ARTS ALIVE! Bill DeYoung with Tamara Lush (aka author Tara Lush)

Stopping by the Arts Alive! podcast studio today is author Tamara Lush, a.k.a. Tara Lush, who’s written somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 books (she’s not sure of the exact number). Lush is among the gaggle of authors who’ll be at the FloridaRAMA Literary Festival Saturday, to meet, greet and otherwise hobnob with readers, and sell (hopefully) and sign (definitely) books. Her stuff is fiction. She started with romance novels, steamy stories set in exotic locales, written under her full name. As Tara Lush, she pens “cozy mysteries,” which she explains are who-dun-its without the gore and awfulness that often accompany fictional police procedurals. Lush’s own story is not without irony, as she spent decades as a working journalist, in St. Petersburg (yes, she was a beat writer for the Times) and in Miami, and then for 13 years a reporter for the Associated Press. She covered mass shootings, several of them, and attended prison executions.  Those sorts of jobs will wear a person down; once the threshold of numbness has been reached, decisions must be made. Tamara Lush was 50 when she decided enough was enough and launched a new career, in romance and mystery.