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Friday, Mar 29th

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You are here: Community Features Local author tells stories of drugs, money

Local author tells stories of drugs, money

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Local resident and writer Gaye Brown de Alvarez has taken her 20 years of interviewing people as a journalist, combined her knowledge as an editor and thrown in her imagination to publish three novels.

Available in the Kindle format on Amazon.com, two of the books, “Chihuahua For Sale” and “Chihuahua Cage,” are the story of a young woman who gets a little too involved with the drug trade in Northern Mexico.

The third book is “Mona Lisa Navajo,” which is a murder mystery set in Gallup.

All three pieces of fiction are based on stories told to Brown de Alvarez by different people.

“When my husband, who was in the import/export business told me stories of things that happened to him in Mexico, I couldn’t believe it,” she has told many people.

She said she actually had to tone down some of his stories about the Mexican border, because they were almost unbelievable. The result? A fictionalized coming-of-age story about a young woman who gets caught up in the violence of drug smuggling and money laundering. Her story is told in two books.

“Mona Lisa Navajo,” is based on a story she heard about a young Navajo girl who was a twin, and was raised in California, while her twin sister was raised on the reservation. The fictionalized story involves the Native American art scene in Santa Fe.

All three Kindle novels are for sale for 99 cents each on Amazon. Money was never the object for Brown de Alvarez, who said it takes her about one year to write a book and another year to clean it up. Recently retired, she finds she has more time to devote to her fiction.

“I’m a writer,” she said. “It’s not what I do, it’s who I am.