Saving La Familia by Donna Del Oro 💕 Guest Post, Book Tour and $50 Gift Card Giveaway 💕(Romantic Suspense)

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She has to recruit help from her hated ex-fiancé...

A romantic suspense comedy set in Silicon Valley, a young Latina teacher, Dina Salazar, is asked by her Mexican-born grandmother to rescue her cousins from a dangerous Mexican drug cartel. After all, her stern grandmother tells her, she is the “smart one” in the family. To do so, she has to recruit help from her hated ex-fiance. What’s a girl to do when “la familia” calls?

SAVING LA FAMILIA by Donna Del Oro, about a latina teacher who's recruited by her Mexican-born grandmother to save her cousins from a dangerous Mexican drug cartel. It's a romantic-suspense comedy with many "buen dichos"!

5 Things The Romantic Suspense Genre Must Have:

A subplot of romance, of course. It may have a HFN ending but there must be some romantic intrigue going on. Secondly, there must at its central core a conflict/danger/threat of sufficient magnitude that require the major characters to get involved in its solution. It can be a terrorism threat, in which hundreds or thousands of lives are at stake, a criminal threat of enormous proportions like a serial killer, or just a very clever psychopath/sociopath on the rampage. Thirdly, the major character or characters must be sympathetic or at the very least have admirable qualities that inspire the reader’s trust. In a romantic suspense, the major characters get involved, either separately or jointly, in finding the source of the threat and often they put their lives at risk in the process. Fourthly, the setting of a romantic suspense can play a significant role, too, in aiding and abetting the criminal enterprise. The fifth and most important requirement of all, throughout the novel there must be moments of intense suspense where the outcome of the major characters’ investigation or solution is held in doubt. Usually, the end of chapters are cliffhangers that spur the reader to bite their nails and continue reading. Dramatic irony comes into play here as the reader often knows something that the major characters do not know, which adds to the suspense.

Grandma Gómez—”Life is like an artichoke. It takes a lot of peeling to get to the heart of things.”

How did I, in three short months, get to the heart of my Mexican-American family? It wasn’t easy, believe me. Especially since I was the family’s desgraciada. The disgraced one. Ever since I turned eighteen and had my legal name changed from Dolores—which means aches and pains in Spanish—to Dina. My namesake, Grandma Dolores Gómez, refused to speak to me or acknowledge my existence for about a year after the name change. Before that, I was simply the family brat and rebel. The know-it-all.

But you see, Grandma was the heart of the matter. And the big, dark secrets she kept closed up in her heart all got ex- posed in those tumultuous months. And before I could blink and realize what was happening, I was roped into a scheme to rescue cousins I never knew I had out of the deadly clutches of a Mexican drug cartel. Why was I chosen, you ask? Me, Dina Salazar, the desgraciada? A single schoolteacher with a long line of loser-boyfriends? How did I end up looking up the barrel of a cartel commando’s automatic weapon? Come along with me and I’ll tell you.

Donna Del Oro lives in Northern California with her husband and three cats. She taught high school and community college English classes for 30+ years and is now happily retired. When not doing research, writing novels, or reading voraciously, she travels and sings with the medal winning Sacramento Valley Chorus.

Donna is a member of Capitol Crimes, the Sacramento chapter of Sisters in Crime in addition to the Valleyrose chapter of the RWA. She has judged RITA entries and does developmental editing on the side. Two of her novels, Operation Familia and Born To Sing, have won national and international awards.