Featured Interview With Jinx Schwartz
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Jinx is the author of eleven book, including eight in the award-winning Hetta Coffey series.
Raised in the jungles of Haiti and Thailand, with returns to Texas in-between, Jinx followed her father’s steel-toed footsteps into the Construction and Engineering industry in hopes of building dams. Finding all the good rivers taken, she traveled the world defacing other landscapes with mega-projects in Alaska, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico and Mexico.
Like the protagonist in her series, Jinx was single, with a yacht, when she met her husband, Robert “Mad Dog: Schwartz. They opted to become cash-poor cruisers rather than continue racing the rat, sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge, turned left, and headed for Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, where many of her books are set.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was raised in places with no television, or even radio. Books were our primary form of entertainment, so I have been a reader my entire life.
It never occurred to me to write a book until I dropped from the rat race and sailed to Mexico. With time on my hands and a few boxes of family documents I’d been meaning to look through but never had time to do so while working, I became fascinated with my family’s rich Texas roots, and one family in particular.
Because summers in the Sea of Cortez are so hot, I spent three of them in Texas—yes I know, hot there as well, but they have air-conditioned libraries—researching the Stockman clan, who immigrated to Spanish Texas in 1806.
My first book, The Texicans, was the result, and from there I just kept writing.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I will read just about anything in any language I can. I’m partial to adventuresome protagonists, vigilante justice and foreign settings. Hmmm, that sounds like my Hetta Coffey series.
Love, love, Nelson DeMille, Clive Cussler, and of course, Larry McMurtry.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Hetta Coffey is a sassy Texan with a snazzy yacht and she’s not afraid to use it.
JUST PARDON MY FRENCH, book 8 in the series, finds her in France.
She lives aboard her forty-five foot boat in Mexico’s spectacular Sea of Cortez, taking work where she can get it and, characteristically, she isn’t all that concerned about any pesky legalities involved.
Docked at a pricey marina in La Paz, her cruising kitty is taking a hit, so when she’s offered a dream job, she jumps on it. All she has to do is act as a courier, babysitting equipment and sensitive documentation for her former employer to their new offices in France.
Not only does she get to revisit a country she once lived in and loved, she’ll meet with her significant other, Jenks Jenkins, in Paris. Oh là là! An easy job and a romantic vacation, all paid for; what could possibly go wrong?
With Hetta? Just about everything.
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