Two of her novels, Operation Familia and Born To Sing, have won national and international awards.Īmazon Author Page: Link: The book will be free during the tour. She has judged RITA entries and does developmental editing on the side.

When not doing research, writing novels, or reading voraciously, she travels and sings with the medal winning Sacramento Valley Chorus.ĭonna is a member of Capitol Crimes, the Sacramento chapter of Sisters in Crime in addition to the Valleyrose chapter of the RWA. She taught high school and community college English classes for 30+ years and is now happily retired. Why was I chosen, you ask? Me, Dina Salazar, the desgraciada? A single schoolteacher with a long line of loser-boyfriends? How did I end up looking up the barrel of a cartel commando’s automatic weapon? Come along with me and I’ll tell you.ĭonna Del Oro lives in Northern California with her husband and three cats. And before I could blink and realize what was happening, I was roped into a scheme to rescue cousins I never knew I had out of the deadly clutches of a Mexican drug cartel. And the big, dark secrets she kept closed up in her heart all got ex- posed in those tumultuous months. The know-it-all.īut you see, Grandma was the heart of the matter. Before that, I was simply the family brat and rebel. My namesake, Grandma Dolores Gómez, refused to speak to me or acknowledge my existence for about a year after the name change. Ever since I turned eighteen and had my legal name changed from Dolores-which means aches and pains in Spanish-to Dina. Especially since I was the family’s desgraciada. How did I, in three short months, get to the heart of my Mexican-American family? It wasn’t easy, believe me. It takes a lot of peeling to get to the heart of things.” Grandma Gómez-”Life is like an artichoke. It's a romantic-suspense comedy with many 'buen dichos'! SAVING LA FAMILIA by Donna Del Oro, about a latina teacher who's recruited by her Mexican-born grandmother to save her cousins from a dangerous Mexican drug cartel. What’s a girl to do when “la familia” calls? To do so, she has to recruit help from her hated ex-fiance.

After all, her stern grandmother tells her, she is the “smart one” in the family. A romantic suspense comedy set in Silicon Valley, a young Latina teacher, Dina Salazar, is asked by her Mexican-born grandmother to rescue her cousins from a dangerous Mexican drug cartel.

Saving La Familia by Donna Del Oro