Local Author Embraces Life as Expat, Pens Mysteries from Home in Mexico

Montana native BilliJo Doll has lived a rich, alternately painful and poignantly interesting life. Mystery, science-fiction, and other variations aside, she has written about her past with honesty and insight.

Her 2011 memoir, YeeHaw! Hang On for the Ride: a celebration of life and love, is both forthright and sensitive to the real-life characters who appear in her personal narrative.

It's quite a story. And based on true events, as the saying goes. Hers is a story of chronic pain, deep local roots and something like forced relocation to a foreign land.

Doll details facing, and largely overcoming, experiences with divorce, rape, the loss of children, PTSD, autoammune disease, and other disabilities and challenges. She remains a positive and engaging person despite everything she's had to deal with in life.

Her latest work, Murder in Montana (2014), is set primarly in the Billings area and follows the exploits of a pair of detectives and a female serial killer who smothers victims with her breasts.

The author's other works include contributions that fall across the genre spectrum, several of which are geared to young adults.

"I kept looking for books for my children to read," she explains, going into her origins as a writer. She didn't find enough to meet her own needs, so she set about writing volumes of her own.

The reception has been warm. Doll peppered our conversation with anecdotes featuring readers anxious for further installments, particually regarding her science-fiction/YA works. The whole truth about her rabid readership is doubtless more flattering still.

Despite having relocated south of the border in a place where she lives largely alone (with the recent addition of a bodyguard), her family remains in the state and she makes the journey as often as her chronic pain will permit. She was the victim of a recent assault in Mexico and her friends and family can count among their number many who are worried for her safety. She is quick to dispel such concerns: "I'm doing just fine," she insists, whenever the chance arises. Something about her demeanor and personality tells this writer that Doll is the expert on her own personal well-being.

She concludes the main part of her memoir with, "Since then a new chapter of my life has begun."

If you want to know more, pick up a copy of Yeehaw! for your own library at home. It will likely prove an excellent addition to the stacks.