Cleverest of Them All is the third book in a series I’ve dubbed “
The Clever Detective,” which is the same title as the first book. Some readers have wondered about that name, so I thought I’d explain it.
The first story came about when my then blog sister
Nicky Salcedo invited the members of the
Petit Fours and Hot Tamales blog group to write a contemporized fairy tale. Since I like both romance and mysteries stories, I decided to combine the genres in my yarn.
While searching for a fable to base my story on, I discovered lists of fairy tales with names like “The Clever Little Tailor,” or “The Clever Tinker,” or “Clever Hans.”
These titles evoked memories from my childhood of stories about a poor man who was challenged by a king to perform some impossible task such as find a pot of gold, kill a bear, or slay a dragon. When the hero performed the task by reason of his wit, he was rewarded with the King’s beautiful daughter’s hand in marriage.
So I did a spin on this idea.
Instead of a tailor or tinker, I decided on a hard-boiled detective. A female hard-boiled detective. The King’s dilemma was that his son (a.k.a. the Handsome Prince) had gone missing. The hard-boiled female detective’s challenge was to find him.
Thus was born Stacey Alexander.
Once Stacey found Prince Chad in the first story, I realized the adventures had to continue, so I followed with
Clever is as Clever Does and now the third book, which is novella length (the equivalent of about 70 printed pages) Cleverest of Them All.
In this story, Chad gets a taste of Stacey’s world, though that doesn’t work out so well for either of them. You can check them all out on
Amazon or
Smashwords.
Happy Reading!
Linsey
