What happens when an idea for a book strikes and won’t leave you alone? What if it’s something you know nothing about? Such as banjo picking, as in the second book of my second series set in the tranquil mountain town where I live in Central California? I...
You’ve read all these murder mysteries of one kind and another from grisly hard-boiled noir to the sweetest cozy. You’ve seen all the tricks and seen how the detectives unravel a Gordian Knot of a story to solve the murder. You let your mind out to play imagining the...
A work of fiction has to be about something, doesn’t it? And really good books are about a lot of things, some of them heavy social issues. Raymond Chandler’s novels are about crime and corruption in the 1940s in a place he called Bay City, in truth, Santa Monica. No...
I’ve asked myself countless times why I’m fascinated enough with murder and mayhem to write three crime fiction novels about Santa Monica? Why do I feel such glee in learning the forensic details of death and dying? If I were alone in this fascination I’d...
My second mystery novel, Rip-Off, is a whodunit about Chechen organized crime set in Santa Monica, not Boston. The news unfolding in Boston has me and the rest of the world gob-smacked, as the Brits say. It may be that Chechnya in the end has nothing to do with the...
