A life-long writer, Terri Benson is the author of one cozy mystery and two historical romance novels and nearly a hundred articles and short stories – many award-winning. She presents workshops at writer’s conferences, and teaches night classes at Western Colorado Community College. Terri spends her non-writing time working at a Business Incubator, camping, Jeeping, and dirt biking with her junior-high-school sweetheart/husband of 40+ years and a succession of Brittany spaniels. Learn more about her and her books and view some beautiful classic cars at her website.A Divco
Classics Never Go Out of Style!
I first fell in love with Classic Cars when I started reading Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novels. There was usually a photo of the car featured in the book on the back cover, and I just loved the beautiful flowing lines and the bits of history from the story. From there, I started going to local and regional car shows and eventually to the big auction houses like Mecum and Barrett Jackson. My husband shares my interest old cars, although he likes the post-1950s, and I’m more interested in the pre-1950s.
My first Bad Carma was a short story that morphed into a full-blown novel a few years later. I shopped that story, but responses were that it was a fun read, but didn’t have enough mystery to carry it in that genre. By then, I had a second story nearly finished, and ended up cannibalizing the first one to fill out the second, and The Pickup Artist was born. It took me another year or two to get brave enough to submit it to agents and editors. During the midst of COVID, I received a contract offer from Literary Wanderlust, and I was in the driver’s seat in a big way! The Pickup Artist, a Bad Carma Mystery, will release April 1 in print and e-book, and, if things work right, audio as well.
I have a rather strange system for deciding what the story will be. First, I find a car I like, then do research on it. Once I know when it was built, and where, I come up with a title which may be a play on words with multiple meanings. Then I work through a plausible story for how it got from “there” in time, to “now,” and craft a contemporary mystery to go along for the ride.
I have my cast of main characters, but each Bad Carma comes with new characters, both good and bad. Renni Delacroix, my protagonist, has the ability—or curse as she calls it—of touching a car and then seeing its history in her dreams (or nightmares as the case often is). That history gives her a mystery to solve, because she hates an incomplete story. The current mystery may not be directly related to the car in question, but she still has to use skills honed over years of finding the provenance of cars (their ownership history), as well as hard-to-find parts, to track down clues. She’s also stubborn (to a fault if you believe her friends and family) and refuses to give up until she has “the rest of the story.”
Renni’s gift has caused her no end of trouble ever since she was nine and it suddenly appeared, immediately following the death of her parents in a car accident. That trouble makes her very leery of talking about it, because she’s lost friends and more over the years when they discovered she’s “different.” She also suffers from the gift, because she has to relive some of the owner’s worst moments. Other times, she gets to see happiness and excitement, as well as a lot of boring applications of makeup in the rearview mirrors or nose picking, but she’d take that any day over the other.
When I go to car shows or auctions, I take photos of cars and trucks that catch my eye. They may not be the most expensive, and I don’t care if they’re in pristine condition or straight off the farm. I look for the small details—the badges (maker logos), hood ornaments, detailed chrome on horns, interiors and dashboards, and the sweep and curves of the bodies. But, and you’ll laugh, my dream vehicle right now is a Divco. The photo is one I saw at the Scottsdale Barrett Jackson show earlier this year. You might think I’m strange, but that little bugger went for $120,000! There’s one here in town that I have my eye on, but I don’t know if the owner will ever consider selling. If you ever see one tooling down the road with Delacroix Restoration’s logo on the side, you’ll know I did it!
A Bad Carma Mystery, Book 1
Classic car restorer Renni Delacroix has a unique gift, one kept carefully hidden: when she touches a car, she sees its history. Focused on building her business in the small town of Rampart, Colorado, she hides the truth of her psychic ability.
But when a Marmon pickup is delivered, visions of terrified women jolt her clean off the old truck. She has no choice but to come forward, especially since one of the women was her best friend, murdered six months earlier. Renni explains what she saw to Detective Matt Brody. Skeptical, he's surprised to find evidence the Marmon belonged to a serial killer known as the Rocky Mountain High Killer.
While battling Brody's suspicions, and her growing attraction to him, Renni uses skills honed hunting down classic parts to unearth the killer. But will she be able to give their identity to Brody before she loses everything—her job, her home...even her life?
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