DK Coutant grew up in Florida and regularly attended Clearwater Beach after school. She was drawn to the beauty of North Carolina after high school and graduated from Davidson College with a Psychology degree. She applied her behavioral training at Sea World, working with dolphins and whales. Realizing that scrubbing fish buckets might get old, she returned to school and earned a Ph.D. She left Sea World but never lost her love of animals. She raised well-trained large dogs (Briard, Bouvier de Flanders, and an Old English sheepdog) but was an abject failure with her small poodle, Marco. He would dig out of the fenced yard and run straight to the elementary school down the street. DK regularly got calls from the principal that, “Marco interrupted our first-grade class and is sitting in my office again.”
DK became a cross-cultural psychologist. She didn’t do therapy but traveled around the world, studying and teaching cultural differences. She helped with Seeds of Peace conferences and at one, climbed Mt Sinai to see the sun come up. And at a research meeting in Tbilisi, she broke a toe and traveled home through Turkey with one foot swollen and shoeless. The Turkish TSA people had to pinch her toe to make sure it was broken. Her howl informed them she wasn’t a terrorist.
Ready to return to an ocean, she began her academic career at the University of Southern Maine before DK made the jump to the University of Hawaii at Hilo, rising to Department Chair of the Psychology Department. In between teaching and research, she enjoyed ocean-dipping weekends, paddling outrigger canoes, and open-water swimming.
After many happy years in Hawaii, DK moved out of academics and became a mystery writer and a professional geopolitical forecaster for GJP, Inc ( https://goodjudgment.com/ ) and INFER (https://www.infer-pub.com/). Her murder mysteries are often much more cheerful than her forecasts. Evil Alice and the Borzoi is her first work of fiction published by The Wild Rose Press.
The new career allowed her time to write and travel freely. No longer on an ocean, she reveled in skiing the mountains. Strictly blue trails, though, she left her daredevil side behind after breaking an ankle two weeks before a trip to Switzerland. On the upside, she introduced the knee scooter to Europe. Scooting along in the Swiss grocery stores started a lot of conversations.
During covid lockdowns DK learned to needlepoint, and the hobby stuck. When she watches Murdoch, or her Miss Marple reruns, she usually has a needle and thread in her hands. Her house is slowly becoming populated with needle-pointed pillows.
DK believes she has led a charmed life, but not one without trials. She, a vegetarian, married a meat-eating man who loved cattle ranching. But he came with four wild (and fabulous) daughters that traveled with them throughout the world. So, as with most things, challenges come with sweet perks.
DK continues her love of travel and she, her husband, along with a well-behaved Old English Sheepdog puppy named Beasley stay on the move. They can usually be found in New Mexico, Washington state, Switzerland, or France.
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Title Evil Alice and the Borzoi
Author DK Coutant
Genre Mystery
Publisher The Wild Rose Press
Book Blurb:
Paradise is shaken when the body of a young woman is dragged onto a university research vessel during a class outing in Hilo Bay. Cleo Cooper is shaken when she finds her favorite student is on the hook for the murder. Danger lurks on land and sea as Cleo and her friends are enticed to search for the true killer. In between paddling, swimming, and arguing with her boyfriend, Cleo discovers all is not what it seems on the Big Island of Hawaii. Will she find the truth before she becomes the next victim? If you love exotic danger entwined with romance buy Evil Alice and the Borzoi today!
Excerpt:
As I mused ‘what ifs’, my eyes drifted to an intense mountain of a man in a red shirt so saturated with color I expected it to drip onto his jeans. The almost-to-the-elbow sleeves revealed ropey forearms the color of a dried kukui nut. The bones in his broad face, made me think of a tiger, not traditionally handsome, but arresting. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Almost as if he could feel my scrutiny, he turned his head and looked directly at me. My pulse quickened and I froze - an impala trapped in the gaze of a predator. I couldn’t look away. A barely perceptible smile appeared on his face. He knew the effect he was having on me. Embarrassment gave me the strength to jerk my eyes down to my feet.
What the hell was wrong with me? Maybe low blood sugar? I didn’t eat much breakfast.
I risked a glance back at him. Damn, he was still looking at me with his self-assured smile. He greeted my glance with a hint of a nod and turned his attention back to the speaker. Flustered, I too looked back at the speaker, but I couldn’t make out what the guy was saying so I went back to looking at the crowd, carefully avoiding the red-shirted predator.
There were a lot of locals who I didn’t know, but I saw Rikki and Gina standing together. No sign of Kawika, Gina’s cop-husband. I would have thought the police would want to come to the funeral as part of an investigation now that they suspected foul play.
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