Viking It Is: A Will Nickerson Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781482377040)

I am currently living in my home state of Ohio, but have spent considerable time in the western states, including having owned a North Dakota cattle ranch, which was a major inspiration for my first novel, Ranch Park. I am also intimately familiar with the Allegheny Mountains region of northern Pennsylvania, which was my father's boyhood home and inspired the setting for my second novel, It's A Place For Trees. My third novel, Viking It Is, returns to North Dakota with a mystery set in a fictional small town that is representative of the typical kind of towns found on the prairies--the kind of towns that are becoming increasingly hard to find in our fast paced and impersonal high tech world. Unlike many contemporary American mysteries, I choose to write my stories with rural and small town settings, and hope the kind of lifestyles these places offer will live on for a long time yet. Many authors are in love with their hometowns and write their stories about the places they call home; however, I find it much more fun to write about places where I have had great vacations or other "getaways"--so instead of writing about Ohio, I like to write about places like North Dakota and neighboring Canada and Ohio's neighbor state of Pennsylvania--and look for visits to Wyoming and Montana in future installments of the Will Nickerson Mysteries series. In addition to fiction writing, I am a small businessman, myself, like my fictional character Will Nickerson. In addition to operating an office equipment business, I am a sheep shearer and hope soon to get back into cattle ranching with the eventual goal of opening an agritourism operation. I enjoy a wide variety of activities, including hiking, cycling, horseback riding, sailing, skiing, swimming, photography, reading, gourmet cooking, gardening, foreign language studies and travel. I have traveled extensively in the US and Canada and have visited Australia, New Zealand and six European countries. I have three novels published on Kindle: Ranch Park, It's A Place For Trees and Viking It Is, and Createspace editions are new for 2013. I have a fourth novel in the works, with more in the planning stage.