Bob Sanchez

Bob Sanchez aims for variety in his stories. When Pigs Fly is a crime novel containing adult humor, so please don't buy it for your innocent youngsters. Most readers find it funny, including one who wrote to say she read it aloud to console her recently widowed father. Yet the Friends of the Library in Alamogordo, New Mexico, denied the author a public reading because the story's villain used (gasp!) bad words. One can't please everybody, right? The story is set partly in Massachusetts, mostly in Arizona.

His Getting Lucky is much more a typical P.I. novel, with some sex and violence along with touches of humor. It's set in the mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts after the arrival of thousands of Cambodian refugees to the area. The author used to live nearby and has explored its network of canals and its fascinating ethnic neighborhoods.

The author's family's sponsorship of a Cambodian family in 1980 inspired his most serious novel, Little Mountain. It's a heavily researched detective novel set in Lowell with a cop hero's flashbacks to Cambodia.

Sanchez and his wife now live in sunny New Mexico and hold fond memories of Massachusetts, which figures in all of his novels so far.