Join Suspense Sisters in welcoming Luana Ehrlich! Luana is giving away an ebook copy of her upcoming release,
Two Days Taken, a Mylas Grey Mystery. To enter the drawing, comment on the post!
Meet Luana Ehrlich: Luana is the author of award-winning Titus Ray Thrillers and Mylas Grey Mysteries. Her novels are clean reads with intriguing plots, fascinating characters, jaw-dropping twists, and occasional touches of heart-warming romance.
Besides being a USA Today Bestselling author, Luana is a minister's wife, former missionary, and, of course, an avid reader.
She developed her passion for reading, as well as writing, while still in elementary school, but she didn’t begin writing fiction until her husband retired from the ministry. She claims she didn’t start writing novels so she could avoid making lunch for him. She insists she writes her mystery/suspense/thrillers to fulfill a lifelong dream of writing entertaining stories while sharing her faith. Luana and her husband are residents of Norman, Oklahoma, and it just so happens that’s where her two grandsons live.
I understand you wanted to become a writer almost as soon as you learned to read. Tell us about that, and tell us why you dedicate all your spy books to your father. You’re right. As soon as I learned to read, I started dreaming of becoming a writer. I even decided I would write under another name. I chose the name Pam Black because I thought Luana was too difficult for people to remember. Now, I love my slightly unconventional first and last name, but I did include Pam Black as a minor character in one of my novels.
I dedicate all my espionage thrillers to my father because when I was only eleven, I got bored reading the books appropriate to my age, and when I asked my father if I could read some of the books he was bringing home from the library, he said yes, and thus was born my love of the mystery/suspense/thriller genre. I might add that my father is 95-years old, and he still reads mystery/thrillers.
You wrote seven books in the Titus Ray Thriller Series before you started your new Mylas Grey Mystery Series, tell us a little about both series and why you added a mystery series.My idea for the Titus Ray series came when I was listening to the news one morning, and I heard a story about a group of Christians in Iran being persecuted. I began asking several questions, and the answers eventually became the backstory of Book I, One Night in Tehran. I later wrote about the Iranian Christians in the prequel to the series, One Step Back. After hearing the news story, I found myself wondering what would happen if a veteran CIA intelligence operative in Tehran encountered a group of Iranian Christians and became a believer. How would his conversion affect his career? How would a man trained to lie and deceive others be able to follow the teachings of Christ in the real world?
After I wrote
One Night in Tehran, not only was I surprised at how well it was received, I knew the story of Titus Ray as a covert operative trying to live out his newfound faith had to continue. I knew I had to keep the story going. Now, I’ve recently branched out and included his partner, Ben Mitchell, in his own series along with Titus, and the first book in that series is
Ben in Love, which was just published in the boxed set, Dangerous Deceptions. The next book,
Ben in Charge, will be published in Spring 2021, and the next Titus Ray book,
Four Steps Missed, will also be available in 2021.
As far as my new mystery series is concerned, I hadn’t planned on writing anything but Titus Ray Thrillers, but when I was at the American Christian Fiction Writers Conference in Nashville, TN, where I was a finalist for the Carol Awards, I met an agent who suggested I might want to develop a new series of mystery novels to expand my reader base.
I found the idea appealing, and within a few days, the character of Mylas Grey, a private investigator in Washington, D.C., was born. One Day Gone, Book I in the Mylas Grey series, was published last October, and next week, on October 29,
Two Days Taken, will be released.
In
One Day Gone, Mylas Grey is investigating the disappearance of a senator’s daughter and during his investigation, he meets photographer Whitney Engel, who causes him to question his lack of faith. Their story continues in
Two Days Taken, and, of course, the story includes an exciting mystery.
Tell us about the plot of Two Days Taken, and why you chose to have the Mylas Grey Mystery Series centered in Washington, D.C.I’ll answer the second part of your question first. I’m a news junkie, and unlike some people, I love all the drama and intrigue that takes place on Capitol Hill. When I decided to write a mystery series, I knew I wanted to write about a private investigator, but I also wanted him to be a complex character who didn’t do run-of-the-mill investigations. That’s the reason Mylas Grey is a private investigator in the office of Senator Davis Allen, and I believe readers will find how Mylas arrived at that point in his career a fascinating story in and of itself.
Senator Davis Allen is head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, so Mylas not only runs investigations for the President’s judicial appointments, he also looks into other matters for Senator Allen, which is why Mylas investigated the senator’s missing daughter in
One Day Gone. In Book II,
Two Days Taken, the senator asked Mylas to do a favor for another senator. The favor is only supposed to take two days, which bothers Mylas because Whitney Engel, a woman he met in One Day Gone, is coming to visit him in Washington, and he doesn’t want anything to interfere with that.
Here’s a short blurb for
Two Days Taken: Two days. That’s all the investigation was supposed to take. Mylas only has to spend two days investigating a matter for a senator, and then he’ll have the rest of the week to entertain Whitney Engel. Two days later, Mylas discovers the man he’s investigating has a dark side to him, putting Whitney’s life in grave danger. Can their relationship survive? Can his faith survive?
What has been the most challenging and/or the most rewarding aspect of your writing career thus far?Beyond a doubt, the most challenging aspect of my writing career has been the need to promote my writing. I never imagined I would have to market myself or my books, yet that takes up about half of my time each day. On the other hand, having dialogue with my readers is the most rewarding aspect of my career as an author. I get emails from readers on a daily basis, and it’s such a joy to hear from each of them. I write a personal email to each fan who writes to me, and they’re my motivation to stay up writing past midnight.
One last question. Tell us a little about your writing process. Do you just start writing or do you make a detailed outline?The writing process for me is like watching a movie and just describing it to someone by writing down everything that’s occurring at that moment. I don’t make much of an outline—just a couple of important points about the story. Occasionally, I’ll expand on that as I go along so my main character will be where I want him to be at the end of the book in order to continue the series.
