Linda Sands is the award-winning author of five novels. Most recent awards include Georgia Author of the Year for Mystery and two Killer Nashville awards. Her Cargo Series features crime-solving trucker Jojo Boudreaux, who she says was drawn out of the many female truck drivers that she met while researching a non-fiction photo essay book
Sands came up with Boudreaux while working on non-fiction photo essay book on the trucking industry.
“I thought it would be sort of like a piece in Esquire Magazine where you describe the lead phase of the driver, of the picture of the inside of his cab, a hundred words about what he does, who he does, and the name of his truck, and his nickname,” she said. “That grew into going around the country and interviewing people and going to every truck stop.”
However, her agent he could sell the book to publishers and asked what else did she have.
“I happened to be standing in the pantry of my kitchen at the time and I glanced at the shelf and there was a box of at Zatarain’s jambalaya rice mix,” said Sands. “So, I said ‘I got a female truck driver from Louisiana. Yeah. That’s it. She’s on the road solving mysteries.’ I just came up with a bunch of who ha at the time and he’s like, ‘I love it. Send me the pages.’”
“I didn’t have any pages so I went back to my desk and wrote 10 pages and sent it off to him. He’s like, ‘I love it. Yeah, let’s go. Give me some more Jojo Boudreaux.’ So, that’s where she came from.”
Her second book, “Precious Cargo,” focuses on human trafficking.
“It is the largest income producing crime that the world has,” said Sands. “It encompasses everything and every type of person, every individual. Unfortunately the trucking industry is very, very, very corrupt with it. A lot of times people will look at truck drivers and think, ‘Oh, you’re the person that is moving these sex traffic children around. Or you’re the person that is helping this horrible crime syndicate get, as the namesake, their precious cargo moved around.’”
She said that she has met several truckers that taken stands on human trafficking.
“When I’m going to all of those trucking conventions speaking to these drivers and posting things online on the Facebook page, where people are asking, ‘Please take these stickers and post them in the pilot bathrooms, in the truck stop bathrooms’ –where there’s a phone number where a girl who’s got that one or two minutes away from her trafficker and is asked to use the female bathroom where he cannot go, can get in there and she can ask for help.”
Sands continued, “There’s burner phones that are being hidden in these bathrooms. There’s codes that the women and the men that are working in these rest stops and these stops along the way to help.”
When asked whose books she likes to read, Sands mentioned Lawrence Block and John McDonald.
“With my dad-growing up sitting there next to him, as he was reading a book, he would hand it to me… and said, ‘I think you might like this.’ I was reading Elmore Leonard, and I was reading Sanders. I was reading Baldacci and Robert B. Parker. Just anything that he had, even the old, remember those Don Jakes history series? I loved that kind of stuff.”
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