Status Update

Howling at the Moon…

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This was the moon very early this morning over south Salem. A werewolf moon perhaps? But my “howling” was strictly in celebration. The contract I signed with Next Chapter Publishing last July is finally in process. This week they sent me the book description they will use on the back cover and in online promotions once the book is released. They asked for my approval, and I gave it both thumbs up. Here it is:

When psychiatrist Carter Lane inherits his best friend’s cases after his suicide, he’s thrown into the fractured world of Arthur Frampton: a patient with dissociative identity disorder whose presence triggers memories of a long-buried massacre known as the Hoffman Horror.

When Lane’s wife is murdered, he discovers that her death mirrors the gruesome details of the decades-old crime. Lane is convinced one of Frampton’s “alters” is responsible, but the detectives on the case have a different theory: Lane himself had motive and opportunity to commit the crime.

Now a man on the run, Lane races against time to clear his name while navigating the maze of false identities and repressed trauma. As the pieces fall into place, will redemption cost him everything?

A relentless psychological thriller, William J. Cook’s PERSONA explores the power of identity–and how the past never truly stays buried.

Needless to say, I am very excited. I expect to hear from their editors soon. Wish me luck! And I wish you all a kind and peaceful weekend.

A Progress Report

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I want to update friends and family to the status of my current project, the novel All the Bodies Do. Since the story begins in Las Vegas, my wife wisely suggested we take a trip there for research. It was a wonderful idea because it lent more authenticity to my descriptions of the city and the surrounding desert. The picture above is the so-called “bathtub ring” around Lake Mead, left as the lake receded to its lowest level ever because of the megadrought here in the West. It’s white because of the calcium carbonate in the waters of the Colorado River.

By spring of 2022, water levels had dropped 176 feet, exposing the skeletal remains of bodies on shorelines that had previously been underwater. The most famous is “Hemenway Harbor Doe,” a dead body found in a fifty-gallon drum near the Hemenway boat launch and marina. As if being found in a barrel wasn’t enough to get it labeled as a homicide, there was a bullet hole in its skull! Below is a picture of Boulder Basin, the area where it was found.

This photo was taken from the Lake Mead Overlook outside of Boulder City, a place where tour buses and visitors stop. It was fun to watch people pose for pictures in front of this background. Since no mention is made of “Hemenway Harbor Doe” on the information posted here, my guess is that most didn’t know they were posing in front of a crime scene!

Finally, I took the picture below from our hotel room. That’s the famous Sphere, which just opened last Friday with a concert by U2. The Ferris wheel is called the High Roller, and it had been the highest in the world until 2021, when it was surpassed by one in Dubai.

The protagonist of my book, the investigative journalist Kate Temperance, will discover the identities of the bodies in Lake Mead—or die trying. Her adversary, Sofia Gemelli, owns the (fictional) Florentine Hotel and Casino on Las Vegas Boulevard. Kate’s investigation will take her from the Vegas Strip and the Nevada desert to the lush vineyards of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. My hope is that the twists and turns of the story will keep readers guessing and keep them turning pages long past their bed time!

The manuscript has had a thorough editing by my beta readers, and now that I’ve added my notes from our Las Vegas trip, I’ve begun to query agents to see if I can get it traditionally published. If I can’t connect with an agent within the next 8-10 months, I’ll go ahead and publish it independently. I’ll keep you apprised of this writer’s journey!

Art and Crime

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I live with an artist wife, and Sharon never ceases to amaze me. She enters her studio (formerly, our dining room!) in “paint clothes” (of course, she’d be beautiful even dressed in rags!), starts blending different colors, and confidently approaches her easel armed only with a palette knife. Hours later, she emerges, the cutest smudges of paint on her nose and cheeks, and asks me to take a look at the initial phases of the piece she is birthing. (It seems appropriate that what she is painting on is called a “cradled birch panel.”) Her work staggers me. Here’s her website.

The Oxford Dictionary defines abstract expressionism as a development of abstract art that originated in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and aimed at subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the creative spontaneous act. Wikipedia says it put New York City on the map, eclipsing Paris as the new hub of art in the West. I don’t know about all that, I only know my wife’s work knocks my socks off. Here she is:

So why have I’ve called my blog “Art and Crime?” I don’t mean to imply that Sharon is in any way a criminal—far from it! But I write murder mysteries. As I’ve accompanied her to showings at the galleries that feature her work, I’ve learned that art galleries are far and away one of the best places to launder money! Oh, I thought, I can use that! And indeed I have.

Gallery of Gangsters is the final book in the Driftwood series (and one of Sharon’s paintings is on the cover!) If you click on the image below, you can read the first chapter. Let me know what you think.

The book will be released on August 24. Pre-order it now for only $0.99—a $5.00 savings. Here’s the link.

The Last Update of 2020

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

                                           —The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

I don’t know if there is a more perfect poem for 2020. If you haven’t read it in a while, I recommend a re-read. It’s easily available on the Internet and it’s truly riveting.

My intent here is simply to bring families and friends up-to-date on what’s happening in my little corner of the world. Although many good things have happened in my life, I’m almost embarrassed to mention them in the light of all the losses others have suffered. The fires that ravaged the Santiam Canyon left families without homes and sometimes without loved ones. The pandemic has touched the lives of everyone, taking a terrible toll in grief and loss of life. And, of course, politics have been so destructive of anyone’s peace of mind.

That said, my family has been blessed and I am very thankful. My writing has taken a different turn. I spent a lot of time this year doing free promotions, which resulted in more sales than I’ve ever had before, as well as many more reviews and ratings on Amazon. In addition, for the first time I solicited “professional reviews”—those done by experts in the field who work for a fee and never guarantee that the review will be positive. I’ve submitted my latest novel, Dungeness and Dragons, which I published in April, to Kirkus Reviews and US Review of Books. I’ve used one-sentence excerpts from them for “Editorial Reviews” on the book’s Amazon page. Click on those names if you’d like to read the full reviews.

The other news is that my narration of my short story, Eye of Newt, finally got released as an audiobook this week. It’s a hoot to go to the book’s page on Amazon, click the “Sample,” and listen to my own voice! The book is a little less than an hour long, and I have to admit, it was a pretty torturous process doing it. I have way more respect for audiobook producers now!  Will I try to tackle a full-length novel, which would probably be ten times the work I put into this little project? Maybe it’s a tiny bit like the woman who has just given birth saying “Never again!” and then she forgets the pain and has another child. We’ll see. If you’d like to check out that sample I mentioned, clicking on the title will take you there.

Finally, I’ve begun work on another volume of short stories, which I hope to publish in the spring—a little “cleansing of the palate” before I dive into the next Driftwood Mystery. Whitehorse has to do something about Volkov!

So that’s the news for now. I sincerely wish you all the blessings of this holiday season, and health for the New Year.