Author R&R with Nancy Burke

NANCY BURKE is author of From the Abuelas’ Window (2006), If I Could Paint the Moon Black (2014) and her new suspense novel, Only the Women are Burning (Apprentice House Press). Her short story, "At the Pool" is a finalist in the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. Her short fiction "He Briefly Thought of Tadpoles" appeared in Meat for Tea and "The Last Day" appeared in Pilgrim: A Journal of Catholic Experience. She completed her MFA in her fifties in Creative Writing from Rutgers University after studying anthropology as an undergrad—a subject that features prominently in her new novel.

In Nancy's Only the Women are Burning, three women are killed by flames in a single morning, one at a commuter train, one at a school, one while walking her dog in the woods. The authorities decide the burning women are members of a cult, but when Cassandra learns her former best friend died in the fiery phenomenon she refuses to accept that explanation. A mom and former anthropologist, Cassandra finds herself wrapped up in the mystery of these fiery deaths, searching for a solution. As she delves into this strange episode in her once-safe suburban New Jersey town, she must also face some buried truths of her own.

 

Nancy stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching the novel:

 

My book, Only the Women are Burning, brings you Cassandra, a suburban mom in relentless pursuit of answers to unanswerable questions when the women in her town begin to spontaneously burst into flame and disappear leaving only their clothes behind. She stepped off her youthful path of insatiable intellectual curiosity a long time ago. You’ll have to read the book to find out why she did that. Only in the aftermath of the women’s deaths does she recover her investigative powers, putting two and two together, and some other unlikely pairings, in her hunt for the truth.

Ever since my summer days on a shady lounge chair near my backyard pool, swapping Nancy Drew mysteries with my sister, I’ve loved the role of sleuth.  Maybe because I’m a Nancy too the role of amateur detective lodged deep in my brain. My synapses flare when I am challenged with ‘what if’ questions. I suppose that is what makes me a fiction writer! This emerged in my central character, Cassandra, a lapsed anthropologist and geo-archaeologist stuck in suburban New Jersey, raising her kids and missing her forever absent husband.

In researching and writing this book, I uncovered all sorts of fascinating facts to work with, building the series of clues Cassandra pieces together to show the authorities in her town that she knows what she’s talking about. But, not everything in OTWAB was discovered through deliberate research. Some of the elements of the book were lodged in memory already. I taught art, history and mythology of Egypt, ancient Greece, China, and the native tribes of Africa and North America to visiting school groups at the Newark Museum, and so does Cassandra. For a short time I was a mission commander at a Challenger Learning Center where I led simulated missions to the space station for groups of middle school children. I taught about life on the international space station, the exploration of Mars and deep space. I studied NASA websites and replenished my lessons with arcane scientific facts. As I developed OTWAB an archive of information rose up from memory and demanded to be included in this quasi-scientific, fabulist novel. I listened. I consulted National Geographic magazine and countless websites to understand how energy travels through space to reach us, and about the energies deep within our earth. I visited Stonehenge with my daughter and pondered the question Cassandra once tried to answer, “Why did they build it on precisely this spot?” There’s more, but again, you’ll have to read the book. No spoilers here.

Writers often tell us how their characters whisper to them, surprising them with their sudden choices and odd behavior. It’s the writer’s job to listen and get it on the page. In OTWAB that happened, but the physical world spoke to me too and whispered solutions to my big question of “How can women burst into flame and die in the middle of their daily routines, leaving their clothes behind?”

I incorporated what I learned through early experiences in my own motherhood into the story as well. When I left a successful career in business to stay home to care for my own children, I stepped into a world of precarious self-doubt, at a time when women were increasing their presence in the workforce, determined to stay in it while raising children. I was choosing against the popular rhetoric of the time. That women could do and have it all – a career and motherhood – was something of a self-righteous insistence for my generation. Many women did sacrifice mom time in favor of the workplace and financial/economic participation. I banded together with other women who chose the traditional at-home role. We found ourselves circling the wagons in defense of our choices. Some would call what we did privilege. But, at the time, we felt a loss of self, an abdication of our own dreams of success, as though we were letting down our own generation and ourselves. This book is an exploration of what that does to us, what society does to women with its expectations and its conflicting demands.

Compiling disparate elements of physical science, visible and invisible environmental threats, into a sequence of discoveries, and blending the scientific elements with the psychological frame of mind of the character was my first challenge. The second challenge was making it all believable. Charles Dickens used spontaneous human combustion to kill off his character, Mr. Krooks, in Bleak House. In defense of his choice he said, “Nobody has proved that it can’t happen.”

I found books on the subject. I read newspaper articles about deaths by fires of unknown origin. Either the police failed or science failed to sufficiently solve those deaths. The FBI does not recognize it as a cause of death, but in England cases have been closed with precisely that listed.

I feared this book would be an eye roll for agents and publishers during my query process. I only discovered one other writer to use the element of SHC in a contemporary novel. Reading Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, where a set of twins burst into spontaneous flame when they feel agitated, encouraged me. My book was already written, but it hadn’t been accepted for publication. This was my third challenge: to find a press who would see the fabulist elements as intriguing, not just as para-normal lunatic fringe. I found Apprentice House Press, who saw the metaphorical value of the burnings in the context of a suburban landscape inhabited by women with potential and no means to express it.

Central to this book is the idea of women’s struggles often being of the silent variety. What we don’t express, but perhaps experience within the roles we assume in our lives, can fester. I’ve heard stories of women who develop illnesses because of deeply buried anger and rage that ultimately is turned inward. I contemplated this sort of unintentional self-destruction and how it manifests itself in lives as I developed this story. It takes many forms. I expect OTWAB to generate highly charged discussions of such themes among women’s book groups. I expect women to find elements of themselves inside the story. And while my readers may speculate endlessly about the phenomenon of bursting into flame and vigorously debate whether it could really happen, I know many will acknowledge they’ve felt the feeling at times in their lives of wishing they could just burst into flame and disappear and start a whole new life all over again. My answer is, of course you can start all over again, but we all know you don’t need flame to make it happen.

 

 

You can learn more about Nancy Burke and her books via her website, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter. Only the Women are Burning is on sale today and now available from all major online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. Nancy will celebrate the launch of the book with a virtual event ("In Conversation with Jenny Milchman"), hosted by Watchung Booksellers, on Wednesday, October 7th at 7:30 pm ET. 

Author R&R with August Norman

Originally from central Indiana, thriller and mystery author August Norman has called Los Angeles home for two decades, writing for and/or appearing in movies, television, stage productions, web series, and even commercial advertising. A lover and champion of crime fiction, Norman is an active member of Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, Sisters in Crime (National and LA), and regularly attends the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference. In addition, August is a founding member and regular performer with LA's longest running improv comedy show, "Opening Night: The Improvised Musical."

Last year, Crooked Lane Books released Come and Get Me, the debut novel in Norman's series featuring intrepid journalist Caitlin Bergman. On September 8, Caitlin returns in the follow-up novel, Sins of the Mother, about which Kirkus Reviews said, "Action-loving readers are the real winners in this offbeat thriller."

This time, the case is closer to home when Caitlin goes in search of her mother, whom she believed dead for the past forty years. But when a rural sheriff invites Caitlin to the woods of coastal Oregon to identify her mother's remains, Caitlin drops everything to face the woman she's spent a lifetime hating. Unfortunately, the body — abandoned on the land of a reclusive cult, the Daughters of God — was left faceless. Instead, Caitlin finds the diary of a woman obsessed with the end of the world, one that hints the cult's spiritual leader knows the identity of Caitlin's real father.

She's not the only one looking for clues in her mother's writing. Johnny Larsen, a violent white supremacist whose family runs the county, thinks the Daughters of God kidnapped his teen-aged daughter...and will do anything to get her back. Caught between the local white supremacists ready to take action and the radical cult her mother belonged to, Caitlin must unravel the town's secrets before the fiery prophesied end of days arrives.

August Norman stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing the book:

"The Cult Leader in Me"

While plotting my second Caitlin Bergman thriller, Sins of the Mother, I wanted to explore the relationship between the families we’re born into and the families we choose. I’d also been researching another type of chosen family at the time: religious cults. To combine the story of Caitlin’s search for her birth mother with that of a woman who would abandon her life in Los Angeles to commune with strangers in the woods of Oregon, I knew I needed to explore my own inner cult leader.

Like a hand held over a candle’s flame just until the point of pain, my fascination with people who blindly follow the dogma of self-professed prophets, often giving up friends, families, sexual boundaries, economic treasures, and original perceptions of reality, is thinly protected with a sense of “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Of course, I mean my God, not their God, because obviously my belief in a higher power that influences the World Series, but somehow ignores childhood diseases, is perfectly acceptable. See? There’s a fine, slippery, dangerous line between them, me, and a spiritual abyss. So, what is the difference between a mass theology and a cult?

Miriam-Webster defines a cult as a small religious group that is not part of a larger and more accepted religion and that has beliefs regarded by many people as extreme or dangerous.

While the world’s major religions often require personal sacrifice through fasting, tithing, or adherence to regimented moral constructs, cults take the weirdness level up to the sky.

Does your religion have a sex-abstaining savior who walked the earth two thousand years ago? Ours lives amongst us in a compound, gets down with everybody, and thinks vows to anyone but himself are mere suggestions.

Do you believe in space travel? We think that evil souls from a galactic war latch onto everyday people and can only be detected by our scanning machine. For a little money, and the recorded confession of your darkest secrets that we swear won’t be used to manipulate you, we’ll be glad to remove them.

Does your clergy maintain that living a moral life means that time will continue as long as we are good to each other? Ours sets a date on a calendar when the world will end in fire, guarantees it will happen in our lifetime, and demands that we sell all of our earthly possessions to fund a theater where our leader can do his performance art.

If these examples sound familiar, that’s because they’ve been cherry-picked from genuine religious movements of notoriety from the last century. While I’m exploring these concepts with a tone of humor, the damage that these groups have created is devastating in its reach and duration. Losing a family member to a fringe religious group, let alone growing up under a cult’s indoctrination, is life-shattering, soul-crushing, and often requires hospitalization and life-long therapy.

(And yes, I’m aware that mainstream religions can and have been just as damaging, especially in the context of global warfare and oppression, but this is about cults!)

Sketching out my own group, the Daughters of God, I needed a leader that even I, a jaded crime fiction author, would find both believable and appealing. Like many other creative hopefuls, I moved to Hollywood in my early 20s only to be lost in a metropolitan area of 12 million people from every country on the planet amidst an extreme range of wealth and poverty. Like anyone, I wanted to feel unique and be recognized. A good cult leader knows where to find people looking for definition, and it will come as no surprise to anyone who’s studied these organizations to find that a great many have started and prospered right here in Southern California. Therefore, Desmond Pratten, my fictional guru, starts as a movie star-handsome yoga instructor in West Hollywood, an area where many people seek physical perfection, surrounded by young and beautiful hopefuls looking for their big break.

Beyond recognition, many in this clique of young Hollywood want another step up their moral ladder, a special purpose. Who doesn’t want to feel like they’re making the world a better place, especially when it doesn’t seem like stardom will arrive anytime soon? Not only are Desmond’s followers getting in shape, but each is told they’ve been brought to his circle for a special purpose – to gather those lost to society and save the environment.

Still, at that level not much is happening that’s worse than an accountability group, so Desmond offers his followers another incentive, a direct conduit to God. Driven mostly by the need to satiate a wealthy defense contractor’s widow who has guilt-ridden visions of an apocalypse fueled by her husband’s inventions, Desmond lets the woman’s dreams become the group’s mythology, stepping in as the guide toward her noble goals while partnering with her corrupt niece, a confident, sensual companion who will do anything to avoid working a legitimate job. With the widow’s delusions, her niece’s help, and Desmond’s ability to read the needs of his well-meaning, soul-searching followers, the Daughters of God could easily attract a broad variety of followers with a mix of free love, intense-to-the-point-of-hypnotic physical activity, and a connection with the divine. Throw in some rules keeping everything legal, such as mandatory birth control and no one admitted under the age of consent, and file for a religious exemption, Desmond could keep the whole thing going for the rest of his life.

Of course, the problem with building a religion on a woman’s belief that the world’s end is on the horizon is that she might actually name a date and time. What will happen to Desmond’s followers when the world doesn’t end, and what would he do to keep his kingdom intact? Above all, what would happen if an investigative reporter, searching for the woman who abandoned her as a child to join this cult, showed up to shine a light on the man behind the curtain?

The cult leader in me wouldn’t give up his life at the top of the mountain without a fight.

 

You can learn more about August Norman and his books via his website and also the upcoming virtual book launch hosted by Anne's Book Carnival in Tustin, CA. Or you can find him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Bookbub.

Author R&R with Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of a memoir, Once We Were Sisters and fourteen works of fiction including the novels Dreaming for Freud, Becoming Jane Eyre, and Cracks, which was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and made into a film starring Eva Green. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and O Magazine and included in the Best American Short Stories. She has twice won an O. Henry Prize, as well as an Open Fiction Award, a Willa Cather Prize, and a Smart Family Foundation Prize. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.

Her latest novel is Open Secrets, in which the lies between a husband and wife are revealed, unraveling their family in a story that moves between the French Riviera, Switzerland, and Amagansett. When Michel, a Swiss banker, discovers his wife Alice's betrayal he turns for help to a Russian client who leads him into unknown territory, endangering not only his own life but that of Alice, and above all, his fourteen-year-old daughter, Pamela. Their charmed life—a beautiful house on the French Riviera, elegant vacations, and boarding school in Switzerland for Pamela—is not all that it seems. As the repercussions of Michel's illicit deals move closer in around them, Alice finds herself in Amagansett with her artist sister who is having a crisis of her own, while the danger circles around Pamela. Open Secrets is a suspenseful novel about relationships, family, love and the inescapable consequences of one's own actions.

Sheila stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the book:

On research and writing

All fiction attempts to portray life in a believable way whether it is science fiction, magic realism, or historical fiction. The reader needs to suspend disbelief to be interested by the story. This verisimilitude often comes with the authority of the voice. There are writers who manage to make us believe even the most extraordinary of events and others whose voice does not ring true. I have often had students who protest that something really happened but on the page render this event unbelievable. How, then, to make something believable?

When I was writing my first historical novel, The Children of Pithiviers, much of which takes place in Vichy France in the early 40's, I had some advice from my fellow countryman and Nobel prize winner: John Coetzee. He told me, "Don't stay too close to the facts." Certainly it is a more difficult task to blatantly alter historical facts. Research gives us the necessary confidence and the sort of precise detail that enables us to create a believable world, a world which rings true on the page. Even Don Quixote in his maddest moments renders his imaginary knights with marvelously real detail.

With my latest book, Open Secrets, I spoke to bankers, I read accounts of banks and banking systems in various parts of the world; I had also first hand dealings with Swiss banks through my sister whose money was stolen from a joint account in a Swiss bank with a numbered account by her husband, yet in the writing of the book, I found it necessary to take some distance from all of these "facts." I had to shut up the books and let the story come to me on the page through the characters who may have originated to some extent in my life but took on a life of their own. The story one is telling has its own truth  which we need to discover in the process of writing it, or so it seems to me.

 

You can learn more about Sheila Kohler and Open Secrets via her website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter. She also has a live online Q&A with Sheridan Hay via the Center for Fiction in New York coming up on July 14. Open Secrets is available this week via all major book retailers.

Author R&R with Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Bestselling author Jane Stanton Hitchcock was born and raised in New York City, where she led a seemingly privileged life. Early on, she learned the trappings of wealth and fame are not nearly all they are cracked up to be, themes she has since explored in her creative works dealing with murder and mayhem in high places. Before turning her hand to crime novels, she actually started her career in screenplays, one of which, Vanilla, was directed by Harold Pinter in London. (Fun factoid: Jane’s mother, actress Joan Alexander, originated the roles of Lois Lane on the radio serial The Adventures of Superman and Della Street on the radio serial Perry Mason).

Jane is also an avid poker player who regularly competes in the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker, and her sixth novel, Bluff (which just won the Dashiell Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers), plays off that theme. One-time socialite Maud Warner polishes up the rags of her once glittering existence and bluffs her way into a signature New York restaurant on a sunny October day. When she walks out again, a man will have been shot. Maud has grown accustomed to being underestimated and invisible, and she uses her ability to fly under the radar as she pursues celebrity accountant Burt Sklar, the man she believes stole her mother's fortune and left her family in ruins. Her fervent passion for poker has taught Maud that she can turn weakness into strength to take advantage of people who think they are taking advantage of her, and now she has dealt the first card in her high-stakes plan for revenge. One unexpected twist after another follows as Maud plays the most important poker hand of her life. The stakes? To take down her enemies and get justice for their victims. Her success depends on her continuing ability to bluff—and on who will fold. Can she win?

Jane stops by In Reference to Murder for a Q&A:

1) BLUFF grew out of your own mastery of poker. In what ways did the game inspire this book – and how is the idea of bluffing a catalyst for suspense?

First of all, I would never say I had “mastered” poker.  If anything, the game is my master.  It’s taught me a lot about life and how to deal with adversity – namely, there’s no point in dwelling on bad luck or one’s mistakes.  Hard as it is, you sometimes have to say “Next Hand” and get on with it.  I also realized that at the poker table I was being underestimated just as I had been in life.  Players never expect an older woman to play anything but Old Lady Poker, just like the guy who swindled my mother out of millions of dollars never expected me to find out about his larceny and ultimately help put him in jail.  When I made this connection I found a way into the book:  Combine being underestimated in life and in poker and write a twisty tale of murder, revenge, and bluffing.  I hope the reader will be intrigued by the characters and swept up in the twists and turns of the story.  The book is one long poker hand with a Flop, a Turn, and the River.  As they play the hand with me, I want them to be thinking:   “How the hell does she get out of this?”  Only one way:  Bluff!

2) “Mad Maud” Warner is a complex character – and a timely one, given the fervor of feminism and the #MeToo movement. In what ways do you see her as an everywoman of sorts – and how did you balance likability with believability in developing her person? 

I say in the book: “Older women are invisible, and we don’t even have to disappear.”  Power derived from supposed weakness is a theme of the book. In the very first scene, Maud is able to escape because no one can fathom a woman like her – an older, well-dressed socialite – could have had the balls to commit such a shocking crime in a posh and crowded restaurant.  

The book is told in two voices:  Maud’s own, as she recounts what led her to commit murder; and the third person, which details the crime and its aftermath on all the people involved.  My hope is that the reader will be rooting for Maud as she explains what has led her to such violence and why she thinks she can possibly get away with it if she literally plays her cards right!  I guess she’s a #MeToo murderer!

3) You also satirize high society. How do you view humor as a tool for enlightenment – and what’s your rule for achieving a sense of fun (and funny) without crossing the line into farce or offensiveness? 

I like what Abba Eban said: “The upper crust is a bunch of crumbs held together by dough.”  I grew up in so-called “High Society” and, as I say in the book “money is a matter of luck; class is a matter of character.”  Maud knows she can trust some of her dicey poker playing pals much more than the “social” friends she’s known her entire life.  I also say:  “Money exaggerates who people are.  If you’re good you’ll be better, if you’re bad you’ll jump right down on the devil’s trampoline.”  A lot of people think having money makes them better than other people.  I like to aim my pen at such pretension and there’s no better way to do it than with humor.  I’d have to be Dostoevsky to write my own family’s story without humor.  As the book shows, money doesn’t save anyone from addiction, swindling, and death.  In fact, money often makes things worse.  But there’s nothing more exasperating than self-pity.  So telling my family’s story was a challenge.  It took me nineteen drafts!  But the poker theme eventually helped me harness the humor in all the darkness.

4) In addition to a novelist, you are also a playwright and screenwriter. In what ways do these disciplines inform one another – and what are the greatest challenges of the novel in comparison?

 Movies are really a directors’ medium so a writer is blessed if he/she has a good director.  Enough said.  Playwriting taught me about creating scenes and developing characters through dialogue.  In the theatre time on the stage grows more expensive with each minute.  You have to engage the audience.  Therefore, you always have to ask yourself:  What’s at stake?  Why should people care about these characters, this situation?  You have a captive audience sitting there waiting for things to develop in a finite amount of time.  The novel has no such constraints.  But I confess, I love a good, twisty plot. I like every scene to further the story.  But I also think it’s important for the reader not to be one jump ahead of me.  It’s when surprise meets inevitability that I feel I’ve done my job.  I want my readers to say:  Wow I didn’t see that coming, but now it all makes sense!  

I try and give the reader a sense of place without overloading the description.  Action is character and I really like writing dialogue, putting myself into all the characters – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  It’s fun to create a good villain and more fun to see the villain get his/her comeuppance.  But in my books, there is usually an anti-heroine who is, herself, operating in an amoral sphere.  In Bluff, I want my audience to be complicit in Maud’s revenge and root for her to get it – otherwise the book doesn’t work.   

5) What does winning the Hammett Prize mean to you?

It’s an incredible honor.  I never expected to win it!  Being nominated was enough, particularly among such a talented group of writers, not to mention the distinguished nominees and winners of past years.  Frankly, just to be favorably mentioned in the same sentence with Dashiell Hammett is a mystery writer’s dream. 

 

You can learn more about Jane Stanton Hitchcock and the Hammett Award-winning book via Jane's website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Bluff is available via all major bookstores.

Author R&R with Robert McCaw

Robert McCaw grew up in a military family traveling the world. After graduating from Georgetown University, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army before earning his law degree from the University of Virginia. After law school he spent a year as a judicial clerk for Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black. Thereafter, he was a partner in a major international law firm with offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City, representing clients in complex civil and criminal cases. For a number of years, McCaw maintained a home on the Big Island of Hawai'i, studying its history, culture, and people, which was the inspiration for his crime fiction series featuring Chief Detective Koa Kāne. Putting himself in the shoes of Kāne, he has walked the streets, courthouse corridors, and parks of Hawai'i’s Big Island. (You an read more about another title in the series we featured here.)

Having killed his father's nemesis and gotten away with it, Hilo, Hawai'i Chief Detective Koa Kāne is not your ordinary cop. Estranged from his younger brother, who has been convicted of multiple crimes, he is not from a typical law enforcement family. Yet, Koa's secret demons fuel his unwavering drive to pursue justice. In Fire and Vengeance, never has Koa's motivation been greater than when he learns that an elementary school was placed atop a volcanic vent, which has now exploded.

The subsequent murders of the school's contractor and architect only add urgency to his search for the truth. As Koa's investigation heats up, his brother collapses in jail from a previously undiagnosed brain tumor. Using his connections, Koa devises a risky plan to win his brother's freedom. As Koa gradually unravels the obscure connections between multiple suspects, he uncovers a forty-year-old conspiracy. When he is about to apprehend the perpetrators, his investigation suddenly becomes entwined with his brother's future, forcing Koa to choose between justice for the victims and his brother's freedom.

Robert McCaw stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing Fire and Vengeance:

 

One need not look further than the current coronavirus pandemic to know that health issues often play a dramatic role in life. Yet, for those of us not trained as physicians, making sense of medical research is challenging. In Fire and Vengeance, the latest story in the Koa Kāne Hawaiian mystery series, medical issues play a critical role in one of the book’s pivotal threads. Koa’s incarcerated brother Ikaika blacks out and collapses in jail. Doctors diagnose him with a slowly growing, frontal lobe brain tumor he’s almost certainly had since childhood and recommend immediate surgery. Koa learns that frontal lobe brain injuries frequently affect behavior, making those affected more impulsive and less able to control themselves. He then embarks on a seemingly quixotic effort to win parole for Ikaika by establishing that his brother’s pre-surgery medical condition contributed to his criminal behavior.

After outlining this part of the plot, I had many questions. Was the scenario I envisioned credible? How should I describe the tumors? How would doctors establish that the tumors had been present since childhood? How often do such tumors occur? Exactly how do they affect behavior? How could the connection to behavior be proved? Where might one find knowledgeable doctors? What diagnostic tools would they use? How should I describe corrective surgery? What is the recovery time?

As a layperson, I could have spent months overwhelmed by the medical literature attempting to ferret out answers through a maze of unfamiliar medical terminology. I was willing to make the effort, but only if the plot was credible. So, I turned to my own physician, who had read the first books in the series, and he put me in touch with a specialist who validated the concept and pointed me in the right direction. I later had dinner with a psychiatrist friend who encouraged me to pursue the plot idea and offered suggestions.

Then began a journey of discovery. Through medical journals, I learned that such tumors are rare—about one in 4 million people—and picked up some useful medical jargon. More importantly, I discovered a growing body of literature discussing the behavioral problems of soldiers returning from the Afghan and Iraq wars with brain injuries. Many of these patients suffer from impulsive behavior like that behind Ikaika’s criminal acts. Those sources also led me to research the miraculous developments in real-time brain imaging, allowing physicians to “see” the actual electrochemical workings of the brain under various stimulations. This research offered the possibility of proof that Ikaika’s thinking processes post-surgery would differ from his previous inability to control his actions.

My review of case studies in medical journals and on the Internet suggested that children suffering from the early stages of such tumors might have absence seizures where they stare off into space and drop things. During the relevant period, doctors often prescribed the drug Depakote for such conditions. Based on this research, I imbued Ikaika with those childhood symptoms, had him treated with Depakote, and thus found a plausible way to tie his tumors back to his childhood.

My need to describe the surgery itself took my research into the world of robotic and image-assisted brain surgery, where I developed some understanding of the processes and timetables. Most relevant to the plot, these sources outlined the most likely outcomes and prospective recovery times for this type of medical procedure. I drew on this background in creating the dialog between the doctor and Koa, and subsequently between Koa and Ikaika.

My story needed a world-class neurosurgeon to consult with Koa about the medical issues, so I researched the country’s leading brain clinics, ultimately creating Dr. Kepler, a fictional specialist at the Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Brain Tumor Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. To add context to a meeting between Koa and Dr. Kepler at the Cochran Center, I make a virtual visit to the facility using Internet images and Google street view.

Perhaps as much as one-hundred-fifty hours of research went into about twenty pages or 6 percent of the final manuscript. Even then, I struggled to limit my use of medical terminology by having Koa insist that the doctors speak in plain English. You might be thinking it was a long run for a short slide, but it’s thorough research that informs the little details that make a story both captivating and believable.

 

You can read more about Robert McCaw and his books on his website and also follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Fire and Vengeance is available in ebook and audiobook formats from all major bookstores now, with the hardcover edition to follow in September.

Author R&R with John Bishop

Author John Bishop, MD, practiced orthopedic surgery in Houston, Texas, for 30 years. An avid golfer and accomplished piano player, Bishop is honored to have once served as the keyboard player for the rhythm and blues band Bert Wills and the Crying Shames. Bishop's Doc Brady medical thriller series is set in the changing environment of medicine in the 1990s. Drawing on his years of experience as a practicing surgeon, Bishop entertains readers using his unique insights into the medical world with all its challenges, intricacies, and complexities, while at the same time revealing the compassion and dedication of health care professionals.

Bishop's series featuring Houston orthopedic surgeon Doc Brady debuted in August of 2019 with the medical thriller, Act of Murder. In the follow-on novel, Act of Deception, just released this week, Brady has been sued for medical malpractice after a mysterious infection caused a knee replacement to end up as an amputation. Donovan Shaw, a ruthless plaintiff’s attorney, has taken the case and doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that he and Brady share a number of friends.

But Brady isn’t the only one in his practice being sued. How is Shaw getting his inside information? Can the patients afford to say no to filing lawsuits, even if the claims aren’t valid? Through a series of twists and turns, and with the support of his wife Mary Louise and their professional-investigator son J.J., Brady once again doggedly goes into “sleuth mode” to get to the truth of the matter—even after his life is put in jeopardy.

John Bishop stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:

I began writing in the mid-1990s, and created a character named Dr. Jim Bob Brady, an orthopedic surgeon in Houston, Texas, who had a penchant for getting himself involved in sordid murders and mysteries, and ultimately being able to solve them. I wrote a series of novels about Doc Brady, which didn't make the cut back then, but which are being published now after all this time.

ACT OF MURDER involves the hit-and-run death of Brady's neighbor's child. ACT OF DECEPTION, out June 10th, revolves around a questionable lawsuit filed against Doc Brady for medical malpractice. The third, ACT OF REVENGE, out September 10th, centers around the murder of the CEO of an insurance company who has cancelled the medical malpractice insurance of a large number of Houston plastic surgeons over the breast implant debacle. 

To update and edit these novels to current times became an almost impossible task. After a period of soul searching and hand wringing, the decision was made to update the writing, but to leave the setting in the 1990s. That meant that that restaurants, so much a part of the Houston scene, would remain intact. Also so would the sports teams, their victories and defeats in all their glory relived for the world to see. The bars and the music venues, so much a part of Houston back then, would come alive again, and the Bluesmen that entertained us at that point in history would return to the forefront. It was a good move for me because all the details about the city of Houston were already in the books. I had to update the stories and the characters but leaving the setting in Houston during that time frame allowed the reader to relive a glorious time in Houston, Texas. 

I don't remember every detail of the research I had to do back then, since it was over twenty years ago. but even though the internet began around 1991, there was not the information nor the detail available to a writer as it is today. Being an orthopedic surgeon myself, I knew most of the medical details involved in the mysteries I wrote about. Of course, there was still extensive library research time involved because I had to gain extensive but forgotten knowledge about metabolic diseases, such as Osteogenesis Imperfecta, at the center of ACT OF MURDER. A great deal of legal research was involved for ACT OF DECEPTION, to the extent of lawyer thinking and behavior, including a vicious malpractice trial at the end of the novel.

In ACT OF REVENGE, I had to research the breast implant lawsuit business extensively, and again, that was mostly library time, plus some necessary knowledge gained from lawyer friends over glasses of wine.

I have started writing again, influenced by the publication of the first three Doc Brady books, and have a few more Doc Brady novels in the wings. While I won't say it is any easier writing a novel, the research is vastly easier with the internet. There is so much information available that I sometimes find myself "clicking" details on a subject and then find myself so embedded in information that I've lost my original train of thought. But the internet saves a great deal of time and effort in leg work. I have also found that once I've educated myself on a subject, my lawyer, scientific, and law enforcement colleagues are more than willing to share information, and bring me up to date on subjects out of my purview. As these friends of mine say, "If you're buying, we're talking.”

 

You can learn more about John Bishop M.D. and his fictional protagonist, Dr. Jim Bob Brady, via the author's website. His books Act of Murder and Act of Deception are available in both ebook and paperback formats through the Amazon store.

Author R&R with Vee Kumari

Vee (Vijaya) Kumari is known for her work as executive producer and lead on HALWA, which received HBO's 2019 APAV award. She has also been a co-star in TV shows that include GLOW, Anger Management, Teachers, and Criminal Minds, among others. Vee spent over three decades as a neuroanatomy professor, a neuroscience researcher and for ten of those years was an Associate Dean for Medical Education at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA. In 2012, she retired to pursue a career of acting and writing and calls this "a journey from the left side of my brain to the right." 

In her debut novel, Dharma: A Rekha Rao Mystery, Rekha Rao is a thirty-something Indian American professor of art history who becomes disillusioned by academia and is haunted by the murder of her father. She believes police convicted the wrong person and moves away from her match-making family. As she tries to manage her PTSD and heal her broken heart from a previously abusive boyfriend, she gets entangled in a second murder, that of her mentor and father figure.  Rekha is attracted to the handsome detective Al Newton, who is investigating the murder but steers clear of him because of her distaste for cops and fear of a new relationship. When police arrest one of her students and accuse her mentor of theft, Rekha is left with no other choice but to look for the killer on her own. 

 

Vee stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing the book:

 

In my novel, Dharma: A Rekha Rao Mystery, Rekha’s beloved mentor, Professor Faust is murdered.

I’m unclear how I came up with the name ‘Faust’ for the murdered professor.

Once I did, I looked up what I could find of the details of the story, FAUST by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808,1832). If you read the novel, you’ll realize that the name truly doesn’t fit the man my protagonist revered, because he was gentle, kind and humble despite his many achievements. However, one of Rekha’s students, Neil, clearly perceives him as evil.

The original 1808 German title page of Goethe's play read simply: "Faust. / Eine Tragödie" ("Faust. / A Tragedy"). The addition of "erster zweiter Teil" (in English, "Part One") was retrospectively applied by publishers when the sequel was published in 1832 with a title page which read: "Faust. / Der Tragödie zweiter Teil" ("Faust. / The Tragedy's Second Part").

The two plays have been published in English under a number of titles, and are usually referred to as Faust, Parts One and Two.

I was able to find the English version online and it provided the source for the verse that Neil’s mother includes in the book she left for him.

“Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.”

I Googled the verse innumerable times to make sure that it would bring up the original text and it did. In the novel, Neil not only figures out his father’s name using the verse, but also considers it an apt inscription for his mother’s tombstone and a meaningful farewell to him before she dies.

The idea of Neil’s mother leaving a cryptic message for him came from a less well-known mystery novel by P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, in which a private detective, Cordelia Gray, embarks on a journey to find the killer of the son of a prominent scientist. The son receives a book from his nanny left for him by his mother. And it has an inscription that he doesn’t decipher, but Cordelia uses it to find the identity of the killer.

 

You can learn more about Vee via her website and also follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Dharma: A Rekha Rao Mystery is available via Amazon in both digital and paperback formats.

Author R&R with Thomas O’Callaghan

After a successful career in insurance, Thomas O'Callaghan turned his hand to writing his debut novel, Bone Thief and its sequel, The Screaming Room, which were published by Kensington Books and translated for markets in Germany, Slovakia, Indonesia, the Czech Republic, China, and Italy. The series features Homicide Commander Lieutenant John W. Driscoll and his dedicated team as they track the darkest killers in New York City.

The third installment, No One Will Hear Your Screams, was recently released by WildBlue Press:  Is there a sociopathic killer murdering prostitutes in New York City? NYPD's top cop, Homicide Commander Lieutenant John Driscoll, believes there is. Someone who calls himself "Tilden" claims to have been sexually abused as a child by his mother's john. But what could have triggered Tilden's rage to place him on a mission to eradicate all of New York's prostitutes? Tilden is not your run-of-the-mill sociopath. After all, would a common murderer take the time to embalm his victims—determined as the cause of all the deaths by the medical examiner? Driscoll is on mission to put an end to the madness. A man haunted by the events of his own unstable childhood, he teams up with Sergeant Margaret Aligante and Detective Cedric Thomlinson to stop the killings and bring Tilden to justice before he kills again.

 

O'Callaghan stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching his novels: 

 

Though my novels depict fictional murder I feel it’s important to accurately and definitively describe all aspects of the heinous killings. The reader, though he or she knows what’s being read is an imaginary tale must have a sense that the murders, meticulously depicted, could be real. Otherwise well crafted fiction becomes fantasy.  With that writing style in mind, I invite the reader to board a rollercoaster of sorts on page one. I then keep them on that rollercoaster until the last page. The key is to never let them off.  My dedication to clearly describe the killings must carry over into how I depict the procedures employed by my fictional team of homicide investigators who must track down these psychotic misfits terrorizing New York City.  But, since I’m neither a killer nor a detective I rely on in-depth research to get both factions right.  Failing to do so brings credibility into question.

When I created the villain in BONE THIEF it was important to depict an individual who not only craved bones, but had a wealth of knowledge about them.  Who better than a radiologist?  There are 206 bones in the human body, by the way. I know this because I looked it up.  And not being a radiologist myself, I was able to ascertain what a normal workday looked like for such a medical practitioner by searching the web.  Admittedly, most of the research for BONE THIEF was done via my laptop.  I did rely on an assist from an actual NYPD homicide commander to get the investigative procedure right, but I failed to ask what weapons a police officer routinely carries.  In the first edition of the book I had Lieutenant Driscoll release the safety on his Glock revolver.  Had I done a tad more research I would of realized Glock, Incorporated only manufactures pistols and none of them have a safety.  On a bright note, my mistake led to an entertaining conversation with a New York Times bestselling thriller writer who admitted to making the same mistake.  She suggested I simply arm Driscoll with a semi-automatic in the second book.  Which I did! 

In THE SCREAMING ROOM, which features a set of demonic fraternal twins, I wanted to add a unique twist to the investigation.  After reading several articles online that detailed interesting information about twins in general, I happened upon one particular article that spoke of something called the Turner Syndrome.  I knew nothing about the condition until my random online search of “Twins” produced that link.  It’s an extremely rare genetic disorder that only affects the female.  But, what I found fascinating was that their DNA would be identical.  A great find!  By adding it to my storyline, Lieutenant Driscoll was baffled.  How could two people have the same DNA?  The information I’d gathered through my online research thickened the plot!

The most memorable research I’d conducted while writing NO ONE WILL HEAR YOUR SCREAMS began when I happened upon a website called BlueLips.com.  My killer in this one is an embalmer by trade who uses those skills in an extremely shocking way to commit murder.  Because it was important to get the details right on precisely what that entailed I purchased a DVD from BlueLips.com that depicted the procedure in vivid detail.  Morbid?  A tad.  Informative and helpful to me as a thriller writer?  Absolutely!

 

You can learn more about Thomas O’Callaghan and his fictional protagonist Lieutenant John Driscoll via his website, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter. No One Will Hear Your Screams is available in both ebook and paperback formats through the Amazon store.

Author R&R with Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Shelley Blanton-Stroud grew up in California’s Central Valley, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the field. She co-directs Stories on Stage Sacramento, where actors perform the stories of established and emerging authors, and serves on the advisory board of 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing nonprofit for children. She teaches college writing in Northern California and has also served on the Writers’ Advisory Board for the Belize Writers’ Conference. She's had flash fiction and non-fiction in such journals as Brevity and Cleaver, and she recently published her first novel, Copy Boy.

Copy Boy, which one reviewer called "Raymond Chandler for feminists," is set in the 1930s depression era and centers on Jane Hopper, whose parents are trapped in a loveless marriage. When her mother threatens to leave her father for another man, he becomes violent towards her and Jane, and Jane strikes her father with a crowbar in defense. Leaving him for dead, Jane steals his truck and escapes to San Francisco to start a new life as a copy boy at the local newspaper, the Prospect. But copy boys are just that, boys, so Jane disguises herself as a man, even learning to smoke and swear. When she becomes obsessed with the mystery of a woman found unconscious after being assaulted with a crowbar—a woman who was photographed with Jane’s father—Jane’s old life threatens to come crashing down into her new life and expose her as a fraud.

Shelley stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about the book:

 

On July 18, it will be ten years since I got the call.

I was packing up to head out the door to my neighborhood Sacramento library to lead a book talk on Ann Tyler’s Digging to America. I’d been leading those talks for ten years but it still made me a little nervous, every time. I was last-minute-gathering the snacks, notes, discussion questions, the key card. Hunting a lost sandal. I was late.

When the phone rang, I didn’t expect to pick up—there was no time. But I looked at the handset in its cradle and the digital caller ID read, Monterey Bay Ambulance.

Which one is it?

My husband Andy and two college-age sons were on a scuba diving trip. Our oldest, Will, was a dive master. My husband and youngest, Henry, were getting certified, preparing for adventure.  This was the final step—getting tested in Monterey Bay.

Which one is it?

I picked up the phone and heard twenty-year old Will. “Everything’s okay Mom. But I’m in an ambulance with Dad. It looks like he’s had a heart attack.”

Treading in the Bay’s 56-degree water, Andy felt pressure, everything yellow, a buzzing in his ears. His arms and legs went weak. Will saw how white his face was. He called to the scuba guide, who was treading water over the spot where eighteen-year-old Henry had submerged. The guide told him to get Andy to shore. The guide stayed waiting for Henry to come up.

Will did swim Andy to shore, paddling with one arm, the other hooked around his father’s chest. On the beach, he found a doctor with a phone. At the hospital, they discovered he’d suffered heart failure. He’d had a previous heart attack we’d never even known about. As I was running to his hospital room, five hours later, I could hear Andy down the hall, laughing and joking with the doctor. Acting like himself. Will was pleased with the scrubs the nurse had given him to wear. Henry was shaken, but fine. We were going to be okay. For now.

Ten years later, Andy is fine, he’s great. So why do I share this with you now?

Because it was that weekend, ten years ago, when the two of us really saw how everything could end, just end, before we were finished being who we wanted to be, doing what we wanted to do. That’s when Andy and I agreed, we’d better start doing it now.

That’s when I began to write my novel, Copy Boy, though I didn’t know yet that’s what I was doing. I was just recording family stories in a journal, getting down whatever I could remember seeing, hearing, being told, as I grew up, about my family’s history as Depression-era, Dust Bowl Okies, migrating from Texas and Oklahoma to California’s Central Valley, where they would have to work and fight and hustle themselves into the lives they wanted. Just getting it down.

Then I starting researching the bigger picture, the history all around our family. So many books, so many field trips to the Central Valley, to San Francisco’s neighborhoods, bars from the thirties.

Then I started taking local writing workshops, where I met teachers and other writers—mostly women my age, fiftyish—who encouraged each other to develop a voice. To make syntactical choices, patterns of them, that would become a kind of thumbprint, making each of us recognizable in the print.  There were many such workshops.

Then, I started taking workshops about the science or architecture of story, especially the architecture of mystery. It was a revelation to learn the elements of it, getting under the hood of my own book. I attended the Book Passage Mystery Conference to learn such things and there I met writer friends who would become essential to my preparation. Some of us continue to talk twice a month by Zoom. It was also at this conference where a famous mystery writer told me the chapter I’d shown her was a mess. I had work to do.

So, I worked on it. Then, six months later, five years ago, I sent off a chapter to a couple literary workshops, hoping to get into one. Instead, miraculously, I was accepted by both the Napa Valley Writers Conference and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. (I got into this one off the Wait List.) In those places, I got more literary advice. I made terrific writer friends I’m in contact with now every day. I began to believe that maybe I could do this. At Squaw, a famous writer assigned to read my chapter, told me he was still hung over from the absinthe the night before, and that my kind of writing wasn’t really the kind of thing he liked to read. So that was bad. I was embarrassed. But when I told him one of my family stories, he said, Why don’t you put that in your first chapter? I did. He insulted me but I got over it. I used it.

The next year, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, again off the Wait List. (Did I mention I believe in wait lists?) There I heard brilliant talks on craft, watched authors perform their stories, had my first-ever chance to read one of my stories to an audience in the Blue Parlor. I cried up there as I read it. Some people in the audience cried too. I thought, maybe I belong here.

There were years of revising—I mean head-to-toe revising. The male protagonist turned into a female. The female became a cross-dresser. I moved from first person to third. From YA to adult literary historical mystery. I changed every inch of it. I spent three more years doing this, with feedback from so many freelance editors and critique groups, who made worlds of difference by giving me advice.

Once it got to the place where I was happy, I knew pretty quickly that I would sign with She Writes Press. That part was obvious. I liked the blend of support and control they offered. They’re a writer’s team. I like a team.

So, you’re probably thinking it’s odd that it took me ten years to make this book. But it also took me ten years of library book talks before that to develop a strong sense of what I just enjoy reading.

Ten years of book clubs. Ten years learning to make a book. You’d better believe I’m going to be making a new ten year plan next month.

 

You can read more about Shelley and her work on her website and also follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Author R&R with Michael C. Bland

MICHAEL C. BLAND is a founding member and the secretary of BookPod, an invitation-only, online group of professional writers. He pens the monthly BookPod newsletter where he celebrates the success of their members, which include award-winning writers, filmmakers, journalists, and bestselling authors. One of Michael’s short stories, "Elizabeth," won Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest 2015 Popular Fiction Awards contest. Three short stories he edited have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, while another was adapted into an award-winning film.

Bland's debut novel, The Price of Safety, takes on the dark side of surveillance and the dangers of data mining. By 2047, no crime in the U.S. goes unsolved. No wrongdoing goes unseen. All because of the security systems that Dray Quintero helped build. Yet when Dray learns his 19-year-old daughter Raven committed a heinous act, he covers it up to save her life.

This pits him against the police he's respected since he was a child and places him in the crosshairs of Kieran, a ruthless federal agent searching for justice. Forced to turn to a domestic terrorist group to protect his family, Dray soon realizes the sheer level of control of his adversaries. Hunted and betrayed, with time running out, will Dray choose his family or the near-perfect society he helped create?

Michael C. Bland stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing the book:

I was familiar with both Los Angeles and San Francisco, having visited both locations. As I wrote The Price of Safety, I drew on those memories as well as Google Earth and Google street view. Of course, the bigger challenge was writing a story set in the future—with both the story and the setting heavily influenced by the technology of that time. The story is about how technology can be used against us if we’re not careful. To make sure the novel wasn’t too tech- heavy, I balanced the technology with Dray and his family’s relationship as the core of the novel.

Even though the technology in the novel doesn’t exist yet, I did a tremendous amount of research to make it as plausible as possible. I researched the latest advancements in science, computing, robotics, and other areas to determine the current state of communication, robotic, and other technologies including Google glass, nanotechnology, tube development, etc. I then tried to determine how much further those technologies will develop over the next thirty years, while making them relatable. As a gauge, I looked back to where we as a society thirty years ago. In 1990, the discman was big, cell phones existed but were clunky bricks, and the internet was in its infancy. Life now is drastically different in terms of technology compared to back then—and advancements are accelerating every year.

I also read articles that predicted the future. These are rarely accurate (I’m so sad we don’t have flying cars!), but they inspired me in terms of what my world of 2047 will look like. I examined the latest research on fusion as that plays a part in my novel. Another area is dark matter. Scientists still do not know for sure what dark matter is, but I studied scientific articles and journals, then crafted my own theory (based on theories of those way smarter than me) of what it is and how it reacts. I used this in my novel as one of Dray’s achievements and incorporated it into his fusion reactor and other inventions.

Lastly, a friend of mine is an engineer. He was generous enough to work though the mechanics of some things that occur in The Price of Safety (at least as much as could be, given the advanced nature of some of the devices I created), as well as helping me make sure an engineer’s thought process and approach to things were accurate.

In writing The Price of Safety, I was inspired by Minority Report and 1984, hoping to bring that kind of feel and threat to the near future—but with a difference. I focused my novel on family, placing them at the heart of the story and driving Dray’s every action.

The structure of The Price of Safety was a challenge due to the laws and logic of the world I created. In fact, the surveillance and technology I wanted to focus on were a major hindrance. I couldn’t pretend a character couldn’t get a hold of another because they’d left the house, as an example. They all have cell phones and other ways of communicating, so I had to find other ways of creating and sustaining tension that made sense. When I was outlining the story, I discovered flaws in my logic over and over, each of which would have caused the story to collapse. I had to go back and rework the story repeatedly to make sure every development made sense, not only from a logic sense but then a narrative sense—and make sure the characters’ actions remain believable. Over the course of a year, I generated sixteen outlines, each one of which fixed a flaw I discovered. Only after I had everything worked out, I began to write the rough draft.

An additional challenge was writing in first person. This was my first time writing in this manner, yet to me it best fit the story. Certain events in the story have the greatest impact via the first- person POV. It also brought intimacy and connection to the main character. To me, that connection and closeness magnified and contrasted the technology that becomes both a gift and hindrance to Dray’s family’s survival.

 

You can learn more about Michael C. Bland and The Price of Safety via the author's website, and you can also follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The Price of Safety, the first installment of a planned trilogy, is currently available via many booksellers.

Author R&R with Lis Wiehl

Lis Wiehl is the former legal analyst for Fox News and the O’Reilly Factor, and has appeared regularly on Your World with Neil Cavuto, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and the Imus morning shows. The former co-host of WOR radio's WOR Tonight with Joe Concha and Lis Wiehl, she has served as legal analyst and reporter for NBC News and NPR’s All Things Considered, as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office, and was a tenured professor of law at the University of Washington. She appears frequently on CNN as a legal analyst.

Hew new true-crime book is Hunting the Unabomber, which meticulously reconstructs the white-knuckle, tension-filled hunt to identify and capture the mysterious killer, Theodore Kaczynski. For two decades, Kaczynski had masterminded a campaign of random terror, killing and maiming innocent people through bombs sent in untraceable packages. The FBI task force charged with finding the perpetrator of these horrifying crimes grew to 150 people, yet his identity remained a maddening mystery. Then, in 1995, a "manifesto" from the Unabomber was published in the New York Times and Washington Post, resulting in a cascade of tips--including the one that cracked the case.

 

Lis Wiehl stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing the book:

 

Most people have heard of Ted Kaczynski, aka, the Unabomber, but few know the herculean effort that went on behind the scenes to identify, locate and apprehend this serial bomber responsible for 16 attacks perpetrated over nearly two decades. Before he was done, Ted Kaczynski had killed three and injured 23 others. And thousands had worked as part of the federal UNABOM Task Force to track him down and finally bring him to justice.

Over the years, there had been countless books, TV docuseries, magazine and newspaper articles done on the case, but many of them rang hollow to me. In all the accounts that I’d read and watched, I never got the sense that the media truly had a handle on what happened in the massive and unprecedented effort to track him down. I was determined to find a way to shed new light on the hunt for Ted Kaczynski. I just couldn’t rehash old and tired accounts. How could I tell the story of the more than 500 law enforcement officials aided by countless others that comprised the task force? After many months of research, I finally found a way in.

My quest to bring the story behind the Unabomber Task Force to life took me to the mountains of New Hampshire, where I found former supervisory special agent Patrick Webb, an FBI bomb technician and one of the longest serving members of the UNABOM Task Force. It was there, in his remote country home at the end of a muddy and rutted path, that I found someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the case—and a treasure trove of task force documents. Of all the law enforcement officials who’d worked on the case, Webb stood out because he’d been involved longer than most and knew the full breadth and scope of the task force’s efforts. I became convinced that Webb was my way into the story; he gave me not just the original research materials that I needed but the color and drama that accompanied those documents.

For days, I sat with Webb in a pair of overstuffed chairs by his fireplace, as he described the Task Force’s work and painted a picture of some of the key individuals he’d worked with. He also went out of his way to introduce me to other key players who shared their knowledge of the team’s work. Webb proved to be an unusual find because he’d spent more than a decade on the case. Even some of the most senior members of the UNABOM Task Force were surprised by some of the details Webb was able to offer.

As my research continued, II learned not just about their actions but about the tremendous stress that drove the agents forward day after day. Some of the stress came from senior leaders of the FBI and other federal agencies who were determined to find Kaczynski; but the worst stress came from the agents themselves as they continued to labor even as their investigations failed to turn up anything of use. Task force members plugged away week after week, month after month. They wrote countless reports and investigated thousands of leads. Finally, there was a breakthrough in the case that led them to the Unabomber in his nondescript cabin in the hills of Lincoln, Montana.

In writing Hunting the Unabomber, I sought to take the reader inside the investigation and make them observers of task force meetings where strategy was plotted out, and take them to crime scenes where Webb and other bomb technicians analyzed the devices that had been carefully handcrafted by Kaczynski from bits of pieces of wood and metal that he’d collected. As a former federal prosecutor, I also delve into some of the legal nuances of the case and the efforts that agents went to in creating the intricate case against Kaczynski.

What made the task force’s job all the more incredible to me was that almost all its work took place before the advent of modern computers, video surveillance and other contemporary law enforcement tools. Agents had no choice but to spend countless man hours investigating leads and writing reports. The bombings happened in jurisdictions across the country and involved law enforcement officers, agents and investigators from local, state and federal agencies. I was stunned at just how many leads were followed over the course of this nearly two decades long investigation.

The involvement of so many different investigative agencies made collecting, organizing and synthesizing crime scene evidence, thousands of witness interviews and paramount. It was the UNABOM Task Force that created the FBI’s first-ever unified database—used to identify, locate and capture this serial bomber.

We will forever be indebted to Patrick Webb and the other investigators for helping us to finally bring this story to life. And we firmly believe that even the most avid true crime followers will find something new in this painstakingly researched work.

 

For more information about Lis Wiehl and the book, check out her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Hunting the Unabomber is available via Thomas Nelson books and all major booksellers.