Get Lost with Bond Girl Gemma Halliday

Her name is Bond. Jamie Bond. And she is licensed to kill any pre-nup you can throw at her.

Catching cheating husbands became Jamie Bond's life when her father was shot and wounded on the job, forcing Jamie to take over the family business: The Bond Agency. But three years later, the P.I. is shocked when the gun that wounded her father surfaces during a high-profile murder trial. Is this the connection Jamie's been waiting for to finally nail her father's shooter? But, oddly enough, Derek doesn't seem interested. In fact, if Jamie didn't know better she'd say he's even trying to stop her from looking into it. Along with her team of bombshell investigators, Jamie suddenly finds herself in the middle of a cold case that's heating up the media, dodging old grudges and new enemies, while questioning the motives of those closest to her. If she can live with the truth, the secrets Jamie uncovers may bring down more than a marriage this time.

 Meet Halliday, Gemma Halliday

 New York Times Bestselling Author 

Gemma had a hard time figuring out what she wanted to be when she grew up. She worked as a film and television actress, a teddy bear importer, a department store administrator, a preschool teacher, a temporary tattoo artist, and a 900 number psychic, before finally selling her first book and deciding to be a writer.

Since then, Gemma has written several mystery novels and been the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Reader's Choice award and three RITA nominations. Her books have hit both the USA Today and the New York Times Bestseller lists.

Gemma now makes her home in the San Francisco Bay area where she is hard at work on her next book.

CLOVER: You’ve had an interesting string of jobs. Are you able to bring in any of these far different experiences into your writing?

GEMMA: Absolutely!  I draw on all of those odd jobs when creating characters.  I have a psychic character, Mrs. Rosenblatt, in my High Heels books who is patterned after some people I met while working at the Psychic Friends Network, and the main character in that series, Maddie has a job designing children’s shoes which I stole from a woman I used to paint tattoos with.  While writing the Jamie Bond books, one thing I didn’t have was first-hand knowledge about P.I. work, but luckily a good friend of mine, J.R. Rain, was a working P.I. at the time, so he filled in my blanks. 

CLOVER: There’s a lot of humor in your books. Are you funny in real life or does that only come out on the page?

GEMMA: I was raised with a lot of humor in our home, so I think some of what comes out on the page is just what life with my family is like.   But I will say that the first thing my grandfather said when he read my first book was, “I had no idea you were so funny.”  So I guess more comes out on the page than it does in person. 

CLOVER: On that note, what’s your favorite kid joke?

GEMMA: Why did the calf cross the road?  To get to the udder side.

CLOVER’S GOTTA ASK:  What is something that not a lot of people know about you but you WISH more people COULD know?

GEMMA’S GOTTA ANSWER:  I wrote my first series of books when I was eleven.  It followed the life of a character I traced from coloring book through her childhood and into her adult years where she met and fell in love with Popeye.  (He was the only male coloring book character I could find to trace.) 

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WHAT’S UP NEXT FOR YOU?

LUCK BE A LADY

Tahoe Tessie Mysteries book #1

coming summer 2013!

   Tessie King has just inherited the biggest casino in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada: the Royal Lakeside. What she didn't bargain for are the problems she inherited with it.

   Having left Tahoe for art school years ago, the underbelly of the casino trade is a far cry from the art world Tessie is used to. High-stakes cons, inside jobs, wise guys... Tessie quickly realizes she's in way over her head. And things go from bad to worse when questions start to arise about the nature of her father's death. Enter FBI agent Devin Ryder, member of the Nevada Organized Crime Task Force. He's had his eye on the King family for months, and with the suspicious death of its leader, Ryder now his Tessie squarely in his sights. If Tessie doesn't want to be running her casino from behind bars, she needs to find out how her father really died, who's behind it, why, and how to get them into Agent Ryder's hot little hands before he gets his hands on her. All the while catching a con-man, beating the competition, and running a multi-million dollar business.

   Tough job? Fo'get about it. All in a day's work for this lady luck.

 Today only Secret Bond is part of a huge Book Buffet with more than 150 Authors offering their books for this limited time at 99 cents.

Load up today and have a great variety of romances to read all summer!

Sale Site Here

In the meantime, enjoy an excerpt from Secret Bond

   “Roll up your window.”

   “It’s 100 degrees outside.”

   “They're tinted.  Less chance of someone seeing you.”

   I shot Derek a dirty look but complied, rolling the window up.  Then I took off my jacket in an attempt to feel less like a roast pig as I shifted in my seat, peeling my thighs off the hot vinyl. 

   “That’s better.”  Derek leaned back and put a pair of binoculars back up to his eyes, training them on the pink, stucco covered motel across the street again.

   “I don’t think he’s coming,” I said, fanning myself with an AARP brochure  I'd found stuck between the seats of Derek’s Bonneville.

   “Oh, he’s coming.  You just gotta be patient, kid.”

   Patience was something I was woefully short on today.  Usually I did stake-outs on my own.  Or with one of my associates from the Bond Agency.  But today Derek had insisted on riding along.  I’d like to think it was just boredom and the restless heat wave that had recently hit Los Angeles and not that he didn’t trust me to do the job right.

   I'd like to think that, but I didn't really. 

   Derek Bond was a licensed P.I., sixty-three years old - though his libido was perpetually stuck at sixteen - and feared by cheating husbands everywhere.  Not because Derek was apt to sleep with their distraught wives, though I couldn't promise that hadn't happened on occasion, but because no matter who they were, how careful they were, or how slick they thought they were being, Derek would always catch them in the act - pants around the ankles, prostitute half naked, pre-nup busted to pieces.  The Bond Agency had been synonymous with a quick and easy divorce for woman all over L.A. for years. 

   That is until one of those cheating husbands had been upset enough to shoot Derek while on a stakeout at a seedy motel in a North Hollywood neighborhood not a whole lot unlike the one we were in now. 

   After the shooting, Derek had been forced into early retirement, prescribed to take it easy on his weakened heart.  That's when he’d reluctantly handed the reins of the Bond Agency over to his only child.

Me, Jamie Bond.  Or as my father, ever hopeful that I’d come out a bouncing baby boy and a chip off the old block, had legally named me: James Bond.  I'd spent the last twenty-nine years of my life trying to forgive him for that.      

   I'd honestly never wanted to be a P.I. myself.  I'd grown up doing my homework in the back of this very same Bonneville on stake-outs very much like this one, which had given me more than enough of a taste of the domestic espionage game.  Me - I'd dreamed of being a runway model.  Which, at age fifteen, is exactly what I'd done, spending my late-teens and early-twenties strutting down the catwalks of Milan, Paris, and New York.  A far cry from the faded sweatbox I was now seated in.  But the truth was that when Derek got shot, my world changed forever.  Suddenly, he needed me in a way I never thought possible.  Besides, I wasn’t getting any younger at the time (at twenty-six I'd been a dinosaur in model years), and I did know the P.I. business inside and out.  So, I’d taken over the reins and been the "Bond" in the agency ever since. 

Not that it kept Derek from still sticking his nose into every aspect of it.

   “How old did you say this guy was?” Derek asked from behind his binoculars. 

   “Forty-seven,” I answered.

   “And the chick he’s banging?”

   I winced at his less than PC choice of words.  “The woman he’s been seeing is twenty-one.  But,” I added, “I don’t think they’re showing today.  It’s too hot for adultery.”

   Derek shook his head.  “Trust me.  He’s showing.  A young piece of tail like that…”

   Thankfully he trailed off and I didn’t have to hear his thoughts on twenty-something “tail.”

   “I’ve got about ten more minutes in me,” I warned him, feeling sweat tickle down my back, soaking the pink tank I’d thrown on this morning.  “Then I’m gonna start melting from the inside out.”

   Derek grunted in response. 

   “I’m serious, old man.”

   He ignored me.  “How much is his wife paying you?” he asked instead, reaching into the center console and popping a piece of gum into his mouth.  Watermelon flavored, if the scent hitting my nostrils was any indication.

   “The usual.”

   “Which is?”

   “None of your business.”

   Derek pulled the binoculars away from his eyes just long enough shoot me a dirty look.  “You’re a tough one, Bond.”  Then he blew a big pink bubble my way.

   I resisted the urge to pop it.  Mostly because I didn’t want to ruin my manicure.

   “If you must know, I gave her a discount.”

   “How much?”

   “On contingency,” I muttered under my breath,.

      “Jesus, James.  A charity case?  Really?”  He didn't look amused.

   “Look, she was desperate.  He’s got all their money tied up.  The only way she could afford to pay us was if we can bust her pre-nup.”

   Derek shook his head at me.  “I thought I trained you better than that, kid.  Payment up front.”

   “We’re fine.  She’ll pay.  As soon as we catch the bastard.”

   “Speaking of whom…” Derek grinned, pointing out his smudged windshield.

   Across the street, a BMW pulled up to the motel’s parking lot.  A guy with salt-and-pepper hair wearing a pressed pair of slacks got out, walked around to the passenger side, then opened the door for a brunette in Daisy-dukes who looked young enough to be his daughter. 

   “What did I tell you?” Derek asked, turning to me with a satisfied grin.

   I shook my head.  “I hate it when you're right.”   I grabbed my camera and popped off a couple of shots of the happy couple entering a room on the ground floor.

   “Yeah, but you love catching your mark,” Derek said.

   Dammit, the old man was right again.  

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