Blog tour ~ guest post: After The Husbands by Gina Cheyne

I am delighted to have Gina as a guest poster today ~ thanks to Rachel’s Random Resources for organizing.

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Genre ~ Crime

Publication date ~ August 1, 2024

Series ~ SeeMs Detective Agency #5

Est page count ~ 240

Author Content Warning ~ Cynicism

After the Husbands by Gina Cheyne, a murder story set on a Mekong cruise in Vietnam, in the current era.

I love doing research for my books. Sometimes I spend so much time doing research I wonder if I’ll ever get around to doing the writing. For After the Husbands, I was researching the subject long before I even thought of writing a book and setting it in Vietnam.

When I was learning to fly in the USA (I am a pilot and it’s cheaper to train in the USA than in the UK) it was shortly after the US/Vietnam war and there were a lot of ex-military pilots teaching. All pilots love telling stories and war pilots even more than most. But the more tales I heard, the more I wondered what it was like from the other side, and what the Vietnamese would say about the USA. However, in the 1980s it was expensive and difficult to go to Vietnam, there was no chance of going there myself and as far as I could see there were no books written from the Vietnamese side of the story. So, for many years it was just an idea bubbling in the back of my mind.

Then I came across a book written in 1990 called When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip. Although the book itself is strangely written and jumps around from the past to the present in a peculiar manner, the story itself is sensational. It is the story of a young peasant girl in both the Franco Vietnamese War and the USA Vietnam War, and how she and her family are caught up in this international conflict and how their lives are changed forever by world politics.

I was stunned. It was a real eye opener on how conflict affects the ordinary person. I knew then I wanted to set my story against the background of the Vietnam War.

The problem then was how to set a crime book, using my current detectives, in a past before most of them were even born. I didn’t want to do time travel and anyway I didn’t think it would work for my detectives. And then, serendipitously, my husband and I won a trip down the Mekong River in Vietnam in a competition. It was a wonderful trip and interestingly there were only four of us on a boat intended for seventy passengers and thirty staff, this was because while the boat was always full

going from Cambodia to Vietnam, going, as we were, from Vietnam to Cambodia was often completely empty – hence the competition to fill it, no doubt.

Being a crime writer I always muse about what would happen if there was a murder here – wherever I am – and what would be the result. I startled the pursuer by asking what they would do with the body if someone died on the cruise. I didn’t say if someone was murdered, I said if they had a heart attack or something, but even so he looked a little shocked and concluded they would have to go in with the frozen food.

Cruises are perfect for murder stories, having as you do a complete cast of potential murderers marooned on board, but my real problem was how to get my detectives to Vietnam, miles out of their normal patch. And that was why I decided to have a very wealthy employer involved, so that he/she could pay for these detectives to travel out when her companion was killed. My only problem now was why would she choose these detectives – which you will discover when you read the book – and how they would be able to work with the local police forces.

And finally, who would be the heroine of the book. Would it be the detectives, as in the rest of the series, or would someone else be the main voice of the narrative. I decided on my wealthy employer and that she would write it in her own voice. She is eighty, deaf and widowed four times. She is likely to look at the world with some cynicism. And she does.

Book blurb:

What do you do when you’ve buried four husbands and not yet found a fifth?

Wealthy Lady Bumstead takes a cruise down the Mekong in Vietnam with a hired female companion, Anne de Tonkin. Annie is not just a kind old lady, she is a brilliant listener and soon knows all about the other travellers. But, on the last day of the cruise she is murdered.

Lady Bumstead, unable to see any reason why Annie should be murdered, is convinced the killer was after her. She hires the SeeMs Detective Agency to protect her and find the killer. At the same time she decides to do some sleuthing herself, and, with the help of her high powered hearing aid, she begins listening to all the conversations around her.

As the SeeMs Detectives investigate the crime, they find Annie had a rich past and connections with almost everyone else on the boat. There seem to be plenty of reasons for killing her, but who did the deed?

Will Lady Bumstead and the SeeMs Detectives find the killer before he/she strikes again? Will Lady Bumstead find a fifth husband? Or will she become another victim?

Written in the first person by Lady Bumstead this novel will be particularly enjoyed by readers of Agatha Christie and A Man Called Otto. Or anyone interested in whodunnits.

Pre-order Link –

Author Bio – Gina has worked as a pilot, physiotherapist, freelance writer and dog breeder. As a child, Gina’s parents hated travelling and never went further than Jersey. As a result she became travel-addicted and spent years bumming around SE Asia, China and Australia, where she worked in a racing stables in Pinjarra, South of Perth. She then lived and worked in various places in Spain, the USA and London before settling in West Sussex with her husband and dogs. This is her fifth crime novel in the SeeMs Detective Agency series. This book is set in Vietnam.

Social Media Links –

https://ginacheyne.com

https://www.instagram.com/ginacheynewriter

https://www.facebook.com/gina.cheyne.books

https://reedsy.com/discovery/user/ginacheyne