BOOK NOOK

By Holly Hargett

Maggie Andrews traps gators in small-town Florida and espresso bar owner Lara Lewis is an amateur sleuth bent on solving a murder. They’re both strong heroines from author Tamara Lush’s novels, rich in personality with busy lives.

“I am far more boring than any of my characters,” says Lush, “That’s what’s so great about writing!”

Lush has been writing “sexy books for smart women” since 2021 when she left her 30-year journalism career that spanned radio, newspaper reporting (including a stint at the St Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times), and the Associated Press. Her stories included everything from crime to politics and natural disasters. “I wrote news for so many years that to me all fiction is fun,” she says.

Lush has been an avid reader of romance since high school. She wanted to try something creative outside of journalism and started to write a book in 2012. She wrote a chapter but later shelved it. Now Lush writes steamy romances, and under the name Tara Lush, she writes quirky mysteries. She is a 2018 RWE Rita Finalist, an Amtrak Writing Fellow, and a USA Today bestselling author.

While fiction has been more fun than chasing real-life crime, Lush says “Sometimes I don’t want to write and then I just don’t write. I try to be really kind to myself if I want to happen. I know a lot of people who write genre fiction and write 5,000 and 10,000 words a day. I try to keep it just under my happy place or around my happy place (1,500-2,000 words) so that I’m excited to work on the book the next step.”

She likes writing about Florida and similar to authors Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiaasen, and Dave Barry, but “not as cynical, in a softer way, more like a Murders in the Building.” And she usually includes a cute pet like a cat named after Patsy Cline or an iguana named after singer Harry Styles.

Her upcoming novel Gator Queen, is about Maggie Andrews who moves back home to help her ailing father and his gator-trapping business. Her twin sister Vera is not interested in the family business but when a rival gator trapper turns up dead, Vera becomes a suspect. With the help of a sexy criminology professor, the sisters track down the truth. Publishing in September, you can pre-order Gator Queen now.