Acapulco has alot to offer: beautiful beaches, water sports, cliff divers, iconic skyscrapers, swimming with the dolphins. Get off the beaten path and you can add gun violence, murder, cops, and drug seizures. All that's missing is a skycraper that looks like a...
The third installment of the Emilia Cruz mystery series, featuring the first and only female police detective in Acapulco, is out on Kindle! The paperback version will be available in August. And finally--the Cover Reveal! The final cover, shown here, is a slight...
Planning a trip to Mexico? Wondering where to stay? Readers often ask if the Palacio Réal, the hotel in Acapulco that Kurt Rucker manages in the Emilia Cruz mystery novels, is real. The answer is well, sort of. The luxurious Palacio Réal is a composite of my three...
Have you seen the new US 100 dollar bill? Compared it to the old bill of the same denomination? Money and Mystery The changes in the $100 bill drive the plot of "The Cliff," a short story from MADE IN ACAPULCO: The Emilia Cruz Stories. "The Cliff" later became the...
The long road that has become DIABLO NIGHTS, the 3th Emilia Cruz mystery novel, started nearly 4 years ago, in Rome, Italy. I'd had my tour of the Vatican and was now on the hunt for gifts and souvenirs. A large Catholic gift and bookstore looked promising.Historic...
If you only had one chance at your dream job, what if it hinged on this man’s help? In MADE IN ACAPULCO, the collection of short stories that traces Emilia’s Cruz’s path from beat cop to seasoned detective, no one wants Emilia to become Acapulco’s first female...
The Emilia Cruz mystery series delivered another bit of entertainment to mystery lovers yesterday with the release for Kindle of MADE IN ACAPULCO, a collection of short stories that take place before the action in the full-length Emilia Cruz novels....
Fact may be stranger than fiction but in some cases they are deliberately similar. I routinely comb the news for inspiration for the Emilia Cruz mystery series so that "action torn from today's headlines" isn't just a tagline. Yes, readers will be entertained by...
This week the very first Emilia Cruz story, "The Beast," was published by Huffington Post, in the website's Huff/Post 50 showcase of female fiction writers. Acapulco beat cop Emilia Cruz wants to become a detective. But will they break her before she gets to the...
Great mystery novels need drama and dialogue. HAT DANCE, the latest Emilia Cruz novel, delivers both but sometimes words aren't enough. Sometimes it helps to have images as well. Here is a bit about the book, which is being released for Kindle...
Book editing is a ruthless business. How much of a book gets rewritten when an author comes back to an old manuscript?In the book editing case of HAT DANCE, the second Emilia Cruz novel coming 30 July, it looks like about 50% of what I wrote 18 months ago will hit the...
In CLIFF DIVER, Detective Emilia Cruz starts piecing together a police investigation by using a timeline. Emilia’s love of timelines will be an element of her crime-solving skills in every book in the Emilia Cruz mystery series. It’s her go-to problem-solving...
When fellow fiction writers ask where to find inspiration for characters I usually reply “minor league politicians.” There is always something to be found in the actions and words of those hungry for political power. In the same spirit, I channeled Elba Esther...
In mid-February, prompted by a spate of news reports on crime for 2012--including a list of the top 10 most violent cities in the world, discussions of violence in Chicago and Detroit, and school closings in Acapulco due to security problems--I posted this picture and...
Police detective Emilia Cruz is the main character in CLIFF DIVER, the first novel in my new mystery series set in Acapulco. She’s the first and only female police detective in Acapulco, a strong Latina woman who knows the value of family, how to fight for what she...