Book Tour: Who Killed Tom Jones - Gale Martin - Guest Post + GIVEAWAY

In Gale Martin's newest novel, Ellie Overton is a 28-year-old rest home receptionist with a pussycat nose who also happens to be gaga for the pop singer Tom Jones. Regrettably single, she is desperate to have a white-hot love relationship, like those she's read about in romance novels. Following an astrological hunch, she attends a Tom Jones Festival and meets an available young impersonator with more looks and personality than talent. Though he's knocked out of the contest, he's still in the running to become Ellie's blue-eyed soul mate--until he's accused of killing off the competition. It's not unusual that the handsome police detective working the case is spending more time pursuing Ellie than collaring suspects. So, she enlists some wily and witty rest home residents to help find the real murderer. Will Ellie crack the case? Must she forfeit her best chance for lasting love to solve the crime?

Book Trailer

Paperback price: $15.95

eBook price: $2.99

Paperback: 268 pages

Publisher: Booktrope Editions

ISBN-10: 1-62015-197-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-62015-197-6

  

About the Author. Gale Martin is an award-winning writer of contemporary fiction who plied her childhood penchant for telling tall tales into a legitimate literary pursuit once she hit midlife. She began writing her first novel at age eleven, finishing it three and a half decades later.

Her first novel, DON JUAN IN HANKEY, PA, is a humorous homage to Don Giovanni, Mozart's famous tragicomic opera about the last two days of Don Juan's life. It was named a Finalist in the 2012 National Indie Excellence Awards for New Fiction. Her second novel GRACE UNEXPECTED is wryly witty women's fiction featuring Grace Savage, a 30-something protagonist with a heart of gold, wrapped in lead.

Gale would commit a misdemeanor to score some Babybel cheese and goes weak-kneed for hummingbirds. She is a wife and mother of one and a communications director by profession. 

She blogs about opera--the art form, not the platform and is an opera reviewer for Bachtrack, an online site featuring classical performance worldwide. She can name any aria in three notes. Okay, five notes, perfectly sung, with full orchestration.

She has a master of arts in creative writing from Wilkes University. She lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which serves as a rich source of inspiration for her writing.

Welcome, Gale, to M's Bookshelf!

When characters inspire…

by Gale Martin

“… meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same . . .”

--an excerpt from “If” by Rudyard Kipling



Life is often a string of contradictions: positives/negatives, acceptances/rejections. Someone says, “I love you.” Another person says, “You’re fired.” (And if you are a character in a book, you are more likely to hear those two lines in one 24-hour period than any normal person.)

What was that clever lyric that Mary Chapin Carpenter used to sing? “Sometimes you're the windshield. Sometimes you're the bug.”

For a story to capture a reader’s attention, you have to have some of both. Admittedly, your main character has to be more bug than windshield, for most of the book. It’s what keeps readers turning pages. It’s what proves a character’s mettle—holding it together or pressing onward under stress.

In my new murder mystery Who Killed ‘Tom Jones’?, when the book starts out, the main character Ellie Overton is a 28-year-old woman treading water, having lost her only surviving parent to cancer three years ago. It’s not the main focus of the novel, but that particular hardship influences all her actions. She wants a white-hot love relationship but is afraid to let herself feel deeply because her strongest feelings thus far have been negative ones of loss and desertion.

She is on a life journey, from paddling furiously above the water’s surface to diving into the deep end, water filling her nose and making it hard to breathe at times.

My Ellie isn’t a nuclear engineer or an emergency room resident or a mercenary on the South Seas. But her journey is significant nonetheless, and the senior citizens around her are vitally important to her being able to take that plunge in the pool of meaningful relationships that she must take in order to grow emotionally.

Without giving too much away, she ends up in a much different place than she started. And she must encounter resistance and surprises and even seemingly insurmountable obstacles along the way to get there. And she must also encounter joy and sheer exhilaration—or it wouldn’t be a cozy mystery.

Ellie is an everyman (or everygirl) character that readers have told me they understand and also relate to. She is a supremely levelheaded young woman who would be inspired by those few lines by Rudyard Kipling, who advises us to meet with triumph and disaster, imposters that they both are, just the same.

She is not accomplished. Nor is she well educated. And as you might expect, she gets knocked down but gives herself permission to get back up. She fixes her eyes on the prize, and keeps her head out of the clouds. By the end of the book, she cultivates a deeply rooted belief in herself because she encounters an inordinate number of challenges. She must. It’s fiction!

I love her for that. And I want to be just like her when I grow up.

 Giveaway
$25 giftcard and 30 ebooks of Who Killed 'Tom Jones'.

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