Guest Author: Deanna Raybourn

I'm so pleased to have Deanna Raybourn visiting here today. We were both double RITA finalists with our first books, and I think we always hold a special place in our hearts for authors who jumped at the same time with us on this crazy publishing bandwagon.

She's a wonderful writer, a lovely person, and she has a new book out in her Lady Julia Grey mystery series. So enough from me. Here's Deanna. ...


This is the month that Dark Road to Darjeeling hits bookstores, and I could not be happier to share this book with readers!

For me, writing Dark Road to Darjeeling was a chance to combine three of my favorite things—tea, travel, and mystery. It was also a chance to revisit my series after my stand-alone release, and I was absolutely thrilled to write about these characters again. I am very comfortable in my late Victorian series, and my main characters--the aristocratic Lady Julia Grey and the private enquiry agent, Nicholas Brisbane--have become old friends at this point. In writing this book, I reached 450,000 words in the series! It is an unbelievable luxury to be able to spend almost half a million words writing about the same characters. It has given me a chance to explore them much more fully than if I had written a single book about Lady Julia’s adventures as an amateur sleuth, and I certainly would not have had the space to delve into her fascination for Nicholas. Their relationship has been able to evolve slowly over the course of the books, and it has been an incredible tease for readers to keep turning pages, wondering if they will ever get together.

Dark Road to Darjeeling answers that question definitively. The now-married sleuths are still on their honeymoon when Julia’s eccentric family appeals to the newlyweds solve a murder. They travel to the furthest reaches of the sub-continent of India--into the very foothills of the Himalayas to a tea plantation where the atmosphere is thick with secrets--in order to save an old friend. There is danger and intrigue around every corner, and for the first time, I have introduced an arch-villain whose greatest pleasure would be to thwart Nicholas and Julia at every turn.

This book also marks the first time I have helped make a book trailer video for the Julia Grey series. It was a tremendous amount of fun to choose the images and the music, and my husband assembled the pieces. Just to make it interesting, we set ourselves the challenge of making it with absolutely no budget whatsoever. We used photos we had taken during our various trips, and found royalty-free music to set a perfect mood. I hope you enjoy this exotic and atmospheric peek at Dark Road to Darjeeling! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WkMTB_GafI

Deanna