Boot Scoot: A Dawna Shepherd Short Story: FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd Mysteries, #5

By Diana Deverell

Dawna Shepherd loves her family, working as an FBI Special Agent, and playing basketball.

She’s celebrating Christmas in her home town when a bounty hunter pursues her college student brother home from Lubbock.

Certain that Fugitive Team Leader Tommy O’Brien is chasing the wrong quarry, Dawna stops him cold at the Shepherd front door.

But she knows O’Brien won’t give up. And all her crime-fighter instincts are screaming that the bounty hunter is going to ruin this holiday for someone she loves.

Can law-abiding Dawna find a way to save Christmas?

Nominated by members of Mystery Readers International for the 2003 Macavity Award for best mystery short story, “Boot Scoot” shows a softer side to the hardnosed FBI agent who appears regularly in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and whose past adventures are collected in Run & Gun: A Dozen Tales of Girls with Guns. Dawna plays a supporting role in three Casey Collins international thrillers, the most recent release being China Box.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sorrel Press
• Release date: May 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386972914

Diana Deverell

Diana Deverell has published seven novels, a short fiction collection, and many short stories. Her latest project is a series of legal thrillers set in Spokane and featuring Nora Dockson, a lawyer who specializes in appeal of life imprisonment and death penalty sentences. The first, Help Me Nora, was released in July, 2014. The second, Right the Wrong, was released in March, 2015. The third book will be published in late 2015. For the latest update, visit Diana at www.dianadeverell.com Diana made her debut as a novelist in 1998 with a series of international thrillers featuring State Department counterterrorist analyst Kathryn “Casey” Collins: 12 Drummers Drumming, Night on Fire, and East Past Warsaw. The three novels are also available in a single ebook, The Casey Collins Trilogy. Diana’s short story, "Warm Bodies in a Cold War", originally published in 1996 under a different title, introduced Casey to the readership of the Foreign Service Journal. The prequel No Place for an Honest Woman expanded on Casey’s early career. The story and all four thrillers are now available as individual ebooks. In 2000, Diana’s short fiction starring FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd started making regular appearances in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Her mystery collection, Run & Gun: A Dozen Tales of Girls with Guns includes eleven Dawna Shepherd stories first published by Alfred Hitchcock, plus all-new “Latin Groove”. Both the collection and “In Plain Sight,” her 2013 mystery, are available in e-editions. Dawna’s latest adventure, “Blown,” appeared in the Kobo Special Edition of Pulse Pounders, the Januaury 2015 issue of Fiction River anthology. In 2012, Diana released her comic mystery novel, Murder, Ken Kesey, and Me as an ebook. Other digital editions include "Heart Failure", a short story set on the day Jim Morrison died, written to order for a publisher of textbooks for Danish teens learning English. Diana is a member (and past board member) of the International Association of Crime Writers. She belongs to the American Women’s Club in Denmark and her short fiction has appeared in Good Works: Prose and Poetry by Ex-Pat Women in Denmark.

Book preview

BOOT SCOOT

A Dawna Shepherd Short Story

By Diana Deverell

Published by Sorrel Press

www.sorrelpress.com

Table of Contents

BOOT SCOOT

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

AUTHOR NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

Boot Scoot: A Dawna Shepherd Short Story was chosen by members of Mystery Readers International as a finalist for the 2003 Macavity Award for Best Mystery Short Story

Praise for Bitch Out of Hell, the new political thriller featuring Bella Hinton

Helluva read! I really enjoyed this. I hope there are more books coming. The characters are intriguing, Bella is intelligent and sassy, and the plot is entertaining. (Amazon reader review)

Diana Deverell’s newest book could be a story on the six o’clock news - the outsourcing of America’s military functions, shady corporate dealings, the suspicious death of a whistleblowing board member, and a special prosecutor’s investigation. (iBooks reader review)

. . . a delightfully humorous and suspenseful read with realistic characters . . . and the plot twists and weaves itself into a satisfying conclusion. For a fun thriller read, check this out. (Kings River Life review)

Praise for the Casey Collins international thriller series

She writes with a polish and a flair that hold nothing back in the areas of terror, torture and adventure as well as in more tender worlds of love and loyalties . . . (National Public Radio)

Deverell's solid second Casey Collins novel [has] engaging narrative, gripping mystery, and wily plot twists. (Publishers Weekly)

Diana Deverell has once again crafted a tale that makes you pray it’s fiction. (S.E. Warwick, mystery reviewer)

Praise for the Nora Dockson legal thriller series:

A great character, a great series—I highly recommend it to people. (Stephen Campbell, CrimeFiction.FM)

Deverell has a gift that grabs the reader so one cares about what happens to every character in the story. Once one starts Nora’s clear sighted and brilliant pursuit of justice it’s hard to put the book down! (Amazon reader review)

"The series is great; it’s got the theme of the hard scrabble up-from-poverty Nora doing her battle of wits against a scheming, social-climbing assistant attorney general, laced with tons of