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Cover of Lost Anchors

Lost Anchors — It’s live on Amazon

It’s here!

Dead or alive? Michael’s missing — in the middle of Melbourne. Julia is hysterical. Michelle just wants Daddy. Can psychiatrist Sadhu Singh and Detective Taylor Franke find him?

Lost Anchors, by JJ KirstenCover of Lost Anchors
(pen name for JL Whitaker, Taran Roberts, and Justus H Lewis PhD)

In Kindle and Print. Samples available.

If you read, please leave a review at your retailer. Tell your friends!

It’s Almost Ready… Lost Anchors, by JJ Kirsten

I’ve spent the past week pulling all the pieces together for Lost Anchors. The cover is done, the proofing is done, and the ISBN is assigned, so there’s no backing out now.

Counting down to the release date. I’m excited!!

Cover of Lost AnchorsOn a drizzly, windy, winter day, Julia Stewart loses someone in the middle of Melbourne – her banker husband, Michael Stewart. Or has she? In a desperate phone call to her long-time counsellor, psychiatrist Dr. Sadhu Singh, Julia pleads for help. When Julia reports her fears to the police, Detective Taylor Franke joins the hunt for the missing Michael.

As far as family friends and Michael’s co-workers know, the relationship has been a relatively happy one, raising daughter Michelle, spending time sailing, planning a trip to visit Michael’s family in Scotland. Of course, there was Julia’s breakdown a few years earlier, as well as Michael’s mysterious ‘men’s business’ meetings upstairs at The Anchor Cafe, his long unexplained mid-week lunches, and the stash of unlikely garments locked in his office file cabinet. Could he have run off with Michelle’s trust account? Did he have a lover? What about the refuelled family boat in the harbour? No one in their circle has seen him for a week. That doesn’t match Julia’s fuzzy stories – at all.

Over the course of the next five days, Dr. Singh and Detective Franke work to answer the question Julia needs them to answer: Where’s Michael? What they eventually find, they could not have imagined.

Next book coming soon — Lost Anchors

Lost Anchors

by JJ Kirsten

NOAA Ocean Explorer: NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer: Gulf of Mexico

(Coming soon)

I’ve been putting the final touches on a new book, and I’m excited for a number of reasons. I hope you will be, too.

Lost Anchors is a mystery, but not your normal run of the mill mystery where someone is killed at the outset and the rest of the time police run around accusing people of being the culprit only to find it was the second person they interviewed who really knocked the guy off. I’m sure we’ve all played that game, taking bets on who in the first few scenes ‘did it’.

Lost Anchors is a missing person mystery. Our central character, Julia Stewart, has mislaid her husband in the middle of Melbourne Australia, a city of over three and a half million people, on a winter Friday afternoon. Julia is distraught and turns to her friend and psychiatrist, Dr. Sadhu Singh, to help her cope and to find the missing Michael. Then there’s Detective Taylor Franke, a crusty middle-aged divorced copper, who knew Julia from an earlier time, when her parents were killed in a train crossing accident. Franke gets drawn into Julia’s current problems and sets off to find out what has happened to Mr. Stewart, while Dr. Singh tries to keep Julia from diving off the deep end. Has he scarpered on the family yacht with his dominatrix? Is he really a dodgy investment banker who is stealing from his clients? Or is there something darker in this couple’s past that has come to a head?

I’ve enjoyed working on this project, in its beginning stages and now in preparing it to see the light of day. Here’s why.

This book was a co-writing project with two other extraordinary women – Taran Roberts and Dr. Justus Lewis, hence the pen name, JJ Kirsten. Continue reading Next book coming soon — Lost Anchors