POISONOUS SCIENCE – A FIRST NOVEL

Today's guest blog is by Henry Forman, who has just published a new mystery novel I think many of you might enjoy reading.   Henry's plot dramatizes a real issue in contemporary scientific research, so there's some real food for thought in this novel.

THE SURREAL KILLER WINS AN AWARD

I just received an e-mail telling me that "The Surreal Killer" won the Indie Book of the Day award today.  This novel, the third (and soon to become the second) in the Roger and Suzanne South American mystery series, is the best seller in the series thus far.  I recommend it highly for those of you who haven't read it yet.

The image of the award is embedded below.

NEW RELEASE: LIFE SENTENCE, ROMANTIC SUSPENSE BY CAROLYN ARNOLD

Fellow mystery/suspense writer Carolyn Arnold has a new book being released that I thought some of us might want to know about.  Note the spouse and two beagles in her life.  With a spouse and three German Shorthaired Pointers (plus a new litter of puppies soon to join us), I can certainly identify with her.  So, let's hear about the new novel from Carolyn herself:

New Release: Life Sentence, Romantic Suspense by Carolyn_Arnold       

"If I pay with my life, you will pay with yours."

MURDER AT A DOG SHOW

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My current WIP novel “The Deadly Dog Show” is just about ready for publication.  The penultimate version is being proofread, edited, and tweaked before being sent next week to a short list of would-be reviewers to critique on Amazon and/or Goodreads.   Please add a comment here after this post or e-mail me directly if you’d like to request a review copy (PDF format) before publication of the book on Amazon KDP.   Reviews improve the author's writing and sell his or her books, so are an essential component of the overall publishing process.   I’ll do one more round of edits and tweaks while that’s occurring and the book should be on Amazon and available for readers to enjoy.  

The new novel features Roger doing an undercover investigation of alleged improprieties at several California dog shows, ably assisted by Robert’s nanny Bruce and by Suzanne.  Bruce is a nanny of many talents, including his abilities as a dog trainer and handler in the show ring.  Vincent Romero, the former CIA agent from Chile who we first met in “The Surreal Killer”, rounds out Roger’s investigative team in this entry in the popular series.  In between finding bodies at dog shows and discovering the identity of Suzanne’s mysterious stalker, Roger and Bruce have time to pick up a purebred Champion hunting dog named Juliet to lend credibility to their undercover identities as an owner/sponsor and a professional handler at several shows and for Bruce to train in tracking and scent work just in time to find a key clue as to who killed the murder victims.

GIVING A CHARACTER THEIR VOICE

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            When writing dialogue, how can you keep your characters from all sounding the same?  If you’re good at this task you can use regional dialects as a distinguishing characteristic, like my friend Wayne Zurl [http://www.waynezurlbooks.net] does so well in his Sam Jenkins series.  If you do it well enough, and Wayne does, before you know it you have books that will sell well as audiobooks where differences in speech usage and patterns are the essential clue in individuating the characters as you listen to the story.  At least for me, this is hard to do as you need a very nuanced ear and a very good memory for what they said and how they said it to make people sound different based only on word choice.  According to The Guinness Book of Records [http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-2000/most-character-voices-for-an-audio-book-individual] the greatest number of characters given distinct and distinguishable voices by an actor in an audiobook is 224.   This amazing record was accomplished in 2004.

What can the aspiring author do to make their characters different from one another?  If the educational level of the characters varies (college educated P.I. versus high school dropout thug), you have another way to make their voices quite different.  The thug can use a lot of slang and slur his word endings, maybe even say a few bad words here and there.  You can make a character stutter or misuse certain words, or even have an accent.  One of my characters slips a Spanish word into his English every now and then.  The perfect word for Vincent to be overusing for this particular idiosyncrasy is the classic parsley word used promiscuously in conversational Spanish, “claro”.  Vincent could make a chimichurri with all of the claro parsley he sprinkles into his conversation [check out a previous recent post on this blog on “Salsas” if this doesn’t make sense to you, or go directly to the recipe at http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/chimichurri].

THE REAL JULIET

In the current WIP, tentatively entitled "The Deadly Dog Show", Roger and Suzanne, with a lot of help from their Nanny Bruce and Roger's new partner in his detective agency, Vincent Romero, go undercover to investigate irregularities allegedly occurring at a series of major dog shows in California. As part of their cover identities they borrow a dog for Bruce to train and show, called Juliet in the novel. The fictitious Juliet is modeled very closely after our Jolie, AKC Grand Champion Von Der Nacht's Classic Beaujolais, JH, SH, especially when her behavior and personality are being described. To avoid concerns about quarantine regulations and the potential adverse effects of hot, humid weather on the dogs during the shows, this novel is set mainly in California rather than in our more usual locales in the Southern Cone of South America.

Jolie has spent most of her life as a member of a family dog pack, the first three years with just Mom, Vinia, and the second three years with Vinia and Jolie's daughter, Schone. Jolie deferred to Vinia until she had her first litter of puppies, but is probably the dominant bitch in a very mellow pack these days, at least in some ways. For example, she gets to go out of the door first when the pack heads for the back yard. She loves to give big slurpy kisses to humans, including strangers if they have a positive attitude. Like all three of our dogs, and like Juliet, she is a superb athlete in the field and in the back yard.

This book has its origins in Elaine's wanting to see one of these novels having a dog-based theme, especially if it could capture some of her interests in German Shorthaired Pointers and dog shows.  Throw in a badly concealed version of one of our dogs and she seems to be happy, pending some heavy editing still to be done.  Stay tuned to this blog, and hopefully we'll be announcing this book's publication some time this Spring season.

A Historical Discovery

Where does the next new book idea come from?  In this case I can give us a very simple and precise answer.  After a lot of years it was time to paint the inside of our house again. That in turn was an excuse (necessity?) to reorganize messy desks and closets and peek into various cracks and crevices. Even (shudder!) to throw away a lot of old junk. But we unearthed a few lost treasures, too. One of them was Elaine's journal from our trip to Quito, Guayaquil, and The Galápagos Islands several years ago. This little bit of hidden treasure ensures that somewhere on the to-do list is a visit to the Galápagos Islands and a body or two for Roger and Suzanne to discover among the Booby Birds and the tortoises. I've also been meaning to re-read Darwin's classic treatise, "Origin of Species", so it might be an excuse to sprinkle a bit of biology into a novel. We'll see.

We met a few very interesting people on that trip. I assume that Roger and Suzanne will meet their fictional doppelgangers in this book to be (book in utero?). These characters should include the two sisters from San Francisco and the mysterious handsome Ecuadorian dude, Raul, who was trying so hard to pick them up (in the face of little or no resistance to the idea).  Raul had his big secret in real life.  Should that secret also transfer to his fictional doppelganger?  I strongly suspect that it will.  One of the low spots of that trip was the taxi drivers' strike in Quito where they closed down travel in the city by setting huge bonfires consisting of burning old tires on the main boulevards.   I don't know if I'll try to work that experience into the story.  One of the high spots of our trip was sitting next to an Ecuadorian Air Force General on the flight from Guayaquil to Baltra and learning about what the Air Force of a modern South American country just to the south of Colombia does.  I'm sure the general will make a guest appearance in the book.  He'll probably get a good sized chunk of the Baltra chapter to himself.

We talked about new technology and writing blog entries more or less spontaneously in an earlier post.  Here's a great example of it.  I have a 1.5 hour train ride and my iPad.  As I sit here now on the Amtrak train traveling from Davis to Oakland, CA for a meeting, I've been thinking about this book, for which I just started writing some scenes. To my right, through the train window, is a beautiful view of the north end of San Francisco Bay.  Next stop is Martinez if you know the route.  Or even if you don't.  My thoughts are on this book in utero. Will this be a romantic getaway just for Roger and Suzanne or should Robert and Bruce be invited along for the trip? Should Eduardo Gomez fly over from Paraguay to meet them or will he be superfluous this time? How about Vincent Romero, Roger's new partner in his detective agency? Decisions, decisions, decisions!

Bulgaria is Not South America

Today we feature a guest post by fellow "travel adventure" suspense writer Ellis Shuman, author of Valley of Thracians, currently available from Amazon.

In considering a guest post for the South American Mystery Novels and Stuff blog I was hesitant, as Bulgaria, the country featured in my new novel, is not located in South America. However, like many of the books listed here, the story of Valley of Thracians takes place in an exotic location, quite off the beaten track for Western tourists.

For those who aren't ready to board a Bulgarian Air flight to Sofia, I can offer something else, a chance to learn about the wonders of Bulgaria through the pages of my novel.

Valley of Thracians is a suspense novel. There is a missing Peace Corps volunteer and buried treasure. However, I would classify it as "travel fiction", in that the location, Bulgaria, plays as important a role in the story as the main characters.

My wife and I lived and worked in Sofia for two years. During that time, we traveled extensively around Bulgaria, learning the country's history and culture, climbing its mountains, sunbathing on its beaches, shopping in its stores, visiting its villages, eating its traditional food, and learning a bit of Bulgarian along the way. Okay, we didn't learn that much Bulgarian. We made many friends and in short, fell in love with the country.

Upon our return to our permanent home in Israel, I found it hard to tear myself away from the feeling of living in Bulgaria. To solve this aching, I turned to my writing. I had previously published a collection of short stories, The Virtual Kibbutz, which was very Israeli in subject matter. Now I decided to try something totally different - a novel about another country.

I believe I have succeeded it telling a bit about Bulgaria and I hope that readers will appreciate the chance to learn about this unique place while they take a suspenseful journey by reading my book.

Valley of Thracians is now available for Kindle at Amazon.  http://www.amazon.com/Valley-of-Thracians-ebook/dp/B00B68J114

Ellis Shuman's blog may be found at http://ellisshuman.blogspot.com/

The Magic of KDP

It's completely counter-intuitive that Amazon's KDP model of giving away free books will stimulate sales of the same book. Why would anybody want to buy a book that they could have downloaded free the day before? If it's in the KDP program, won't it be available free some time in the future if the would-be buyer is just patient enough to wait?

My son Michael suggested that I try two consecutive book giveaways starting on Christmas Day and ending on January 3, 2013, ten days later. All of those brand new Kindle readers who got them for Christmas presents needed downloaded books to read, so this made sense, at least to me. I had previously had free book giveaways for two of my novels in KDP, "The Surreal Killer", a full-length novel, which was very successful, and a novelette, "The Body in the Parking Structure", which was not very successful in stimulating new sales. But I learned a few lessons along the way. They were lessons everybody was already saying on Facebook, Goodreads, and Kindle Forums. Short forms of books---novellas, novelettes, and short stories---aren't as popular as full-length novels even if they are free.   People seem to want more pages for their money, even if the total cost is $0.00.  And nobody wants to download any book, free or at full price, unless it has a lot of positive reviews.  And maybe a catchy cover too, but this isn't quite as clear to me yet.

"The Surreal Killer" giveaway lasted five days, from 12/25-12/29/12.  In the USA more than 1,150 free copies were downloaded during this period.  Interestingly, Amazon UK readers almost matched this performance by downloading 995 copies of the book.

The performance of the novelette, "The Body in the Parking Structure" was different.  In the USA there were more than 825 downloads of the freebie between 12/30-12/31/12, with a little over 700 more taken in the first three days of January.  There was much less interest in this free novelette on Amazon UK, where only 29 free copies were downloaded between 12/30-12/31/12 and 39 more for the 3 days in January.

But then came the magic:  More than a 1.5 books a day (thus far) were either sold or were borrowed via Prime, mainly "The Surreal Killer" despite the more than 2,000 free downloads the preceding month.  Total sales/borrows were almost exactly equally distributed between Amazon.com in the USA and Amazon UK.  The January sales included all six of my book titles for sale on Amazon, but "The Surreal Killer" led the pack, with "The Body in the Parking Structure" comfortably in second place in the USA, but not in the the UK where "The Ambivalent Corpse" followed "The Surreal Killer" in sales.

What lessons are to be learned from this simple, but uncontrolled, experiment?  What do you think, readers?

Onward to the World of High Technology Blogging

My family decided to support my second career as a mystery writer by upgrading the technology available to increase my productivity.

My first gift was an iPad for more comfortable reading of e-books that the Kindle app on my computer that I had been using. The iPad also has a downloadable Blogger app that supports writing these blog posts for Blogspot off-line.  Now I can take any spur of the moment idea that occurs at any time and get it written down, properly formatted for Blogspot, at the instant of conception. If it still looks good the next day it uploads at the touch of a finger. If it doesn't look good in the cold, clear light of the next day, it disappears forever at the touch of a finger. If inspiration strikes during the 8-6 working day, so be it. Just open the iPad, start typing, and pretend it's work related.

My second gift was a smart phone, in this case an iPhone that synchronizes seamlessly with my iPad and laptop.  It's even more portable than the iPad and fits in a pocket.  Guess what?  It has the Blogger app available for free download too.  I'm pretty much out of excuses for hitting my goal of one or more posts per week to this blog.  And before any of you eagle-eyed readers notes the date on the last post, I just had a week of the flu as an excuse for being late.

Given the technology upgrade I hope to explore various new and different themes in the next few months.  Guest posts are most welcome, especially if they relate, however distantly, to mystery novels or mystery writing.

Happy New Year and Feliz ano nuevo to all!

Tich's New Review of The Matador Murders

"I enjoy reading Mystery novels, I love the excitement and solving problems. The Matador Murders is a pretty fast paced and well written Mystery.  Roger and Suzanne are called Montevideo to help solve a murder. In order to find the killer and free their friend from murder charges they must investigate the members of the two gangs that are at war. Someone is killing for leadership and they must figure out who this is.  Jerold Last did a great job creating The Matador Murders. The characters were fantastic and the storyline was great."


From: 

http://lovesallthingsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-matador-murders-by-jerold-last.html?zx=de3ef21597754e19, Monday, January 7, 2013

Thank you, Tich.

A New Review of The Body in the Parking Structure

This review is from Amazon: The Body in the Parking Structure (Kindle Edition) 4 Stars

"This is a short, fast paced read that has all the elements of a detective series with a notable shortage of detail.
This may sound like a negative but it is not.
This turned out to be a fun read. All the necessary information is contained herein but all those details that are used to drag out a story and flesh it out was absent.
Making it a really easy and nice read.
None of the essential information is missing.
The characters are fluffed out enough for the reader to connect to them though not so fluffed that they become THAT family member, you know the one!
The family member where you know every single breath taken.
This is a nice read and worth it's 4 * review rating."

I believe this is the first review of this book originating in the Southern Hemisphere (South Africa).  The 4-star rating overall is based upon a total of 9 reviews thus far.

It was fun experimenting with this short form mystery that takes place in Los Angeles rather than the much more descriptive style I used in my novels set in various South American locales.  It's quite amazing to me as an author how different the task becomes when you need to have a plot and a conclusion within some arbitrary constraint of total book length.

I have a question

In the last few days I've had 36 hits on this blog originating from Russia.  That's a lot of hits from any country other than the USA for me over any three day interval since the blog began.  Does anyone have any idea of what topic or keyword might have triggered this level of interest?  Any comments are welcomed.

More Deaths Than One, by Pat Bertram

Pat Bertram's newest mystery novel is entitled "More Deaths Than One".  Pat was kind enough to subject herself to an interview about her new novel, about how she writes, and about her website and her blog.  For all of you who have gotten this far, enjoy a visit with this successful author.

What is your book More Deaths Than One about?

More Deaths Than One tells the story of Bob Stark who returns to Denver after 18 years in Southeast Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. He attends her new funeral and sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on? And why are two men who appear to be government agents hunting for him? With the help of Kerry Casillas, a baffling young woman Bob meets in a coffee shop, he uncovers the unimaginable truth.

What inspired you to write this particular story?

More Deaths Than One started with an obituary for a stranger that could have been for a friend’s mother. The woman who passed away came from the same city as the friend’s mother, had a similar name, and had two sons about the same age as my friend and his brother. Jokingly, I said, “Maybe this really is your mother.” We had great fun that day trying to figure out how it could be possible for him to be the dead woman’s son. The story we came up with captured my imagination, and so I had no choice but to pursue it.   

Going To The Dogs

At Elaine's (my wife's) urging, I'm trying to bring her hobby of dog breeding, which we've discussed here before in some of my earlier posts, into Roger and Suzanne's fictional world of mysteries and whodunits.  There are two noteworthy efforts to tell you about thus far:

(1) For Roger and Suzanne Trivia buffs we can pose the following questions and the source of the answers.  What was Roger Bowman's first case as a P.I.?  What very unusual fee was he paid?  Who was his most unusual client ever?  The answers are in a new 2,000-word short story, "The Dog with No Name", available free on Erika Szabo's blog at http://www.erikamszabo.com.  Go on over and take a look.  Enjoy the story.  It's a little bit different than my usual style.

(2) Currently under construction is a new book, tentatively entitled "The Deadly Dogshow".  I can promise that no dogs will be killed or injured to advance the plot, but can't make any such promises with regards to the human characters.  In fact I can almost certainly promise that one or more humans will be killed in this story.  Suzanne and Roger have bought a dog (Juliet, a German Shorthaired Pointer, of course).  Bruce, among his many other talents, turns out to be a skilled dog trainer and handler so will be a featured player in all doggie subplots from here on.  Robert is getting old enough to help Bruce train the dog, so will also get more toner than he used to in these stories.  For the old-timers here:  remember when that used to be ink? 

There are also bit and pieces of several other short stories and one or two novels being worked on.  Current plans for the next South American book will take our characters to The Galapagos Islands to mix biology and murder in one of the most special places in the world, located off the coast of Ecuador.  They will also get a chance to visit Alaska to investigate a homicidal bear.

Now, if I can only find the time to write all of these stories........

Roger and Suzanne's New Case

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For fans of my South American mystery series, the newest entry, an 11,600-word novelette, "The Body in the Parking Structure" was just published on Amazon.  In this new mystery, my first in a shorter story format, Suzanne discovers the body of a Bolivian scientist in the parking garage next to the Medical School at UCLA.  The police treat the killing as just another drug deal gone bad.  P.I. Roger Bowman, Suzanne, and his newly assembled team investigate the murder, which seems to be linked to a small biotechnology company and a new anti-cancer drug they are developing.  The reader is off on a whirlwind tour of Los Angeles and Westwood in search of clues.  The clues are all there: Can you figure out whodunit before Roger does?  This fast-paced mystery story features characters from the author's popular South American mystery novel series working on a murder case at home in Los Angeles.  Enjoy it!  There's a link on the blog page to the book's Amazon page.

Excerpt (950 words):             The Body In the Parking Structure

                                                Chapter 1. Suzanne finds the body

            For the first time since we had met, Suzanne discovered a dead body without me being there.  She was collecting her car at twilight from the UCLA parking structure after a quick trip to the laboratory to change the samples on a DNA sequencer.  The structure seemed to be deserted except for her and a large lump lying lifeless between her car and the garage wall.  She called 911 to report the body then called me. 

            The police and I arrived at the garage at about the same time.  While she was waiting for us, Suzanne took a closer look at the corpse and got her second shock of the night.  She not only counted at least five bullet holes in the body but she also recognized the victim from one of our previous cases.  It was Eugenio Vasquez, a biochemist from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, who we had met the previous year in Lima, Peru.  We had spent a pleasant afternoon with him and his cousin Rogelio, at a couple of museums, eating ceviche for our first time and drinking Peruvian beer.

The Nexus of Fiction and Reality

In "The Ambivalent Corpse" and in my upcoming (Summer, 2012) novel "The Matador Murders", we meet a character named Andrea, a scientist at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, who is studying affordable methods for the analysis of the microcystins, a family of toxins produced in rivers, estuaries, and lakes by various species of blue-green algae.  She also gets mentioned in some of my other blogs.  Her character is based on a real scientist studying these algal toxins in Uruguay who I've been collaborating with for more than a decade.  So, what's real and what's fiction?  Let me give you a few hints; these are references to, and abstracts from, actual scientific papers published in the peer-reviewed literature that I have copied from Pub Med:

1.  From Brena et al., (2006). ITREOH Building of Regional Capacity to Monitor Recreational Water:  Development of a Non-commercial Microcystin ELISA and Its Impact on Public Health Policy. INT J OCCUP ENVIRON HEALTH 12:377–385.

A Novel Idea

            My second South American mystery novel, “The Ambivalent Corpse”, is set mainly in Montevideo, Uruguay.  The premise is that our heroes find parts of a dismembered corpse on a rocky stretch of beach in Montevideo, apportioned equally between the Memorial to a German cruiser sunk in World War II and the Memorial to Jews killed in the Holocaust.  Because of the murder victim’s strategic location shared between two antithetical monuments, the Uruguayan press names her “The Ambivalent Corpse”.

            I got the original idea for this book’s title and basic premise when my wife and I took a walk in Montevideo in 1999 and we saw that strange juxtaposition of the two monuments.  As you can tell from the dates, it took a while for me to find the time to sit down and start writing the book.  I remembered the Graf Spee Memorial, which was a favorite spot for snapshot taking among the university students I knew, from my first stretch of living in Montevideo in 1982, but I didn't remember the Holocaust Memorial from my earlier visit.  Perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising since the memorial was first dedicated in 1995.

Where Do All of Those Characters in the Books Come From?

As we try to create the imaginary worlds of our books, to be believable we have to rely on reality for inspiration.  I try to use the places I’ve lived in and visited in South America as settings in my South American Mystery novels.  These novels have to be populated with people, both the central characters like my detectives Roger Bowman and Suzanne Foster, and all of the rest of the characters they will meet as they investigate the murder or murders.  We quickly encounter a problem of how to make these other characters into distinct individuals rather than just 20 clones named Pedro or Jose.  To solve this problem I try to use real people I’ve met in South America as models for fictional characters in these books by visualizing someone I actually met for a physical description or taking part of their personas to start building my fictional characters.  Let me introduce you to the path from reality to book pages of a few of the suspects in the murders being investigated and a couple of the minor characters from two of my novels.

Pat Canella (The Dockland Murders)

I'd like to introduce you to Alan Place, a Indie science fiction and fantasy writer from Great Britain whose most successful book thus far is a P.I. mystery novel, The Dockland Murders, starring a tough female sleuth, Pat Canella.  Rumor has it that there is interest in this book from a few traditional publishers.

Alan is a presence in the blogosphere and can be found several places, including Facebook:

http://hereiamattheedge.blogspot.co.uk/

http://angiesdiary.com/author/alplace/

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?trk=tab_pro

https://www.facebook.com/awplace

 

The Dockland Murders can be found on Amazon (UK and US) at:

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Al-Place/e/B0076M5BNG/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

http://www.amazon.com/Al-Place/e/B0076M5BNG/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

To whet your appetite, a short excerpt from the book follows:

 

I stood there, the gun still warm in my hand, barrel smoking from the gun battle.

“Why did he do that, Sarge?  I tried my best to talk him out of it.”

“Living with the guilt finally got to him, Patti.”

“Couldn’t he have talked it over?”

“No, the only thing worse than being a dirty cop, is being the son of a loose cannon, and none came looser than Bill Chart, Patti.”

I looked around.  There lay the body of Bill's son, my ex-partner, Adrian Chart.

“I had no choice, he pulled first, Sarge," I said through my tears.

“I know, Patti, we all saw it.  Nobody blames you.  It was his way out.”

The last thing I remember was the Sarge saying in a soft tone, "Take a week off Patti, something like this will haunt you. I know. I have been there myself.”  Dazed, I stood there, trying to remember how it had all started . . .

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