Wilder in the Everglades
A Truly Julie Detective Novel

Born and raised in the backwaters of the Florida Everglades, Truly Julie Wilder is a self-taught animal and wildlife expert. She’s thirty-one, single, and prefers to be called TeeJay. She’s an Everglades tour guide during the busy season, but off -season she takes odd jobs to keep from moving back with her quirky family. TeeJay will do anything to avoid living with her mother.

During the slow season a shady tour operator offers TeeJay a job taking Turkish royalty on an Everglades tour, but this job requires a private investigator’s license. With so much money at stake, the penniless TeeJay exaggerates her credentials. After all, it’s just a tour. How tough can it be?

TeeJay gets the job escorting the prince’s daughter, a fourteen year-old Paris Hilton wannabe, on a tour of the Everglades. While dragging the unwilling party girl through alligator country, TeeJay discovers they’re the target of an international plot. An intrigue that will only succeed if both TeeJay and the princess are killed. Okay, so now TeeJay knows how tough it is to be a P.I.

While protecting a self-indulgent teenager from hit men, a psychopathic Indian and a redneck tracker, TeeJay must also plan her mother’s birthday party by cell phone. She contends with a sister who wants to buy mom a casket, a brother who thinks a trip to the Betty Ford Clinic would make a good gift, and a Chinese stepfather who doesn’t care what they get as long as there’s karaoke at the party.

Throughout this adventure, TeeJay uses her wildlife knowledge to foil the bad guys and turn a spoiled princess into a decent kid. And along the way, TeeJay also transforms—from a simple backwoods tour guide to first-rate P.I.

© Rootie Simms 2006 All rights reserved