Meet Me / Events
I'm a California girl (transplanted from Pennsylvania via North Carolina). Well, girl might be stretching it, I'm a mom (both kids out of the nest), a baseball coach’s wife, a runner (slogger is more like it, I jog very slowly), an obsessed pickleballer, and a lapsed cook. My whole world lit up the second I deciphered Fun With Dick and Jane, and it has never dimmed. I am endlessly enthralled with how stories come out of someone’s head into my hands then into my head. Every book feels like it is enchanted. I love the beach, Lemonheads, and baseball. I've sampled several professions including psychologist, college professor, rat lab tech and waitress (not in that order). And these days, I am a writer, taking pieces of everything I know and love and putting them together in one place. Sometimes that place is imaginary (my novels) and sometimes that place is my twist on the real world (my blog). It is a most delicious way to live life, playing with words, occasionally glimpsing magic.
My novel My Paperback Cape is a sort of support letter to my teenage self. Jacqueline is not me and the things that happen to her did not happen to me but the feelings she had, the sense of loneliness, helplessness, fear, those all did happen to me and I would have welcomed a story about someone who found the heroic side of herself. And who did it without the help of any adults.
My novel The Unmooring of Mrs. Mango is a darkly comedic family drama reminiscent of A Man Called Ove and This Is Where I Leave You. Straight-laced, sixty-something Mrs. Mango has been married to her second choice for forty-two years, mindlessly trudging through her tedious life—except when she's dreaming of the fancy wedding she'll throw for still-single daughter Christine, and except on Sunday mornings when she allows herself a half-hour locked in the bathroom to write tragic letters to her first love, Raul. When Christine announces at Thanksgiving dinner that her friend Sarah is really her girlfriend, disapproving Mrs. Mango is shaken to her core. Stumbling through subsequent events with her husband, four grown children, dogs, cats, nosy neighbors, religious authorities, octogenarians, babies, and random strangers, every experience seems out of kilter, colored by her daughter's perceived betrayal. As family strife builds, Mrs. Mango is forced to confront her rigid world view and the secret she herself has hidden for almost fifty years, the cause of a painful rift with her own mother. In the process, she discovers that what she thought she knew about love (and sex, definitely sex), was all wrong.
I am the author of the cozy-ish mystery series Order Out of Chaos, which currently includes Murder, Mess, and the Tangerine Dress and Murder, Hijinks and the Peridot Cufflinks. I am now at work on Book 3 in the series.
The books follow Izzy Bishop, a forty-something woman who pretends a lot: pretends she knows how to organize closets in her new job with her sister Lauren’s Order Out of Chaos organizing business, pretends she didn’t develop unwelcome psychic flashes after a car accident and coma, and pretends her life isn’t teetering on the edge of financial disaster with a son in college, another about to start, an estranged husband in France, and a stack of medical bills.
When Izzy’s extrasensory flashes warn her that a client is in danger—and no one believes her, not even the client—she finds herself stumbling into murder investigations while juggling organizing jobs, family crises, and a complicated attraction to a mesmerizing ER doctor.
If you mixed Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum with Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri, you’d get Izzy Bishop.
You can also find my work on:
my blog https://lynnrankinesquer.wordpress.com
amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/lynnrankinesquer
FB page https://www.facebook.com/lynnrankinesquer
Twitter (X) at https://x.com/lrankinesquer
website: https://lynnrankin-esquer.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lynnresquer_/
