What is Leigh Dunlap reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Leigh Dunlap, author of Bless Your Heart: A Thriller.

Her entry begins:

I’m a big reader of non-fiction. I love nothing more than a 900-page book on, say, Andrew Carnegie. Having written a murder/mystery, however, I’ve been playing catch up on all the current writers in that genre.

Such a Lovely Family - Aggie Blum Thompson

Spoiler alert – they really weren’t all that lovely. The members of the Calhoun family were complicated and devious and funny and awful and a wonderful family to spend a book with. The characters in this upper-crust Chevy Chase family spin around the murder of the family’s patriarch. I loved that the novel weaved so much humor into a not so humorous premise. Thompson is great with detail and brings richness to the pages as well as red herrings and fantastic plotting that kept me turning the pages and trying to guess who did it in this whodunnit....[read on]

About Bless Your Heart, from the publisher:

Motherhood and murder link five very different women when a working-class detective clashes with wealthy moms in this upmarket thriller in the vein of May Cobb and Jeneva Rose.

Anderson Tupper, a member of one of Atlanta’s richest families, has been murdered in the dugout of the Little League field where he was a volunteer coach, and it’s up to Detective Shay Claypool, a single mother from the other side of town, to find his killer.

With the exclusive area of Buckhead threatening to secede from the city of Atlanta and take its tax revenue with it, Shay is under pressure to solve the murder of one of Buckhead’s own. Accustomed to handling drug dealers and prostitutes, she must now contend with an even more sinister group: the Buckhead Betties, the insufferably entitled women of Georgia’s most affluent zip code. One of them might be a murderer, but who? Is it the old-money queen of Buckhead? The mysterious new girl in town? The drug-dealing trophy wife?

It seems secrets and lies are as plentiful as luxury handbags in Atlanta and everyone’s guilty of something. Shay’s investigation will make her examine her own prejudices and discover that, as a woman and a mother, she might not be that different from the Betties after all. And if she isn’t careful, they just might take her down with them.

Visit Leigh Dunlap's website.

Q&A with Leigh Dunlap.

Writers Read: Leigh Dunlap.

--Marshal Zeringue