Local author invites all to follow murder mystery three-book series, with first now available
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POCATELLO — A new mystery book, set in the Portneuf Gap and written by a local author, was published earlier this year, with two more books to come.
Sue Anne Hodge grew up in Mount Pleasant, Utah, where her grandmother ran a mortuary. As a child, she spent many days playing in that mortuary, coming face to face with countless dead bodies. And those experiences stoked her morbid curiosity.
Add that curiosity to Sue Anne’s love for the written word, and you get “Never Touch a Dead Body” — the first installment of a three-book series published by Epicenter Press, a Seattle-based publishing company.
Sue Anne — who goes by the pen name J. W. Hodge — saw her debut novel, a 212-page “cozy mystery,” released in January after more than 20 years of work.
Though the writing started two decades ago, the destination became a dream when Sue Anne was a child. As she described, Sue Anne violated her parents’ lights-out curfews by climbing underneath her covers with a flashlight and reading herself to sleep. Spending hours reading, she thought, “How hard can this be?”
She has since discovered how difficult it is to write a book — and even more difficult still, to have it published.
There were many a speed bumps along the way, she said. So many, in fact, that she considered giving up on her dream — though she fought hard through that consideration.
Sue Anne’s husband, Jerry Hodge, called his wife a “trooper” in the pursuit of being published.
“She’s very tenacious,” Jerry said. “She has stuck with it, and stuck with it. … A lot of times she’s felt rejected –.”
Sue Anne cut her husband off, describing how she handled the many rejections.
“I used to have a big jar that I put the rejections in and I thought, ‘Once it reaches the top, I’m done.’ When it reached the top, I kept punching it down,” she said.
The story’s protagonist is Mercedes — or Sadie — who, like her creator, grew up playing around her family’s mortuary and, again like Sue Anne, is a property owner who rents and cleans apartments. While cleaning those apartments, Sadie discovers the body of a woman whose death is ruled an accidental electrocution.
Sadie, though, does not agree with that ruling and launches her own investigation.
The story draws on more than just the writer’s background. It came to Sue Anne’s mind after she discovered the body of a woman who’d died of a heart attack inside one of Sue Anne’s properties. The death was ruled natural, but it got Sue Anne’s mind racing.
“I kept going to conferences where they said, ‘write what you know,'” she said.
The entire series — with coming installments “Never Nap in a Casket” and “Never Whistle Past a Graveyard” — follows Sadie, Sue explained, though the mystery of part one is solved in the first book.
Book two will be released in January 2025, with the third following in January 2026. If this series is successful, Sue Anne added, she would consider extending the series further.
While the writing part of her journey came natural to Sue Anne — who at one point had aspirations of being the next Nora Roberts — selling the book was more difficult.
“I actually won a few contests,” she said. “One of those contests I won was first place for this story, and I got an agent — I was so excited.”
The New York agent requested manuscripts for Sue Anne’s first two books. She happily sent them over, then waited for a response that never came.
“He disappeared off the face of the earth,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t know if he was abducted by aliens.”
After additional rejection, Sue Anne got in contact with Carol Cartaino, an self-published author out of Ohio, who in turn put her in contact with Epicenter.
“There are a lot of self-published people, and that’s fine, but I really needed a publisher to say, ‘Yes, you’re a writer, we want this,'” she said. “I needed verification, and I got it.”
After signing her three-book deal — and collecting up front payment — Sue Anne said she didn’t know what to expect. Then, one day, she began receiving royalty checks.
“(Jerry) brought it to me and and I said, ‘Do I have to pay this back?’,” Sue Anne said of her reaction to receiving that first royalty check.
“I’m so proud of her,” Jerry added rubbing his wife’s shoulder. “She’s put so much work in — there’s been disappointment, but she just keeps pressing.”
Those disappointments, Sue Anne said, have made the success “so sweet.”
She will be holding a book signing at Barnes and Noble in Idaho Falls between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. on April 27.
“Never Touch a Dead Body” is available online at Barnes and Noble, Target, Amazon and Sue Anne’s website. The audiobook is also available, on Audible. Pocatello’s Portneuf District Library has two copies available to borrow.
“I just hope that people enjoy Sadie,” Sue Anne said. “So far, I’ve had positive reviews: that she’s fun — there’s a lot of humor in (the book) — the characters are wild and crazy.”