Dear Readers, Lee is a dear friend of mine. I mentored her for several years, and now she’s helping other authors who want to Indie publish. I love her writing. Her characters are well-developed, and she does the research to make sure her stories are authentic, even though her characters and their plot lines are fiction.
Welcome back, Lee. Why did you become an author?
I had just re-retired after six years as a volunteer missionary in the Brazilian Amazon, and wanted to illustrate real missionaries and life in the Amazon. The jungle is not anything like that of Tarzan movies, the missionaries are real people. I have tremendous admiration for those we worked with, yet they are faulted as we are, and most have strong personalities. They need that to face the challenges and frustrating limitations that complicate their mission. The characters in my Brazilian novels (three yet to be published) aspire to bring life and breath to these people and their surroundings.
If you weren’t an author, what would be your dream job?
I wanted to be a medical doctor for most of my life through college, but was talked out of it by friends and received no encouragement from my parents, teachers, or friends. I became a high school biology and chemistry teacher instead. If I had it to do over again, I would persist on the path to medicine. But I would never have met my husband on that path, which is the one huge compensation for my life as it played out.
If you could have lived at another time in history, what would it be and why?
I was a child in the 1950s, which were far more peaceful and relaxed than today. I was safe and free to roam on my bike in ways that are unimaginable today. Aspirin caps weren’t sealed and passengers just bought a ticket and walked onto an airplane—not that I did until after graduating from college. I would like to spend more time in that era in my small
Alabama
town.
What place in the
United States
have you not visited that you would like to?
My husband and I want to drive through the Northeast in autumn. We’d planned to this year, but our daughter and her teenage daughters moved in with us during their relocation from
Michigan
to
Texas
, and we felt it better to stay home with them. Maybe next year.
How about a foreign country you hope to visit?
Been there, done that. We’ve lived in
Greece
,
Saudi Arabia
,
Argentina
,
Indonesia
,
Brazil
, and
Spain
, and I’ve traveled in forty-nine countries. Europe is expensive, the
Middle East
is dangerous, and travel has become a royal pain. Life and travel in the
United States
is so much better!
What lesson has the Lord taught you recently?
As I wrote in the back of my previous book, Retreat to Shelter Creek, pardon me if it sounds sanctimonious, but at this ripe age, I’ve finally learned that the only things worth spending your days on are what’s done with and for God. This includes raising a family and getting an education and holding a job, and I did those things. As a Stephen Minister and member of the Prayer Shawl Ministry, showing love and support for others has become my mission at this time and place. People hurt. Friends suffer and die. I want to be there for them and their families.
Tell us about the featured book.
Kendra Cooper copied fine art, but she never sold the paintings as originals. As a librarian at the
Kimbell
Art Museum
in
Fort Worth
, she needed the extra income to pay her college and graduate school debts—tuition her father refused to pay because he considered the study of art to be useless. She’d scrimped for years to take a vacation in
Europe
and see the great masters. She never dreamed she’d be suspected of painting fraudulent fine art.
Richard Reed, art professor at Emory, agreed to a summer stint with the Experts Group of Interpol to identify frauds and assist in finding their source. With no detective training, no gun, this should be a fun summer in
Europe
. He had nothing to show Interpol until observing Kendra at
Amsterdam
’s Rijksmuseum intently studying and photographing 17th and 18thCentury art, his specialty. Maybe she was the lead he needed. When the police raided her apartment and found her masterfully-painted copy of Vermeer’s Milkmaid, he was convinced.
Unfounded accusation moves to a tentative working relationship as Kendra and Richard combat greed and deception to gain what cannot be bought.
Please give us the first page of Counterfeit.
Richard eased his cell phone from his pocket and snapped a photo of the young woman from the back, recording little more than her clothing and height. And her slender frame. She had stood in front of the Vermeer for a good twenty minutes, sometimes taking a step left or right, backward or forward. At times she slipped a small camera out of her jeans to snap a specific area of the canvas, which the
Rijks
Museum
allowed without flash, her attention focused on each element of The Milkmaid.
Sure, the painting was beautiful. Exquisite even. But for detail and complexity, it didn’t compare with Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, which covered most of the wall at the end of the gallery. A shifting swarm of museum visitors gaped and photographed that canvas, his personal favorite. Such intricate detail. Such masterful use of shades and focusing.
Maybe he’d finally stumbled upon a lead to the counterfeit art. He could be back on the plane in a few weeks with a feather in his professorial cap. The element of danger in this assignment had intrigued him at first, but he was way out of his element.
The woman sighed and checked her watch. Richard smoothly moved to a painting on a different wall, turning his back to her and bending his face down to the information plaque at the right. Her steps sounded toward the double glass door.
He looked up as she waltzed through the great hall as if she owned the place and was scanning it for decorating ideas about the ball she would give that weekend. Her expression, glimpsed from the side, radiated a calm pleasure.
Not what he would expect from a fraud artist.
How can readers find you on the Internet?
www.LeeCarverWriter.com
http://LeeCarverWriter.blogspot.com
www.amazoncurrents.homestead.com
www.facebook.com/lee.carver.507
Thank you, Lee, for sharing this new book with us. I am eager to read it, and I know my readers will be, too.
Readers, here are links to the book. By using one when you order, you help support this blog.
Counterfeit
Counterfeit - Kindle
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