The Weekly Book Scan caught up with real estate pro and author Bente Gallagher (a.k.a. Jennie Bentley) to talk about her new novel, Fatal Fixer-Upper (Berkley Prime Crime, 2008), a do-it-yourself mystery centered around a renovation project. The book follows New Yorker Avery Baker, who inherits her aunt's 1870s Victorian cottage in Waterfield, Maine. While she sets out to learn all about home renovation, she unravels family secrets with historical ties and clues to a missing professor in the area.

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Bentley used her experience as a renovator and real estate professional in Nashville, Tenn., to write the fiction book, which is her first published novel. In November, the book was No. 11 on the Barnes & Noble bestseller list for paperback novels.

Bentley is willing to respond to any of your questions, so after you read the Q&A, be free to post a comment or question for her below.

Where did you get the idea for the novel?

BENTLEY: I had first written an unpublished book Cut Throat Business about a real estate agent when I was a new agent myself. Whenever I walked into empty houses, my vivid imagination would start going wild. I would open the door to an empty house – and I realized that anything could be in there—you never know what you were walking into. So for that book, I made it about a real estate agent who stumbles over a dead body in an empty house.

My agent started sending it around to publishers and it made it to Penguin. They liked it but they didn't think a real estate topic would work for them. Their books are usually focused on crafts, hobbies, and activities.

Because of my bio as a real estate agent and renovator, they asked me to write a mystery series about a home renovator.

The main character in Fatal Fixer-Upper is renovating a 19th Century Victorian cottage and is often at odds with her handyman on the design. She wants to add contemporary touches and he wants to preserve the heritage of the home. Is that based on what you often see in real-life renovation projects?

BENTLEY: It actually it is. My husband and I have renovated eight or nine houses over the last few years. We love the old finishes and how homes were built back then. We've always tried to be very sensitive to that, and keep the original as much as we can in homes. So often the house may look old on the outside but then when you walk into it, it's been gutted to the suds and everything is new. That's strange. If someone wants contemporary, they can go buy one.

You always have to have conflict in a book so having these two at odds about how they want to renovate I thought would be amusing.

You even included renovation tips at the end of the book as an extra.

BENTLEY: The publisher often has tips at the end of their books on how to do various things mentioned in the book. Readers like to try out what the characters are doing.

So I made a list of five different crafts from the book and the publisher selected a few. In the book, it has tips on how to create a mosaic tabletop or countertop, and using lace to create

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Posted on December 9 at 12:35 PM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (2)

The new fiction novel, Red Hot Property (Infinity Publishing, 2008), follows the adventures of four rookie real estate agents as they embark on their careers, juggling work demands and weaving their way through the mystery and danger that sometimes looms.

In recognition of REALTOR® Safety Week , which kicked off yesterday, we talk with the book's author Devin O'Branagan, a real estate practitioner with ERA Tradewind in Longmont, Colo., about why she wrote the novel, which brings real estate safety to the forefront.

The book is a fictional account of real estate agents just starting out, but as you point out, the book is also a cautionary tale to those in the industry. What was that cautionary lesson that you wanted to get across to your peers?

One of my main reasons for writing this novel is the issue of safety. I hope this will shake up my fellow REALTORS® a bit and cause them to place a greater emphasis on safety. I see this all the time in our industry — and I'm guilty of this too: We take big risks in our job. I just think we're too trusting. Every day we see real estate agents take some of the same risks of the characters in the book — we're running out the door after a call to meet clients we don't know in an area with no cell phone service.

I wanted to dramatize some of the dangers of our profession in the book because I thought it would have a much greater impact than a how-to list of safety tips. I long ago learned that people are often affected more emotionally by the dramatization of an event. If the reader came to care about these characters and then were blind-sided by what could happen, maybe they would suddenly realize that it could happen to them too.

In the book, the characters are exposed to dangers that real estate practitioners sometimes face, such as at open houses. Are any of these situations based on true stories?

Some of it is based on true stories. For example, when one of the main characters is attacked by a dog at a showing, there really was an incident of a real estate agent in Denver where a dog grabbed her by the throat.

These kinds of dangers can happen in this profession. There are sexual assaults, robberies,

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Posted on September 15 at 05:28 PM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)