by Tracy Cooper-Posey, guest blogger and author of Dead Again

Everyone knows the historical romance market is dead, dead, dead. I’m tempted to protest that there should also be warning signs that the romantic suspense market (or romantic intrigue, if you prefer that moniker) has also been rolled into the palliative care ward and a death watch has been set up.

Why the temptation to protest?

I write in several different genres, and one of them is paranormal, and I make over three times as much money writing paranormal as I do writing romantic suspense. The crappy income alone suggests Cheynes Stokes breathing has set in.

Walk along the shelves of any decent bookstore’s romance section and measure off the section devoted to romantic suspense and compare it to the section devoted to paranormal. You won’t need a tape measure. There will be such a huge difference in shelf space that eyeballing it will depress you enough.

But please notice that I said I was only tempted to protest.

There’s evidence that romantic suspense isn’t quite dead yet, and that like the historical romance market, it will doggedly defy death and linger on endlessly.

My statistics on my site show consistently high ratings for two search terms: “Desperado” and “James Bond”. Two of the most perfectly generic thriller/suspense movies and characters in movieland that romance readers love to drool over. And these terms aren’t just in amongst my search term stats. They’re in my top five search terms of all time. Readers want this stuff. They’re eager for it.

But this doesn’t compute with the cruddy income I make from romantic suspense compared with paranormal novels.

However...I have a theory about that.

It’s all about power and swinging it the right way.

Romantic Suspense novels had their golden age in the nineties and the early years of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and that was when women were just getting used to the idea of equality and beating men at their own game. The glass ceilings were crashing down all over the place. Having alpha heroes rescue us was still sort-of okay in our fantasies, until erotic romance fantasies like Sex and the City showed us that we could be equals or better in bed, too.

These days it’s no longer a matter of equality. It’s a matter of being more powerful and completely different.

That kinda left romantic suspense wallowing in its own trope juices, wondering where it was supposed to go.

And along came paranormals, with feisty heroines that had unique talents that made them powerful, different and special, and millions of women latched onto paranormals, grabbing them and running with the idea that women could be strong, gutsy, powerful and better than men. And different, too. And sexy, alluring and attractive to men....they could have it all.

No wonder paranormals went through the roof, and are still the number one selling genre in romance today. Pick up any paranormal romance anywhere, and you find yourself a kick-ass heroine, almost guaranteed. Urban Fantasy is the ultimate example of this phenomenon. Almost every central character in urban fantasy is a first person female who has a spine of steel and sweats hydrochloric acid. Look at Anita Blake, as a perfect example, from Laurell K. Hamilton’s vampire executioner series. Tough, gutsy and even police chiefs are afraid of her.

Pick up a romantic suspense, and the odds are less certain you’ll find a cast-iron heroine. The old, traditional formula for romantic suspense often depends on the alpha male hero to rescue the heroine to make the suspense work. Woman-in-jeopardy is one of the favourite tropes of RS along with the James Bond and Desperado-style storylines that – clearly – readers are still searching for. But those readers are in the minority and as long as publishers continue to publish romantic suspense where power swings towards the hero, the genre is doomed.

There are more modern writers like Gennita Low who can make kick-ass RS heroines work, and it is these writers who will pull RS out of the palliative care ward. I feel personally optimistic because my own heroines have always had a backbone — I’m incapable of writing spineless heroines. But now I’ve formed this theory, I’m really going to get gung-ho about making sure my heroines grab the power bar with a vengeance.

The trick is in the swing. If the power swings to the heroine, like it does in paranormal, then romantic suspense becomes a whole (re)new(ed) genre.

Suddenly, everything old is new again...

Not just a feisty heroine, but a heroine with genuine authority, genuine power, genuine abilities, talents, skills. She owns real estate and perhaps her own enterprise. She has plans for her life, and they are in no way temporary or flexible to include a man if one comes along. She will take no shit, and doesn’t have to wait up for the hero to rescue her. Like Mrs. Smith said to Mr. Smith in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, “This is not my first time,” when she was directing him through access tunnels. She can throw a damn fine left hook. She has principals and expectations. And she can do the seducing as well as he can.

And she never forgets that she’s a woman, either.

I would love to read lots and lots of romantic suspense featuring heroines like that.

Wouldn’t you?

Dead Again by Tracy Cooper-Posey

A small plane crashes in the Rockies, and the only two survivors, Jack and Sophie, help each other live until rescue arrives, seven days later. Only Sophie goes on to pick up the pieces of her life, which has now been irrevocably changed by big, gentle Jack’s love…and death. But Sophie learns that Jack’s death didn’t close that chapter of her life, after all.

A drifter called Martin holds the key to her heart, alongside a deadly secret. Combined with a corrupt and desperate police chief and her pressure-cooker life as a single mother in a small town, they plunge her head-deep into the after-shocks caused by those seven days in the mountains. The consequences will reach out to rock state governors, district attorneys, and one of the deadliest crime lords in the land, and all of them have reason to react. For Sophie, life is about to change again…for the worse.

_________________________

Chapter One

My fault…

Jack looked numbly at the remains of the small, commercial turboprop, which was scattered in three big mangled pieces. The two pilots had done their heroic bests to pull the plane out of trouble. Just the fact that the turboprop more or less landed and didn’t simply fall out of the sky, was a testament to their grit and skill.

The lack of an explosion after it hit, the pilots’ efforts and the quite extraordinary run of luck that had preserved his miserable skin all impressed themselves on Jack as he studied the new scar on the mountainside.

My goddamn fault.

A long furrow filled with fragments and slivers of metal trailed the wreckage. And there was more debris, things he didn’t look too closely at—busted open luggage and personal possessions.

At first light, he’d spent an hour looking for survivors. Instead, he found bodies.

Four of the seven passengers and one of the pilots. He’d dragged them all under the shelter of a thicket of pines with low-lying branches, the best he could do for them.

Afterward, he went looking for a way off the mountain and found an impassable ravine just down the slope from the wreckage. It cut across the lee side of the mountain like a giant’s sword slash. The sharp sides dropped straight down to the valley floor, impossibly far below.

Now he sat on the edge of the terrifying drop, wondering if he was going to make it out of this after all, or if the Silent Knight would reign supreme.

My goddamn fault.

It was very quiet now that he’d stopped moving. The stillness focused his senses.

He could smell astringent pine, sharp in the cold morning air and feel the chill of the rocks beneath him reaching through to his bones. The silence was a scream of accusation. There should be the sound of others around him, rallying together, sorting things out. But there were no other survivors.

The thought came clear and sharp then. He should push off from where he sat, let himself fall. It was a perfect penance for last night’s work.

As he sat there, exploring the size and weight of his guilt, only one thing held him on the ledge—the knowledge that he had to make it back to Chicago. Isobel couldn’t pull it off without him.

“Help…please…”

The voice floated up from beyond the ledge.

Jack froze for a moment and his heart actually seemed to stutter in shock. Had he imagined that weak sound?

He leaned over the edge, moving carefully because something stabbed his chest with each movement. He’d probably cracked his ribs when he’d been thrown against the arm of his chair. That had been toward the end of the nightmarish five minutes the plane bucked and tortured metal screamed. Five minutes while everyone in the little cabin braced themselves for the death they knew was coming.

Except by some twisted, evil freak of fate, he hadn’t died. Instead he sat leaning over this cold rock, hoping against hope he hadn’t imagined the cry for help, while he knew with utter certainty that it had been a product of his own desperate mind.

“Help me!”

Again, the quiet plea came up from below, soft and feminine.

Jack gripped the edge of the shelf and shards bit into his palms. He barely noticed them. Someone else lived! The thought fizzed through him, a potent cocktail that brought his whole body alert and his mind awake. In the space between two heartbeats his whole perspective altered. If someone else lived, then there were things he must do, actions to take.

“Where are you?” About twenty-five feet below the ledge was a stony shelf, mostly hidden from view by a bulge in the rocky side of the ravine. It seemed impossible that she could be somewhere beneath him.

She was silent for a moment, then her voice floated up to him, sounding weak and tired, “You sound like you’re above me.”

“I can’t see you. Can you move closer to the edge?” With each exchange, Jack could feel everyday concerns coming online, making themselves felt. They added to a growing sense of urgency. There was someone other than himself to consider now.

“I can’t move at all. My leg is broken.”

Leaning, Jack looked over the sharp edge of the cliff. That bump in the wall…how had she landed on the ledge and not bounced out into the ravine, to fall to the bottom, thousands of feet below? “I’m going to come down and get you but I need to know how you got down there.”

“I slipped in the dark last night. I must have stepped off the edge. I slid down here. That’s how I broke my leg.”

Slid? No one would slide down that sharp gray wall. They’d roll a bit, then free fall for much, much longer.

But if she’d slid, there must be another way down.

“Wait a minute. I’m going to have to look around a bit.” Carefully, he got to his feet and walked along the cracked, jagged edge and every couple of steps he leaned over to check beneath. After a dozen steps, the shelf of rock disappeared from sight. The bulge in the wall receded too, leaving nothing but sheer rock face all the way to the floor of the valley below, where boulders had rolled and collected for millennia. From this height, they looked like pebbles.

Going in the opposite direction, toward the bulk of the mountain they were on, he found a place where snow melt and rain had eaten a two-foot wide, shallow channel into the soil, biting into the edge of the ravine. There, he could see a sharp new scuff in the soil. There was a white, fresh scrape in the stone just beneath, where she must have gone over.

Looking down, it reminded Jack of a bumpy, dirty amusement park water slide.

Only there was no deep pool at the bottom to break a fall.

She was lucky her weight hadn’t pushed her over the edge of the channel as she’d slid around the curve—she’d have gone straight down to the bottom of the ravine.

Instead, she’d been dumped on the shelf, hard enough to break a leg.

He had to go down the same way but he needed to get down without breaking bones and then get back up again. “I’ll be gone a bit. I’ve got to do some things. Then I’ll come down. Okay?”

“Please don’t be long.”

No demands to know what he was doing, why he wasn’t instantly climbing down to get her. A pragmatic lady, despite what must have been a hell of a night on that ledge.

Reluctantly, Jack walked up the slope and faced the wreckage again.

A litany began to whisper. All your fault. All your goddamn fault. If you hadn’t got on the damn plane they’d be fine, they’d be home hugging their wives and kids…

Forcing himself, he searched the wreckage, knowing exactly what he needed to get down to the ledge and help her. The smoldering, curved pieces of fuselage set the guilt litany in his mind to cycle over again but he drowned it out by concentrating on what he was doing.

Helping her. That’s what I’m doing. One saved out of this wreckage. That counts for something, right?

To buy Dead Again, click here.

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death watch, desperado, Historical Romance, movieland, palliative care, romance market, romance readers, romance section, romantic intrigue, romantic suspense novels, shelf space, suspense movies, tape measure, time readers, tracy cooper posey, warning signs