Vicki Shelton’s Background and Writing Style

As a child, siblings and neighborhood friends were often frustrated when it was playtime. The common remark, once they found me in the boughs of a huge sycamore tree, was, “Oh, there she is, with her nose in a book again!” Captivated by great literature, in my teens, I decided to read the top 500 novels while participating in a highschool honors English program. I only reached the count of 334 books, but the love of words has permeated my being.

During my career, I have written articles for seminars and events related to charitable planning, estate planning, raising money-wise heirs, and the emotions around money and wealth. Not only were the written materials used by marketing departments, but also for newspapers and magazines, such as the Puget Sound Business Journal, Philanthropy Northwest, and other charitable organizations.

Now my writing is focused on my favorite topic of mysteries. Over the years, I have watched all the seasons of Forensic Files, and other murder-solving programs. To me, forensic programs are intriguing by the science of solving murders, and the investigative approaches detectives use are equally fascinating. t In my own writing, I am always mindful of the reader, who may be impatient with the story and want to get to the solving of the murder mystery. Given this scenario, all of my books in the Biodina d’Angelo series have two interweaving plots, sometimes intersecting as Biodina, a nosy but intuitive amateur sleuth, comes in contact with multiple actors driven by greed, lust, power, or anger.

One other characteristic of my writing is that I hope to provide learning and information about topics the reader might otherwise never have been exposed to in their daily lives. For example, in Murders in the Cascades, the fraud committed by the partner in the lumber industry is a very clever and unusual deception. The second murder of the record producer is rare, by poisoning with a food delicacy. In Murders at Filucy Bay, I incorporated a historical native American story about a chieftain’s son who was murdered for a beautiful copper breastplate, a treasure crafted by Salish coppers. The body was found on the same property as a contractor who was murdered, and Biodina assists the police in determining which of the three suspects is the murderer, with two characters driven by anger, and one by revenge.

In the upcoming book, Murderers and Smugglers On a Cruise Ship, I have incorporated the plight of garepeiros, the poor Brazilian miners who work in the sediment of rivers to unearth colored diamonds, called fancy diamonds. When the captain of the cruise ship is murdered, at first the reader wonders if the death is related to the smuggling scheme. Pay attention, dear reader, to the other characters in the book, and their motivations