It Takes a Bad Mofo...

It takes a strong woman to survive an apocalypse. She better be a bad mofo if she's gonna get past the lunatics, zombies, or alien overlords. But what makes a powerful female character? Is it black leather, a motorcycle, and a sharp knife? Tattoos, stilettos, and a fierce sex drive?

Nope. For me, it's motive.

In Alien, Ripley had her cat, Jonesy. In Aliens she had the little girl, Newt. (They kicked the worry factor up a notch, eh?) Sarah Connor, of Terminator fame, had the existence of her future son, John, to motivate her. Oh, and the survival of the entire human species. You know, small things like that.

In Girl Under Glass, I deliberately endangered a child. I made her a target of a pedophile, separated her from her mother, and disfigured her face. Why? To provoke her mother, Rachel, of course. I needed Rachel to have an unavoidable reason to trust an alien enemy, leave her home, and fight for more than just her own life. I needed her to shoot a man in the face, brain another man with a wrench, and get spitting-blood mad. In other words, I needed Rachel to be a bad mofo, whether she wanted to or not.

Does my heroine carry a weapon? Sure. A black shotgun she found under a floorboard in an abandoned cabin. Does she have tattoos? Yes and no and not exactly by choice. Does she have motive? Oh, yes, indeedy. Rachel's a momma bear, and if you threaten her girl she will blow your head off and welcome hell's warmth. And you won't be the first person she's killed.

But does she love? Yeah. She does. Her daughter, Pearl, more than life. And a man she never dreamed she could trust, let alone fall in love with.

Rachel Pryne, my idea of a bad mofo.

BLURB:

What do you do when you’re trapped between death and the devil?

To protect her young daughter from a madman and a tyrant, Rachel Pryne must trust an enemy—one of the alien warriors who conquered Earth.

It is 2032, the Ohnenrai—Earth’s humanoid alien conquerors—orbit the planet, and Terran reproduction is failing. Rachel Pryne, a trained medic, is struggling to protect her seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, from the sexual predation of their penal colony’s leader. Having fathered the girl by rape, he now intends to take her on her eighth birthday, only six weeks away.

Then Rachel finds her unlikely champion—an injured Ohnenrai soldier who appears in her yard one stormy evening. She knows she may be choosing death over the devil in trusting this warrior, but she doesn’t know that her trust, and her DNA, will make her one of the most important and endangered people to ever set foot aboard an Ohnenrai starship.
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Girl Under Glass is a 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Semi-finalist. Now available in ebook format from Amazon.

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