Tag Archives: road travel

San Albarradas, Oaxaca  October, 1991

In 1991  I drove to Mexico to research a novel. I bought a 1969 VW pop-top camper and tricked it out with everything I thought I’d need for a six-month stay: no-see-um netting, a generator to run my desk lamp and a pre-laptop portable Toshiba computer and printer, solar fans to suck the heat out of the cabin and air shocks to  smooth out the bumpy, pot-holed back roads of Mexico.  My eleven-year-old German shepherd, Parsley, co-piloted from her red leather seat salvaged from a Cadillac, the twin to mine.

California had taken an economic nose dive around the same time we bombed Iraq and I’d gone from a thriving bookkeeping and tax preparation business with little in my savings, to a bulging portfolio and clients who couldn’t pay me anymore. The universe pointed south. It had been my dream to learn Spanish and delve into the mesoamerican cultures while exploring Mexico, and overnight, the dream became reality. I made a plan, custom-built my bus’s interior, packed my bags and headed out.

Three years later I hadn’t written the planned book, but I’d lived an amazing array of experiences, starting with being threatened by armed narco-thugs on a lonely stretch of the Pan American Highway in the State of Michoacán—just like JadeAnne Stone, the heroine of the books I did write. It may have been a long time coming, but it was a Set Up from the start!

When JadeAnne Stone and her German shepherd, Pepper, are kidnapped off a lonely highway in Mexico en route to locate a banker’s missing wife, she unwittingly enters a world of high-stakes oil politics, money laundering, and El Narco’s grab for power. JadeAnne finds the missing wife and realizes she’s been set up. To stay alive she must unravel the Aguirre family’s secrets. Who will she trust as loyalties shift and greed rules?

Now available     Amazon      B & N        Kobo

If you enjoy the book, please take a moment to go to your retailer and leave an honest review. It won’t take long, and it will enable me to write more of JadeAnne’s adventures for you.

Thanks for being part of the journey.

~Ana