Crime mystery: My latest novel and works in progress

SILENCED CRY is a detective murder mystery with enough police procedures, investigative work, and bad guys to make even the pickiest mystery lovers happy, (or so I'm told). You'll find all the reviews on my website, listed under The Body of Evidence. But reviews aside, this book is a story about the events, disappointments, and successes that transform the character, Sam Harper, into the man who emerges in the final pages of SILENCED CRY.

August 2007 Virtual Book Tour
For other reader comments, please visit the August 3, 2007 post in http://writingspace.blogspot.com/

I'd like to say that writing has been a life-long passion, but the fact of the matter is, my first love was art. From the day I could hold a pencil in my hand, I drew. I studied a wide variety of art forms in school; charcoals, oils, watercolors, ink washes, ceramics, sculpture-love it all. Later I studied graphic design and got hooked on it. Although writing and art are two vastly different creative forms of expression, I am the whole of my life experiences. The art discipline helped me to develop an observant eye and sharpened my senses to the subtle nuances of the world around me. I can visualize the details of a scene as clearly as if I were looking at it with my eyes. The trick for me is to transform those images and other sensory messages into words. Is the scene vivid enough for the reader to smell the stench of death when Harper walks into the morgue; see the glint of light bouncing off a pool of water on the sidewalk, and hear the rain drumming onto a metal awning?

Homicide Detective Sam Harper arrived on the scene: The creation of The Sam Harper Crime Mystery series and its diverse set of characters go back to a fall afternoon in 2004. That was the day I wrote The Black Pearl which will now be the second book in the Sam Harper Crime Mysteries series. Although I've changed the story line considerably, the idea for that book was sparked by a tale of a cursed ring my mother told me when I was eight. I wrote The Black Pearl and (at the time) books two and three but needed a fourth story to complete the series, however, instead of moving forward in time, I decided to show the beginning in "Silenced Cry." I felt there was much more to the Sam Harper character than catching criminals. I wanted the reader to understand who Homicide Detective Sam Harper is and what drives him. Harper has his share of flaws. He doesn't always get it right, the evidence doesn't always fall neatly into place, and doors don't always open to reveal the answer. The deeper Harper digs into the case, the closer the crime gets nudged toward his doorstep. He is consumed with suspicion, doubt, and a hatred that nearly destroys him.

The journey is far from over. Each day brings a new encounter and another incident to add to the treasure trove of life experiences I can infuse into my writing.

Have you ever thought of committing the perfect crime? You scheme and plan every detail from beginning to end. You know your victim. You have a motive and means. Keep to your routines-don't draw any attention. And now you wait-patiently for the perfect window of opportunity. You strike when your victim least expects it, then you attack fast, clean, and leave without being noticed.

Except, murders are rarely planned, they're seldom clean, and the killer always leaves something behind. A strand of hair, a careless fingerprint, a trace of saliva on a cigarette butt or the edge of a drinking glass is all it takes. One slip and you're caught.

Regardless of how random the crime might seem, there is always a motive. It could be as immediate as an impulsive response to an argument or as obscured as a childhood experience. Once I decide who committed the crime in Silenced Cry, my challenge as an author was to understand the killer's motive, his madness. The hardest part, of course, was making the killer invisible until the last possible moment.

My writing has been influenced as much by film as it has been by literature. One of my favorite past times, in fact, is to watch a suspense or thriller and try to guess who perpetrated the crime. I'm usually good at fingering the right person, but I hate to be right. There's nothing better than to not see it coming. Sitting on the edge of my seat with one expectation and getting blown away by the truth is half the fun. Two movies that immediately come to mind are, High Crimes, and Presumed Innocent. Both films successfully divert the viewer's attention from the killer. In both cases, the charges against the defendant are dismissed, and just when I thought the cases were solved and nothing else could possibly happen-it did.

In chapter one of my novel, a shot is fired and the first of several victims is killed. In chapter 10, Homicide is called to investigate a cold case. Workers find the skeletal remains of an infant entombed in a wall of an apartment building marked for demolition. Two murders, no connection, and still no motive or suspect. The killer's only advantage in this case is time. The Baby Doe murder was committed years before DNA was admissible in a court of law. It was an era when all a killer had to do was to lurk in the shadows, watch his back for a while, and if need be, pay someone off to keep quiet.

The investigation heats up when Homicide Detective Sam Harper discovers a connection between the