One of my favorite mystery authors had decided it would be funny to have her heroine hesitate to get into an elevator with an old woman who "must have weighed at least 200 pounds."

Elevators are tested at 2000 pounds, so the joke was that a woman (but not a man) who weighed over 200 pounds was a monstrous burden that might cause the elevator cable to part and both parties to plummet to a horrible death. This was about prejudice, not pounds. I suddenly knew I wanted to write a book about a woman who accepts her body and doesn't allow anyone to intimidate her.

When the character began to "speak to me" she introduced herself with the first line from LARGER THAN DEATH, "My name is Josephine Fuller, and I've never weighed less than 200 pounds in my adult life, not counting the chip on my shoulder."

Josephine wins the job of her dreams, but she also has to deal with a killer who targets plus-sized women in the series opener, LARGER THAN DEATH.
In the second book in the series, LARGE TARGET, Josephine travels to San Diego to encounter a slain defense contractor a kidnapped admiral and a world-class dysfunctional family.
In the third Josephine Fuller mystery, AT LARGE, Jo encounters two men from her past, finds the dead body of the woman who broke up her marriage, and becomes a suspect.
In A TON OF TROUBLE, Jo visits the California wine country after getting a note from filmmaker Wolf Lambert. She discovers a dead body in one of Wolf's wine barrels, and her friend, Thelma, a super-sized porn star, is the prime suspect. Caught in the midst of a feud between powerful wine families in the valley, Jo finds herself literally under fire from a gun-toting would-be charity client. She also needs to make her boyfriend understand that her involvement with the plus-sized porn industry is purely innocent. Will Jo be able to dig herself out of this Ton of Trouble?

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