Tangled Souls' Characters

As the Tangled Souls 99 cents sale continues (see previous post), here’s a bit more about my very unique characters. Leave it to me to pair a Wiccan and an Irish Catholic in a romance.

The heart of any novel is the lead characters. Not only do they have to be believable, they have to possess a complexity that warrants the reader’s interest. In short, the characters better have a strong “back story” (their personal history) and compelling “issues” that must be resolved over the course of the novel.

Authors spend a great deal of time working out those elements to ensure the story is strong. To that end, I purposely chose to make Tangled Souls’ two lead characters from opposite ends of the religious spectrum.
Douglas O’Fallon is a red-haired Irishman who has lived in the US for a number of years. He has a strong sense of right and wrong, which is reflected in his career as homicide detective in Los Angeles.

He’s Roman Catholic and rather devout, despite two divorces. He and his priest (O’Fallon’s former partner and ex-homicide detective Avery Elliott) are best friends. Now a private investigator, O’Fallon has a deep distrust of most things supernatural, which is awkward since he’s psychokinetic (has the ability to “pull” images off everyday objects). That “gift” makes him very uncomfortable, if not physically ill, especially when he was working crime scenes. In fact, he took early retirement just because of that problem.

My hero is cynical and stubborn, but a romantic; a man who has lost at love more than once and yet still believes he’ll find the right lady. His “history” and his disdain for psychic charlatans immediately puts him at odds with my heroine, Gavenia Kingsgrave.

Gavenia is from a different faith tradition: she’s Wiccan, as is her aunt. Her “gift” came to her late in life, just a few months before, and now she’s a Shepherd, tasked with helping the souls of the dead to make the journey toward The Light (Heaven). It’s a difficult and heartbreaking job with a high burnout rate. Her Ethereal Guardian (Bartholomew Quickens) is trying to teach her the ropes, but even Bart isn’t allowed to tell her everything.
In addition to the “job” stress, Gavenia has some serious emotional issues stemming from a horrific event when she was a teenager, making it hard for her trust men.
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So we have one pigheaded Irishman going head-to-head with an equally stubborn woman, both with romantic baggage. Put them on the mean streets of L.A., with a murder mystery to solve and dangerous ghosts on the loose, add in a dash of romance and that’s Tangled Souls. Personally, it’s one of my favourite tales if nothing more than for Gavenia and O’Fallon’s love story. ‪#‎TangledSouls ‪#‎99cents ‪#‎Ireland ‪#‎MurderMystery

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