runner didn’t participate, KRUU-FM in Fairfield, IA does something more reasonable and interviews novelist Monte Schulz.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Aug/monteschulz.mp3|titles=Monte Schulz interviewed on KRUU]According to Amazon, Monte’s next book, The Big Town, will be out in February. Nice cover!
I’m comfortable having a couple of non-fiction books going at the same time, but novels I prefer to read all the way through to avoid spoiling the mood, and I’m starting Monte’s current novel, The Last Rose of Summer. Monte has a knack for defining distinctive characters, and in the first book of his 1920’s Americana series, This Side of Jordan, Chester is as chilling a cold-blooded killer as any villain you’d never want to meet. The funniest moment in the story for me is Monte’s nod to his father that I wrote about at this link.
I love that cover. Jacob Covey created it for the catalogue copy last winter. The basic idea is what we’ll use for the novel. All we need to change is the city itself because that image is of NYC and my book has no specific city. But the idea of the shade and the window looking out over a city is perfect; even the colors are fabulous.