In December of 2015, Linda L. Richards was named as the new publisher and senior editor at Self-Counsel Press, replacing newspaperman Kirk LaPointe who has moved on to become VP Audience and Business Development at Business in Vancouver after his failed attempt to defeat Gregor Robinson for the office of Mayor of Vancouver. Richards had been publisher and founding editor of on-line January Magazine. She was also the author of 14 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including The Canadian Business Guide to Using the Internet, published by Self-Counsel in 1995.

Born in Vancouver, editor Linda L. Richards and photographer David Middleton started their on-line literary publication JanuaryMagazine.com in 1997, having been partners since 1993.

Her first novel, Mad Money (MIRA Books, $7.99 2004), was the first in a series of novels featuring Madeline Carter.

In 2005, Richards published a Hollywood crime novel, The Next Ex: A Madeline Carter Mystery (MIRA Books), in which former stockbroker-turned-daytrader Madeline Carter agrees to teach the indulged wife of an A-list movie producer about the stock market. When said wife turns up dead, Madeline finds herself in the middle of a series of murders while inadvertently opening up a 40-year old cold case. While the first two books in the series take place mainly in Los Angeles, the third book, Calculated Loss (2006; $8.50), about the suspicious death of Madeline Carter's ex-husband, a chef, has been set in Vancouver.

Linda Richard's fourth novel, Death was the Other Woman (2008), is a classic noir set in the Depression era of the 1930s, from the perspective of an L.A. private eye's secretary. The heroine is Kitty Pangborn, an ex-debutante whose father killed himself on the eve of the stock market crash of 1929. His death leaves Kitty in a dire, unfamiliar place: having to make a living for herself for the first time in her life. She finds a job with a hard-drinking gumshoe named Dexter Theroux in a world that is completely new to her. "She is the typical fish out of water, in so many ways," says Richards. "That's one of the things readers seem to really relate to in the Kitty Pangborn books," says Richards. "What does the inside of the 1930s detective office - and that whole world - look like? Most of us don't know."

In the second Kitty Panghorn novel, Death was in the Picture, the Girl Friday mixes with Hollywood glitz when Kitty's boss, Dexter Theroux, has been asked to help leading man Laird Wyndham prove his innocence. The actor was the last person to be seen with a young actress who died under very suspicious circumstances, and the star has fallen from the big screen to the big house. "Wyndham's a dreamboat, but that isn't the only thing that has Kitty hot under the collar. Dex has already signed a client -- one who's hired him to prove Wyndham's hands are not as clean as they look."

Death Was in the Picture won the Panik Award for Best Los Angeles-Based Noir ficiton.

With her novel, If It Bleeds (Orca $9.95) Richards entered the Rapid Reads niche. Her new heroine Nicole Charles didn't attend journalism school to become a gossip columnist, but with jobs scarce she takes on the beat with the Vancouver Post. As Nicole struggles with the stigma attached to her type of journalism, she begins to think she'll never have a real reporting job. When she discovers the body of an up-and-coming artist in a dark alley--stabbed in the throat with an antique icepick--she finds herself in the middle of the biggest story of the year. Sorta' Yaletown meets Trotsky.

In 2021, Richards published the first in her "The Ending" series about a woman who becomes a hired killer in Endings (Oceanview Publishing). In the follow-up, Exit Strategy (Oceanview Publishing, 2022) Richards' "hitwoman" gets a surprise assignment -- keep someone alive -- although this might involve killing other people. In Dead West (Oceanview Publishing, 2023) our anti-hero is questioning whether to continue being a hitwoman as she is confronted with a man she believes should live the longer she is stalking him.

***

Wild Horses: Running Free by Linda L. Richards (Orca $24.95) Ages 9-12

Review by Heidi Greco (BCBW 2023)

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that as a child, I dreamt of having a horse. And I’ll admit my desire was so fierce that I fastened pretend reins to the handlebars of my bike, and even tied it to our fence in the evening.

Linda L. Richards shared my passion and filled her bedroom with posters and statues of horses — only she managed to have at least part of her wish come true because one day “Bonnie” arrived on her family’s property in Langley, BC. Richards cautiously bonded with the horse, which she believed was wild, and managed to “tame” Bonnie enough to climb onto her back for a ride. And even though it turned out that Bonnie wasn’t a wild horse (and wasn’t an animal she could keep), that experience helped firm up her devotion to learning more about these beautiful creatures who still run free in a few special places around the world.

With 16 books to her credit, as well as experience as the president of Vancouver’s long-standing Self-Counsel Press, Richards has clearly learned to do thorough research and this book reflects the depth of her explorations.

She begins by offering information about horses in general. For example, I certainly didn’t know about the mobility of their eyes or ears, or the limitations of the spectrum of light that’s visible to them. She then goes on with a history of Equus, the horse family’s scientific name, examining it right down to the various surviving strands of DNA. She also helps us distinguish between the terms “wild” and “feral” which she says are often applied incorrectly.

But readers shouldn’t shy away with thoughts that this book is overly scientific. Part of the Orca Wild series, its intended audience is middle-grade readers although the colour photos on every page are enough to lure much younger readers into turning these pages. And, as I’ve already admitted, I learned a number of things while reading this.

Numerous sidebars, dense with information, appear frequently — though I did find that some of them didn’t exactly fit with the text they were meant to amplify. Nonetheless, they present such an interesting array of facts — everything from vocabulary specific to horses (words indicating age and gender, or terms for their various colours) to what determines a pony as opposed to a horse.

Richards also deals with several delicate issues about wild horses. One, their origins. While some claim horses were first brought to North America by explorers from Europe, others say that they migrated much earlier across what was then a land bridge connecting Asia and North America. Further, many Indigenous Peoples hold the horse as sacred and believe that horses have always been on the North American continent.

Another contentious issue which Richards addresses head-on is what the fate of wild horses should be. She seems to not be altogether onside with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a branch of the US Department of the Interior. This is the branch of government that’s in charge of public lands, the lands on which a number of wild horses still live.

In some ways it seems that the BLM is at the mercy of several groups: those who claim wild horses “…are bad for the environment, that they eat too much of the grass that deer or cattle or various other species need to eat, that there are too many of them.” Others contend, with some evidence, that horses can be good for the environment by helping prevent wildfires when they clear out vegetation that might serve as tinder. There are also economic benefits to tourism from having wild horses in a protected area. Other countries have found wild horses are beneficial, especially as is noted in a sidebar about a practice called “conservation grazing” now used in England and other parts of the United Kingdom.

In areas that seek to control wild horse populations, the options for dealing with them range from rounding the horses up (often with helicopters) to leaving them alone, to administering chemical birth control measures.

Richards offers hope for solutions — not only with the challenging-sounding proposal to adopt a wild horse, but also with stories of changes that have come about from letter-writing campaigns, letters that were often written by children. She includes a glossary and a list of further resources, both in print and online.

This clearly-written and well-researched book holds more information than most of us could absorb in a single reading. It encourages us to browse around, maybe something like the grazing style of a wild horse, digesting what we learn as we proceed. For any girl or boy wanting to learn more about horses (or maybe to do research for a science fair project), they couldn’t ask for a better starting point. 9781459825598

Heidi Greco still admires the beauty of horses, but doesn’t often get the chance to see one up-close, in-person.

***

BOOKS:

Mad Money (MIRA Books, 2004)
The Next Ex: A Madeline Carter Mystery (MIRA Books, 2005)
Calculated Loss (MIRA Books, 2006)
Death was the Other Woman (Minotaur/HB Fenn, 2008) $27.99
Death was in the Picture (St. Martin's Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books, 2009)
If It Bleeds (Orca, 2014) $9.95 9781459807341
When Blood Lies (Orca, 2016) $9.95 9781459808379
Return from Extinction: the Triumph of the Elephant Seal (Orca, 2020) $24.95 978-1-4598-2136-1
Endings (Oceanview Publishing, 2021)
Exit Strategy (Oceanview Publishing, 2022) 9781608094226
Wild Horses: Running Free (Orca, 2023) $24.95 hc 9781459525598
Dead West (Oceanview Publishing, 2023) 9781608095131

[BCBW 2023] "Fiction" "Galiano"