DISCOVERING SETTING by Paty Jager


Marilyn, Thank you for having me on your blog today!

Root Diggers

the very first Shandra Higheagle book I wrote I knew there would come a point when I would need to know more about reservation life and especially life on the Colville Indian Reservation. Shandra’s paternal side of her family are Nez Perce Indians who live on the Colville Reservation.
It was fortuitous for me that I’d have several book signings in Clarkston, Washington with a woman who was married to an Arrows Lake descendent and who lived on the Colville Reservation. She is a wonderful, open and giving woman who not only answers my questions and sends me photos, but she also took me on a tour of the reservation so I could see the different agency buildings, where people lived, and get a feel for the atmosphere.

While touring and seeing the reservation was great, the most valuable asset to having this woman who lives on the reservation give me a tour was learning the dynamics of the twelve tribes who live on the reservation. There was a time when many of them were enemies.  It is over a hundred years later and there are still rivalries and animosities that lie under the surface of the different tribal members.

This animosity will come out in a later book, though some of it did come out in Murderous Secrets, book four in the Shandra Higheagle Mystery series.  I used the rivalry as a red herring when Shandra travels to the Reservation to discover if her father’s death thirty years was a rodeo accident or murder.



Murderous Secrets: A Shandra Higheagle Mystery Blurb

Book four in the Shandra Higheagle Mystery Series

Jealousy…Deception…Murder

The accident that took her father’s life has always haunted Shandra Higheagle. When her dreams become too real, she knows it’s time to discover the truth. It doesn’t take long to suspect her father had been murdered and that someone is unhappy with her probing.

Detective Ryan Greer knows Shandra well enough to insist he be kept informed of her investigation into the decades old death of her father. When signs implicate her mother, he can’t withhold the information, even though he realizes it could complicate their relationship.




Bio:

Award-winning author Paty Jager and her husband raise alfalfa hay in rural eastern Oregon. On her road to publication she wrote freelance articles for two local newspapers and enjoyed her job with the County Extension service as a 4-H Program Assistant. Raising hay and cattle, riding horses, and battling rattlesnakes, she not only writes the western lifestyle, she lives it.
All Paty’s work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters. Her penchant for research takes her on side trips that eventually turn into yet another story. She recently returned to the genre of her heart- Mystery.

You can learn more about Paty at

her website; http://www.patyjager.net 
Newsletter: Paty’s Prattle: http://eepurl.com/1CFgX
twitter@patyjag.


 

Comments

Paty Jager said…
Thank you for having me on your blog today, Marilyn!
I loved what you wrote. Setting is so important and some new authors don't realize how much it can add to the story and influence the plot. Thanks for stopping by today, Paty!

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