A couple of years ago, when it was time for me to write the next Beaumont book, Nothing to Lose, I ended up sending my fictional pal of some forty years standing off to Alaska in the dead of winter. Beau is a Seattle native. Trust me, Seattle natives have NO idea how to drive in snow. Not only that, he’s a guy of a certain age (My age, actually!) who happens to have two titanium knees. Naturally, Mel Soames, his wife, is deeply concerned about driving around on his own in a rental car amid really dodgy winter weather. Eventually, she prevails upon him to hire a driver—for the day. Make that, supposedly for the day.

When I’m writing a book and a new character shows up, it’s my job to give that person a name. So, as I was sitting here in my writing chair (Which I happen to be doing right now.) I put on my thinking cap. Pretty soon a name popped into my head—Twinkle Winkleman, aka Twink for short. Just the thought of her name made me smile because I knew that someone stuck with a handle like that was bound to be every bit as tough as Johnny Cash’s boy named Sue.

So if Twink was living in wintertime Anchorage and running a car service, what kind of vehicle would she have? Let’s see. Bill, my husband, has always been a car guy. We follow the Formula 1 races on TV and have actually managed to attend three in person—in Monaco, Austin, and Indianapolis. We watch some Indy car races and a few Nascar ones, too, but we also follow things like Chasing Classic Cars, Roadworthy Rescues, and Wheeler Dealers.

In the last Wheeler Dealer season filmed in the US, the vehicle Mike and Ant brought back from the brink of death was a 1973 International Harvester Travelall. They removed the shag carpet from inside, cleaned up the engine, and reinstalled the outside luggage rack. I knew International Harvester made tractors. (My father actually gave my mother one of those for her birthday one year, and she loved it!) However I had no idea International Harvester made automobiles. It turns out that the Travelall is the great, great grandaddy of every SUV you see on the road today.

And that’s when I decided that was exactly what Twinkle Winkelman needed—a 1973 International Harvester Travelall complete with a snowplow attachment along with a luggage rack loaded with crates of spare parts. (When you’re driving around in the wilds of Alaska in an antique vehicle, you can’t expect to find an AutoZone carrying the parts you need on every street corner.)

As a character, Twinkle Winkleman turned out to be a tough nut to crack. She was supposed to be in the book for one day only, but when it came time for her to exit stage left, she refused to go quietly. She ended up hanging in there until the bitter end of the book, including the literal crashing climax. And do you know what happened? As far as Nothing to Lose is concerned, Twink ended up stealing the show. My readers loved her, and they begged me to bring her back.

But there was a big problem with that. Twink is someone who’s Alaska personified—tough minded, independent, and capable as all get out. I’ve been to Alaska exactly three times in my life—twice on cruises and once for Left Coast Crime. I don’t know nearly enough about Alaska to be able to set an entire novel there, but I decided I could see my way clear to write a novella—and that’s where Girls’ Night Out enters the picture.

Girl’s Night Out is Twinkle Winkleman in all her feisty glory. It will be published as an ebook only on July 23, 2024. I’m sure some DTR’s, my Dead Tree Readers, will accuse me of “going over to the dark side” here, but that’s the situation on the ground in publishing today. The time when publishers did little stand-alone paperbacks of novellas has, unfortunately, come and gone, and Girls’ Night Out is too long to be printed in the upcoming hardback edition of the next Beau book, Den of Iniquity, due out September 11. Readers of the novella will, however, get a short preview of DOI .

So for those of you who pleaded with me to revisit Twinkle Winkleman? As they used to say in that old Toyota commercial: You asked for it? You got it.

J.A. Jance’s Website is www.jajance.com

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