“Pigs in human clothes are helping unearth the missing in Mexico.”
The image of pigs dressed in Burberry plaid snuffling for truffles came to mind as I skimmed the headline.
Over 130,000 people have gone missing in Mexico since 2006 with around 6,000 clandestine graves found to date and only a fraction of the remains identified. Are pigs the answer, I wondered? Perhaps they are better at sniffing out cadavers than dogs.
How wrong I was.
Pigs aren’t replacing dogs. They are replacing humans.
Dead humans.
Pigs are people, too
Scientists in the Mexican state of Jalisco, which has seen thousands go missing each month thanks to the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, are putting human clothes on dead pigs and burying them the same way that cartels bury their victims. Whole, wrapped in tape and plastic bags, burned, chopped into pieces, and so on.
Why? Because human DNA and pig DNA are almost 98 per cent similar. Their size and fat distribution, structure and thickness of skin are also almost the same. This means they decompose in a similar manner and leave evidence of that decomposition in a similar manner.
For example, high levels of phosphorus flowing into the soil from decomposing pigs led to a field of yellow flowers. Naturally occurring flower beds could be evidence of decomposing human remains.
High tech helpers
Now add a layer of high tech. Drones sniffing for high levels of phosphorus, combined with mapping techniques, should yield the location of unmarked graves.
The point of this is to find out what happened to the tens of thousands missing from the state of Jalisco—just 15,500 in March alone! José Luis Silván, a coordinator of the mapping project and scientist at CentroGeo, a federal research institute focused on geospacial information, said Jalisco’s disappeared are “why we’re here.”
I’ve written about Mexico’s legions of the missing and mass graves in the Detective Emilia Cruz series. Emilia is always on the hunt for women who have gone missing from the Acapulco area. She calls them Las Perdidas–the Lost ones–and keeps a binder full of their personal details to aid her search.
The 6th book in the series, 43 MISSING, was inspired by the true-life mass disappearance of 43 students from the rural community of Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero, not that far from Acapulco. Over the course of 11 years and multiple investigations at the local, state, national and even international levels, only a fraction of the students’ remains have been found and who to hold accountable remains murky.
Feature photo by Rob LaVeck via Unsplash
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MY BACKSTORY— I learned a few things about danger, deception and resilience during a 30-year career with the CIA focusing on counterdrug efforts and technical collection. Now a mystery author, those lessons play out on the page, especially in the Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series set in Acapulco. Starting with Cliff Diver, the series is a back-to-back winner of the Poison Cup Award for Outstanding Series from CrimeMasters of America. I’ve also written historical and political thrillers, essays about the craft of crime fiction, and live with a very large white dog named Bear.
Especially when you are taking on a new challenge, a mentor can show the way, guide you around obstacles, or simply be a sounding board. Being a mentor is a way of both giving back and helping others rise to their fullest potential.
My mentor didn’t even know he was my mentor.
“I want to take readers inside Mexico,” I told the agent. “The same way that the Arkady Renko series by Martin Cruz Smith takes readers inside Soviet Russia.”
When the agent didn’t recognize the reference, I knew that she wasn’t the right person to represent Detective Emilia Cruz.
That interaction was more than a dozen years ago, before CLIFF DIVER, first in the Detective Emilia Cruz series was published. Querying literary agents was a deflating exercise; none were interested in a mystery series with a female Mexican police detective. Make her an American who helicopters in to solve crime, they suggested (I paraphrase).
But my mentor didn’t turn his main character into an American to fit someone else’s vision.
Martin Cruz Smith was my mentor, although we’d never met, spoken, or exchanged emails. Via the Arkady Renko series set in Moscow, he charted a course I wanted to follow .
By Mark Coggins from San Francisco – Martin Cruz Smith via Wikipedia Commons
About the Arkady Renko series
Renko is a Moscow detective solving crimes against a Cold War backdrop of a dysfunctional Communist system, corrupt Party apparatchiks, and a black market economy. He was born in that environment, the product of a decaying Soviet system and a father who butchered his own Soviet troops during World War II.
There are 11 books in the Arkady Renko series, which includes the posthumously released HOTEL UKRAINE.
In my view, Books 1-5 (GORKY PARK, POLAR STAR, RED SQUARE, and HAVANA BAY, WOLVES EAT DOGS) are among the best international police procedural novels ever written. Arkady’s personal life is rife with betrayal. His inner voice is appealing and relatable. Secondary plots abound and there’s a perfect balance between dangerous action and dialogue-driven investigation. The Cold War is alive and well, strewn with deception and darkness.
Proven formula with a new face
That series proved that a character who is rooted in the setting has a powerful advantage when it comes to storytelling. Seeing events through those eyes gives an author a deep well of authenticity to offer the reader.
Using the same formula, Emilia Cruz is a native of Acapulco, a world-famous city falling prey to the drug trade. Through her eyes we understand the real Mexico, the highs and lows, the beautiful and the appalling. Deception and betrayal are all too common as everyone struggles to survive the unrelenting drug war.
Martin Cruz Smith recently passed away after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. An obituary noted that the first Arkady Renko book, GORKY PARK, was devised as a buddy thriller, with a Russian and an American teaming up to investigate. (FYI: Anyone remember the 1988 movie Red Heat with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi?)
When Smith decided to focus on the Russian investigator, his publisher baulked and didn’t release the book. It was 10 years before Smith could buy back the rights and deliver the Arkady Renko series as we know it now.
RIP, Martin Cruz Smith. Thank you for showing the way.
Imagine yourself lounging on a hotel balcony in Positano, an Aperol Spritz in one hand, condensation rolling down the glass and cooling your palm. Below you, the Mediterranean is a translucent shade that’s impossible to define. One moment the water is a smooth plane of cobalt, the next it’s a pool of bottomless turquoise.
Sunglasses are a must. A cooling breeze lofts the muted conversations of other guests into the cloudless sunshine. Laughter and insults in joking Italian carry from the airy kitchen. A scooter, unseen from your vantage point, putters along the narrow street unspooling along the cliff. It’s the same street of bumpy cobblestones that brought you to this seaside secret where time has stopped and octopus is on the menu.
The Italian Stories podcast is a mix of interviews and historical documentary about the Italian-American experience. Host Stephanie Detton keeps things moving during my chat with her about the Galliano Club books and growing up Italian.Lots of fun stories and laughter.
Mangia with Michele’s zucchini fritters. Check out the website, it is gorgeous!
Patterns for knitting and crochet projects inspired by the Galliano Club books are available from knitwear designer Elizabeth Booth on the Ravelry website. If you knit or crochet, check out her patterns here.
The club has knitted its way to the last book in the series, REVENGE AT THE GALLIANO CLUB and wraps up the final projects next month
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Knitwear designer Elizabeth Booth models “Revenge Wrap” inspired by Revenge at the Galliano Club, in custom yarn color, “Hanna’s Hatband.”
This article I wrote aboutmy grandfather who was a deputy sheriff during Prohibition yielded some unexpected results! A second cousin whom I never knew existed emailed me as did a genealogical researcher who had more information about the descendants of my murderous great-grandfather! FYI, this is my grandparents wedding photo from April, 1927. I think my grandmother might be standing on a box.
Galliano Club audiobooks are coming! I’m beyond excited to share that the entire 4-book series will be voiced by actor and narrator James Froemel. More to come!
Last but not least, the Galliano Club complete series is available as a Kindle Unlimited box set on sale for $7.99. Join Luca, Benny, Ruth and the rest of the cast at the club, where trouble is always on tap.
As a rule, I’m not fond of the serial-killer-with-mommy-issues-preying-on-young-women trope but this thriller breaks the mold. The book is so cleverly plotted that you don’t recognize the trope until the very end bursts like a dam, leaving you torn between gasping in shock and saluting in admiration at the writer’s outstanding grasp of the craft.
The first thing I loved about INTO THIN AIR, first in the new Arctic Mysteries series (hopefully many more to come!) is that the lead character is introduced during a time of transition in his life. Jacob Weber’s wife has passed away and he’s slowly getting used to life on his own. Luckily, he has an empathetic dog that comes into the office with him.
Jacob is head of a tiny team of police detectives in Bodø, Norway, above the Arctic Circle. When a young woman who has applied to the police academy goes missing during a run through a popular wooded trail, the prime suspect is her on-again, off-again boyfriend from a wealthy family.
Seen through Jacob’s eyes as well as those of a female cop who has something to prove, the investigation into the runner’s disappearance unfolds at the same time as seemingly unrelated events. On the nearby island of Røst, a disabled young man is locked in a feud with a violent and erratic neighbor. A popular Scandinavian wellness influencer visits the area to introduce her millions of followers to the healthy northern lifestyle. The unnamed killer drives around in a specially outfitted van, stalking unwary female travelers at highway rest stops.
Jacob’s investigation jumps into high gear when he connects two previous murders to the runner’s disappearance and is able to pinpoint the time and place when the app she was using to time her runs stopped working.
The pacing is sensational, with the various points of view swapping places at crucial high-tension moments. Short chapters, a drumbeat of suspense, and strong characters you want to root for made it a fast and compelling read. Not to mention the setting, which makes the most of Bodø’s remote location and sparse population.
Norway is one of my favorite places, which is why I read Jo Nesbo’s BLOOD TIES and INTO THIN AIR is quick succession. Both are wonderfully atmospheric books, but to be honest, INTO THIN AIR had me flipping pages faster. I can’t wait for the second book in the series!
Also known as the Season of Author Conferences and Book Festivals.
Blast from the Past – Killer Nashville 2019: R.G. Belsky, Carmen Amato, and conference founder Clay Stafford
This means that I’ll be introducing myself to lots of strangers. In noisy situations, dull situations, spur-of-the-moment situations.
But even if you aren’t an author at a bookish event, everyone wants to be able to introduce themselves with confidence.
Introduce yourself with a formula
Here’s my easy-to-remember formula: Present, Past, Future.
Here’s how it works:
Present: Say who you are and what you are doing right now.
Past: Share something from your past that is relevant to the present.
Future: What’s ahead for you.
Me as the example
If I was introducing myself to you right now, I’d say something like this:
Present: I’m Carmen Amato, author of the Detective Emilia Cruz series, the Galliano Club historical thrillers and standalone suspense.
Past: Mystery author is my second career. I was with the CIA for 30 years, focusing on technical collection and counterdrug issues.
Future: This summer, I’m working on the 10th title in the Detective Emilia Cruz series set in Acapulco, tentatively titled DRAGON CARTEL and I’m meeting up with book clubs that are reading my political thriller THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF MEXICO CITY.
Present: I’m Eduardo Cortez Castillo. My friends call me Eddo. I’m an attorney and the Mexican government’s top anti-corruption investigator. As presidential elections near, I’ve discovered disturbing links between my boss, the Secretary of Public Security and a notorious cartel kingpin called El Toro.
Past: I began my career in law enforcement where I formed a brotherhood of cops sworn to be incorruptible. We call ourselves los Hierros, The Iron Ones.
Future: I want a relationship with Luz de Maria, a woman from the opposite end of the social spectrum; not an easy thing to do in class-conscious Mexico. But unless I can shut down the conspiracy to buy the Mexican presidency with drug money, neither Luz de Maria nor myself will be alive much longer.
I’ve teamed with UK author Jane Harvey-Berrick, who writes the Cornish Crime Thriller series as Berrick Ford, in a new YouTube project!
Our Amato2Berrick Crime Conversations features short videos (7-10 minutes) in which we discuss what makes crime fiction so compelling. Not only do we share insider details about our own crime fiction, but we consider the reader’s point of view because we are both avid crime fiction fans as well as writers of the genre.
The videos are short and fun while offering a fresh perspective on what it means to read and write crime fiction.
Over the years, Rankin has put his iconic Edinburgh police detective John Rebus through the wringer. In the latest, MIDNIGHT AND BLUE, Rebus is 60-something and in jail for the murder of his longstanding frenemy, Morris Gerald Cafferty, one-time lord of the city’s criminal underworld.
Rebus maintains that he only meant to frighten Cafferty when the man died of a heart attack. His appeal is pending.
Although a cop’s chances of surviving the general prison population are low, Rebus is his usual salty self. He enjoys the fragile protection of Darryl Christie who took over Cafferty’s crime operations but is doing a stretch in jail himself. Christie runs his criminal enterprise from his jail cell despite pressure from an outsider who is making a play for Christie’s territory.
With tensions already running high in the prison, an inmate is stabbed to death on Rebus’s cell block. Rebus’s former police colleagues are called in to investigate.
Did a guard do it? Or another inmate? No murder weapon, no blood anywhere.
At the same time, his long-time partner Siobhan Clarke is looking for a missing girl, eventually tracing her to a soft porn site run by a famous athlete with ties to the dead inmate.
Everything ultimately connects in Ian Rankin’s usual brilliant way.
Take your time reading because there are many characters in this book. Two separate police investigations, a score of prison inmates, prison guards, criminals on the outside running amok, the soft porn website bunch, etc.
All of the secondary characters from previous books are back, including Malcolm Fox, the driven detective who started out in Internal Affairs (THE COMPLAINTS) and is never as good at his job as he wants to be.
The most intriguing character in MIDNIGHT AND BLUE might be Darryl Christie. We first met him as an ambitious teen 7 books ago. He’s older and more cunning now. Jail is hardly a setback.
After this, I re-read STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE, the first book in which Christie appears. He’s a great foil to Rebus, younger and more calculating. He swims in and out of Cafferty’s dangerous wake as he takes control of Edinburgh’s underworld, making for a series-within-a-series.
Each Rebus-Christie book is better than the last. Here they are in order:
Carlota Montoya Perez, the fictional mayor of Acapulco in the Detective Emilia Cruz series, was “born” long before Claudia Sheinbaum became president of Mexico last year. (That’s her official presidential portrait.)
Yet the two women, one fictional and one real, are strikingly similar.
So much in common
They both wear their hair in the sleek ponytail popular with upper class Mexican woman.
Claudia Sheinbaum, official presidential portrait. Credit: Government of Mexico
They both wear classic skirt suits, although Sheinbaum also favors traditional Mexican embroidery.
They both embrace sports as a unifying vehicle.
In fiction, Carlota wants to bring the Summer Olympics to Acapulco and has convinced Emilia’s significant other, hotel manager Kurt Rucker, to join the exploratory committee.
In real life, Claudia hosted a National Boxing Class in Mexico City’s Zócalo square to promote youth sports, drawing a reported 42,000 participants including Mexican boxing greats like Canelo Alvarez (whose quote kicks off BARRACUDA BAY). The event was held simultaneously in public squares in every Mexican state, with a nationwide attendance of about 500,000, according to the president’s social media.
Finally, both Carlota and Claudia are grappling with the problem of organized crime and violence.
In the Detective Emilia Cruz books, Carlota is extremely self-motivated. She’s quite ruthless when it comes to her own power and prestige. For her, organized crime is viewed through that lens. If something makes her look bad, she’s against it. If it can be used to her advantage, well, there’s room for negotiation.
For example, did she take cartel money for her re-election campaign in BARRACUDA BAY?
A dose of reality
President Claudia Sheinbaum’s policy toward organized crime is still a work in progress, in my view. She inherited her predecessor’s “hugs not bullets” policy, which saw homicides skyrocket and the army take on a heightened law enforcement role. Now, fewer than one-third of poll respondents say she is doing a good job combating corruption and organized crime.
But in an unprecedented move, in February Claudia sent 29 drug cartel suspects to the US, including the man charged in the 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Not only did the handover bypass the glacial Mexican legal system, which generally fusses over extraditions as a threat to Mexican sovereignty (and tellingly Mexico City did not use the word extradition in this case), but the sheer logistical feat of moving so many cartel members without leaks to the bad guys was impressive and speaks of tighter control than in administrations past.
Moreover, Claudia has empowered her security chief, Omar García Harfuch, to create a civilian force under his direct command and take the military out of the security equation. The National Operations Unit will be staffed by veterans of the now-defunct Federal Police, where García Harfuch started his career before becoming Mexico City’s chief of police when Claudia was mayor.
What’s next for each?
In fiction, Carlota wants Emilia to find the teen-aged cartel sicario who killed her sister.
In reality, Claudia wants to keep a “cool head” in the face of President Trump’s bluster.
The master of spy fiction, is of course, John le Carré. TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY is the classic Cold War counterintelligence tale. There’s a Soviet mole within the Circus, the author euphemism for British Intelligence. George Smiley is the retired spymaster called out of retirement to hunt the mole, reporting to the chief who is known only as Control.
But the very first book in the Smiley saga was THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, a slim volume published while the author was still working for British Intelligence. The book was a monster hit and turned into a movie starring Richard Burton as doomed British intel officer Alec Leamas who goes behind the Iron Curtain in a risky operation and is killed at the Berlin Wall.
TINKER, TAILOR came next, but never really addressed the impact of Leamas’s death on George Smiley or any of the other Circus characters. Until now.
Nick Harkaway is le Carre’s son, who grew up having his father read portions of works-in-progress to him. So he was the perfect person to write a book that takes place between SPY and TINKER, TAILOR, showing how shaken everyone was by the failure of the Leamas operation and the missing backstory of Karla, the shadowy Soviet spy who is Smiley’s nemesis in TINKER, TAILOR and later in SMILEY’S PEOPLE.
Harkaway does all this in KARLA’S CHOICE while giving the story it’s own decisive plot. All the Circus characters from the other Smiley books—Toby Esterhase, Peter Guilliam, Bill Haydon, etc—are there, being positioned for what will happen later in his father’s books.
A Hungarian who escaped Communist rule alone at age 16, Susanna Gero is now secretary to László Bánáti, a fellow Hungarian who runs a publishing house in London. One day, Susanna is alone in the office when a strange man comes looking for Bánáti in order to assassinate him.
Susanna turns for help to the secretarial agency that placed her, which has ties to the Circus. The would-be assassin has had a change of heart and reveals that he’s been sent by Moscow. Bánáti is not a Hungarian after all, but a Soviet sleeper agent who has run afoul of his masters in Moscow. But why?
It’s up to Smiley to figure this out even as Bánáti is on an increasingly dangerous quest behind the Iron Curtain.
The book is filled with brilliant prose, with the kind of vocabulary that has gone out of style. Descriptions conjure mental images of the “unconvincing modern veneer” on a file cabinet. Cheap hotel beds: “Only the mattresses were traditional: flat, flaccid lozenges lying inert on their imported pine frames.” (I’m going to re-read and annotate as a lesson in better writing.)
As in TINKER, TAILOR, much of the story is told through passages in which someone is telling Smiley about past events, complete with slang terms and allusions to historical events. These voices are written so well, you can almost hear the conversation as dramatic events are retold, punctuated with drags on a cigarette or a boozy belch.
Smiley must piece together yet another Soviet puzzle, going both into the past and anticipating the future in order to resolve the present. Soviet evildoer Karla, whose true name no one knows, is an off-screen presence. Yet at the end his choice perfectly sets the stage for what is to come in TINKER, TAILOR.
KARLA’S CHOICE is a brilliant book that continues le Carré’s legacy in the best possible way.
My CIA career has come up several times lately, during new release promo events for BARRACUDA BAY, the latest Detective Emilia Cruz mystery.
House of Mystery podcast
When I was chatting with House of Mystery podcast co-hosts Alan Warren and Joe Goldberg, one of them asked that given my long CIA career, “Why don’t you write spy thrillers instead of police procedurals?”
It was a fair question. Many retired CIA officers go on to write spy thrillers, like Joe (DEVIL’S OWN DAY, etc) and Jason Matthews (RED SPARROW, etc). But I didn’t have anything clever or different to say that would make me stand out in that crowd.
I did, however, have something to say about how cartels and corruption are eroding Mexico’s rich culture and civil authority. The situation tugs at my heartstrings after years living in the region. Hence the Detective Emilia Cruz series set in Acapulco, otherwise known as Ground Zero for drug war violence.
In one of our first videos, I show off two CIA challenge coins.
Lived to tell the tale
Recently, I shared how my personal experiences have inspired more than one scene in the Detective Emilia Cruz books with fellow author Debra Goldstein. I know she can relate.
Debra is a former judge with meaningful professional experiences that lie behind her award-winning fiction. She left the bench to follow her passion for writing mysteries. Her novels and short stories have received Silver Falchion, IPPY, BWR, and AWC awards and been named as Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Claymore finalists.
Her most recent release is With Our Bellies Full and the Fire Dying, a collection of 18 award-winning short mysteries, from cozy to dark, centering around family and friends, their sins and sometimes redemption.
Here’s how my little “I lived to tell the tale” memoir for Debra began:
“If the police show up, make sure you’re holding the package.”
The fellow CIA officer prepping me to meet a deep cover agent wasn’t trying to scare me, although he sure succeeded.
No, he was simply being practical. I was expendable. The source wasn’t.
Meeting a CIA source in a foreign country involved a head-spinning number of variables, not least of which were avoiding local cops and hostile intelligence services like those from China and Russia.
As my heart hammered, I memorized the details of the upcoming rendezvous. I’d been a CIA officer for 12 years, but meeting agents was never my job.
In the language of modern espionage, the officer who was supposed to meet the agent had been “burned.” Basically, the bad guys knew who he was. With a hostile service on his tail, the compromised officer could not meet the agent, whose situation already simmered with danger.
Part of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, I wasn’t the kind of officer you read about in John Le Carré novels, furtively doing brush passes with agents or leaving coded messages in dead drops. I ran a technical collection platform which kept me behind a computer keyboard.
This meant that I was completely unknown to the opposition. Thus, the perfect candidate to replace the compromised officer.
MY BACKSTORY— I learned a few things about danger, deception and resilience during a 30-year career with the CIA focusing on counterdrug efforts and technical collection. Now a mystery author, those lessons play out on the page, especially in the Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series set in Acapulco. Starting with Cliff Diver, the series is a back-to-back winner of the Poison Cup Award for Outstanding Series from CrimeMasters of America. I’ve also written historical and political thrillers, essays about the craft of crime fiction, and live with a very large white dog named Bear.
Every other Sunday, my Mystery Review newsletter carries a review of a book I loved and think you will, too. Basically, I’m recommending what to read while you wait for my next book!
But if you’re a big reader like me, one book every two weeks is not going to cut it. So here are some fun mini-reviews of books by friends who also write in the thriller/mystery/crime fiction genre.
Click the image to find the book on Amazon. Most are quite reasonably priced for Kindle readers.
Goodreads is a great resource for readers. One part review platform, one part social sharing, all parts clunky and hard to navigate.
Yet it is worth taking the time to navigate the platform because you’ll discover great new reads and reader friends.
Putting books on lists in Goodreads’s Listopia section especially helps others find new books. You can put books on a list (although if you are an author you can’t add your own) and vote for books already on a list to increase its visibility and let others know your interests.
BUT navigating Listopia is not all that simple. There are literally thousands of lists and thousands of books on the popular lists. The terminology is confusing, with the word “vote” sometimes used in place of “put” and not much space between columns, making instructions run together.
Here’s the easiest way I’ve found to get a book on a themed list. Note–These instructions are for laptop/desktop screen, not a mobile device.
Step 1
Log into Goodreads. From the homepage, use the search box at the top of your profile to find the book you want to add. You can type in a title or an author name to find books. See how I’m using BARRACUDA BAY as the example.
Step 2
Click on the search result that shows the book you want. This will take you to the description page for the book.
Below the book cover you will see a button which is set to the default “Read.” This is your “bookshelf” section. Click to select from “Read” or “Want to Read” or “Currently Reading.” Choose any option as all will add the book to your profile’s book list.
Step 3
Now that the book is on your “bookshelves,” go to the top menu, click on Browse and select List.
This brings you into the Listopia section on Goodreads where thousands of lists reside and are waiting for your additions and votes. Click on one of the category links running across the middle of the screen.
Step 4
In this case, I chose the Mystery Tab, which brings me to the mystery book lists sub-section.You can also type in a keyword but that doesn’t seem to work as well to bring up relevant lists.
I’ll choose the list called Best Twists.
Step 5
To add a book to Best Twists, I have to click on the “Add books to this list” text on the right.
The books on my personal bookshelves will appear. Choose from that list showing the books you previously added to any of your bookshelves. I’m going to add DEAD WATER to the Best Twists list.
Step 6
Once you have added a book, a box will appear on the lower right of your screen giving you the option to say why you chose that book .Note–the screen won’t return you to the list, but stays on your bookshelves view, which is kind of irritating.
Type in a short note, such as Recommended to me or Book Club selection, etc. There is not room for a real review. Note–there’s no “Save” button. Just type and go. Use your browser back arrow to get back to the lists.
Step 7
If you see a book that is already on a list, you can “Vote” for it. Just click the box that says “Vote for this Book.” A text box will appear just the same as when you added a book, asking Why you added this book. Again, a short phrase is sufficient and there is no “Save” button.
Bonus: You can see what lists a book is already on by scrolling to the bottom of the book description page where you’ll see 3 lists and a link to all the rest of the lists where this book appears. So if you are adding that book to lists, pick different ones to add the book and/or choose an existing list to upvote the book.
That’s it!
Go forth and add books to Goodreads lists. Don’t forget to leave reviews, too.
A 30-year veteran of the CIA, Carmen Amato is the award-winning author of the Detective Emilia Cruz police series, the Galliano Club historical fiction thrillers and standalone suspense.
