6.18.2017   “Death, Taxes” series set to wrap up this year

The eleventh book in Diane Kelly’s engaging “Death, Taxes” series of novels featuring female IRS special agent Tara Holloway is Death, Taxes and Sweet Potato Fries (St. Martin’s, $7.99 paperback).

The series will wrap up with one more full-length novel, Death, Taxes and a Shotgun Wedding, due at the end of October, plus another e-book novella.

Kelly also writes the “Paw Enforcement” series starring a Fort Worth policewoman and her trusted canine partner. The sixth novel in that delightful series, Enforcing the Paw, is due June 27, and look for more to come.

In Death, Taxes and Sweet Potato Fries, Tara Holloway is in the middle of two ongoing investigations, the most serious of which involves human trafficking across the Texas-Mexico border. Three sisters are missing and the Border Patrol enlists Holloway’s help in solving the mystery. As usual, Holloway finds herself in grave danger before all is said and done.

Meanwhile, she’s afraid she has some awful disease because her skin has begun to turn orange. Could it be she has eaten too many sweet potato fries? And she has a wedding to plan — or rather to let her mother and future mother-in-law plan. Kelly mixes humor, romance and mystery together in another entertaining tale.

The “Death, Taxes” series debuted in 2011 and “Paw Enforcement” in 2014. So in the past six years, Kelly has turned out eighteen novels and another half dozen or so e-book novellas, and she hopes to have a new series in the works soon. She will be one of the featured authors at this year’s West Texas Book Festival in Abilene in September.

Nature guides: Texas A&M University Press continues to produce informative, colorful regional travel and nature guides as well as its impressive series of books about Texas rivers. Here are four new ones:

Certified naturalists Lynne and Jim Weber of Austin have produced Nature Watch Big Bend: A Seasonal Guide ($24.95 flexbound), a month-by-month guide to the natural wonders of the national park

From the Frio to Del Rio: Travel Guide to the Western Hill Country and the Lower Pecos Canyonlands by Mary S. Black ($24.95 flexbound) is a travel guide to Southwest Texas, with information about state parks, rock art, historic forts, hunting, towns, ghost towns and scenic trails.

The Blanco River by Wes Ferguson, with color photos by Jacob Croft Botter ($24.95 flexbound), explores the history, the beauty and the challenges along the 87-mile “White River” that flows through the Hill Country, with the concluding chapter focusing on the devastating 2015 flood.

The Nueces River: Río Escondido by Margie Crisp, with artwork by William B. Montgomery ($29.95 flexbound), is a personal tour of the South Texas river that flows into Corpus Christi Bay. It is the twentieth book in the press’s River Books Series, sponsored by the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.

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Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.