Camy Tang’s spunky heroine Tessa Lancaster is a woman with a shady past and a heart for God.
Camy calls her new Protection for Hire series a “Japanese version of The Sopranos,” with Tessa’s Japanese mafia ties and martial arts training adding a unique angle to the storyline. Readers will also delight in more of the crazy family dynamics for which Tang’s fiction is known.
“I couldn’t write a story without the characters’ families somehow getting involved in the action,” she says. “Family is very important to me.”
Fourth generation Japanese-American Camy Tang grew up in Hawaii as the daughter of bibliophile parents. “My favorite memories were going into the bookstore at the mall with them,” Tang says. “I’d be allowed to choose one book.”
Her favorites were the Little House series and, later, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong and Dragonsinger. In high school, she discovered Jane Austen and Regency romances.
“I’ve always loved writing,” Camy says, “but my attitude wasn’t the greatest. I was more interested in seeing my name on a book cover than in giving God the glory. So, God asked me to lay it down.”
She obediently did, but after losing her job as a biology researcher, God allowed her to pick it up again. Even after many rejections and writing five complete manuscripts featuring Asian-American characters, she pressed on.
Her persistence paid off when Sushi for One (Zondervan) released in 2007, followed with two more novels. “I loved writing the Sushi series,” Camy says. “But I found when I was plotting the books, I kept nixing all these dead bodies that would sneak into the storyline! When it came time to start a new series I naturally gravitated toward humorous romantic suspense so I wouldn’t have to waste time editing out the danger and murders.”