Category Archives: Saints and Skeletons

Magic, Mole, and the Mexican Who Would Break My Heart

Part travel, part action-adventure, Saints and Skeletons is the memoir from which my award-winning JadeAnne Stone thriller series was born. 

This action-packed memoir/travelogue formed the real-life backdrop to what later became the successful JadeAnne Stone thriller series. Starting in the summer of 1991, Saints and Skeletons takes you through the back roads of Mexico, Belize, and the Peten region of northern Guatemala, where I camped out in ruins, sampled exotic foods, smoked loco weed atop pyramids, drank mescal out of the still, skinny dipped in the Pacific at Zipolite, found lost cities, and learned to make a killer margarita. In the process, I also experienced love, betrayal and loneliness. As doors opened and walls crumbled in my heart, skeletons tumbled out and, occasionally, saints appeared just when I needed them most.

How did a forty-year-old bookkeeper come to leave her houseboat and business to spend a year running rogue in Mexico?

“In Manwaring’s immersive memoir, Saints and Skeletons, she deftly takes her reader on a pilgrimage to Mexico. Rendered with heart and vulnerability, we observe her inner life through the risky choices she regrets, the love she desires, the sublime beauty she discovers. Don’t miss this multi-sensory adventure of a lifetime.” JC Miller, Amazon #1 author of Vacation, Believing in Bigfoot, Heliotrope and Larkspur (2023)

Preorder your digital format now and pick up your paperback on June 21st. Available from most digital retailers.

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I Can Really Pick ’em

Saints and Skeletons is my serialized story of traveling in Mexico with an old dog and a hot Chilango boyfriend in a VW poptop camper in 1991/2. Read more at http://www.saintsandskeletons.com

Saints and Skeletons

Boats Photo by kateburtonblog.co.uk

The laughter of fishermen woke me at 7:00 A.M., the camper already a slow cooking oven in the heat. A sheen of sweat covered my skin. I stretched and pulled myself out of the sheets to look through the no-see-um netting Velcroed into the door opening. The edge of the bay lay about seventy-five feet away. Tiny waves foamed onto the shore where the jolly pod of fishermen clustered, cleaning early catches, mending nets, or preparing to launch the green, yellow and red pangas. Catcalling and laughter between boats drifted my way, but gulls, squabbling over bits of discarded fish guts, drowned out the fishermen’s conversations with their grating calls.

Four or five stout women in shiny dresses appeared, hefting gigantic blue enamel pots and baskets laden with steaming tortillas wrapped in bright napkins. They began to dish up breakfast for their men into clay bowls…

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