The Story Behind the Story of Delaney Pace: My Second in a Knife Fight

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A few years ago, my husband Eric posted that we were giving away rusty, fire-damaged barbed wire. One of the takers was Daisy, who showed up with her family to claim some to use for a project. We soon learned that she’d given up oil field trucking in North Dakota—and a side gig as a reality star— for taking over the family homestead, raising her second daughter twenty years after her first, and being a service to others through philanthropy and her physical labor. She was a key player in organizing one of the largest agricultural relief efforts in the history of the United States through a huge convoy of truckers, donors, and volunteers after historic fires devastated America’s Midwest. She and her family raise (and butcher) a large flock of turkeys every year to feed 300+ people at a free community Thanksgiving dinner.

Daisy’s the one you want as your second in a knife fight, who could have been a model or actress instead of a rodeo star and extreme trucker, and she’s the friend you can knock back a cold one with or take to meet your pastor (after you’ve done your best to prepare them for the encounter). If by some small miracle you find her in a church, you won’t see her sitting in the pews... she’s the one standing in the back. She was forged in the kind of volcanic upheaval that can result in smoking rubble or beautiful rocky mountain ranges. Daisy, through character and force of will, is the latter.

If you enjoy Delaney as much as I do, it is because of my friend Daisy. Daisy, thank you for agreeing to let me reshape you in fiction. You were the perfect muse when Bookouture asked me to write detective crime fiction with a badass female protagonist with wild and wonderful Wyoming as the setting.

Catch Delany in Her Silent Bones, Her Hidden Grave, and Her Last Cry in ebook, audio, or print, here: https://amzn.to/3Th7dOy 

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