How are these for opening shots?

On the left you see Pogo. The white furbaby in the picture on the right is Wiley. Both were adopted from the Amanda Foundation, an animal rescue in Beverly Hills. I tell my husband all the time, “It’s the dogs or anti-depressants.” And I’m not kidding. I love my dogs. Like, crazy love them.

Lucy, the first dog we adopted together, was a basset hound. We rescued her when she was five and she lived to be almost sixteen.Here’s a photo from her early days with our family…

Lucy came with a lot of baggage. She lived in the closet in our bathroom until we remodeled it. If she’d had her druthers, she would have lived under our bed, but we blocked it off so we could actually see her. But I loved her dearly, so much so that for the last six months of Lucy’s life when she became incontinent, I diapered her. I did. Really.

I’ve immortalized my puppy loves in my books.You can find Lucy on the covers of my Cajun Country Mystery series. She’s a male basset named Gopher in the books.

In Body on the Bayou, Pogo morphed into a stray rescue named Jolie that the Crozat family rescues. But Wiley, poor Wiley… he inspired a wonderful dog in my first mystery, You Can Never Be Too Thin or Too Dead. Unfortunately, that manuscript never sold. I felt so guilty about Wiley not getting his literary due that I literally created a subplot for him in the third book of my series, A Cajun Christmas Killing, to be published in 2017. He’s a doggy named King Cake.

I can’t imagine my life without dogs. I can’t imagine my books without them, either. Writing about my furbabies is a way I honor the priceless role they play in my life.And it sure beats Prozac.

Readers, tell us about your pets. Have they inspired any literary animal characters for you?