Fans of “The Office” will enjoy the mockumentary format of the new book trailer for Peak Season, which came out in audio last week.
In a tongue-in-cheek takeoff of shows like “Entertainment Tonight,” the broadcaster casts the debut of the CW McCoy crime series as breaking news, giving it the proper gravitas, with a bit of wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
Here’s the video. (You can also watch it on YouTube.) Enjoy the show.
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I heard CW McCoy before I saw her face.
The heroine of my first crime novel was listening to a fugitive con artist make the case for clearing his name. CW did what I bet most former police officers would do: she kicked the guy to the curb.
Feisty, I thought, from the low, smooth voice to the Spenser-like banter. Maybe I should take notes.
I did, and the result was Peak Season, a novel set in the tony Florida beach town of Spanish Point. The work came out this summer in ebook and paperback formats. And while that satisfied my itch for publication, I kept hearing the dialog and realized CW wanted her own voice.
She has finally gotten it. After months of preparation, Peak Season is now available as an audiobook through Amazon, Audible and iTunes. The recording sounds just as I envisioned it, thanks to the powerful narration by Pamela Almand, who captures CW’s grit as well as the nuanced voices of her mentor, friends and enemies.
At first I had some doubts. Everyone said that writing from a woman’s point of view would prove challenging. So it felt like a victory to hear Pam bring the fellow risk-taker to life. CW may surrender her gun and badge but she will never surrender her spirit, and Pam’s rich tone and nuanced reading make that spirit sound very real.
If you’re a fan of Lorelei King’s wonderful rendition of the Stephanie Plum books, you’ll enjoy Pam Almand. It’s a voice that will ring in your ears long after she turns the last page.
You can listen to a free excerpt of Peak Season at Audible or iTunes.
A doctor wants to euthanize his terminal patients. A disgraced journalist wants a better job than flogging tours of crime scenes. The tour business is dying. There aren’t enough murders in this sleepy town to draw a crowd.
A good serial killer would help.
So begins Mr. Mayhem, a new crime thriller from a mind the folks in my writers’ group have alternatively called clever and demented. The work is available as an ebook pre-order through Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble and Kobo, with the print release set for Nov. 27.
Here’s the story: For a man known only as Brinker, the trouble starts when he’s fired for reporting his publisher’s DUI. Reduced to doing PR for a funeral home and its trolley tour of murder sites, Brinker despairs of ever restoring his pride, or his bank account. Compared to journalism, PR is degradation, an excuse to lie for a living. His addiction to prescription medication only fuels the rage.
When his doctor asks for a hand in dispatching hopeless patients, Brinker hires a wildly successful assassin named Angel, who brings chaos and fame to a backwoods town in Pennsylvania. But as Angel’s demands soar with the body count, Brinker wonders whether he’ll become the latest addition to his own list.
I’d like to think that Mr. Mayhem turns the suspense genre on its head. I’m hoping that fans of Elmore Leonard and Gillian Flynn will enjoy the double- and triple-crosses that give the book its dark edge.
A note of caution to readers: Mr. Mayhem is wildly different from Peak Season, my first novel of suspense. That book is set in sunny Florida and chronicles the life and loves of former police officer and real estate agent CW McCoy. Mr. Mayhem is set in the snowy mountains of Pennsylvania and draws on my experience as a journalist with Dow Jones/Ottaway News.
The parallels between Brinker and me end there. But not the drama. The two of us are planning a sequel. I think we’ll set it in the world of advertising. No chance anyone in that industry ever lies.
Every Sunday at dusk, drummers gather on Sarasota’s Siesta Beach to bid farewell to the sun. They put it to bed with a hypnotic rhythm that vibrates through the heads and feet of the hundreds of visitors and residents who rim the sand, who’ve been lucky enough to find a parking spot.
On Halloween they wear masks. Most of the time they wear their dreads and tattoos and thrum their congas and djembe, their snares and bodhrans.
In the circle, a woman balances a sword on her head, her skirts flying through the night air. Children spin in glowing hoops, an elderly man offers free hugs, a man dressed as Santa with a jester’s hat poses for pictures. People talk to each other.
A middle-age couple from Illinois sits with a beer in their hands and their toes in the sand. They’re staying on Siesta Key for a few weeks and this is their first time at the circle. In his short beard he looks woolly. She has blond hair with sculpted curls and perfect legs. The woman takes in the drummers and the jugglers and leans in to whisper, “I suppose anything goes.”
No, I say, not here, and if she’s disappointed, it doesn’t show. She nods and as the sun drops into the Gulf, she gives in to the rhythm, rising in her flowing shift and twirling for her husband, who snaps a picture with his smartphone.
She settles back in the low beach chair and smiles and says to no one, or to everyone, “We’ll send that to the girls.”
Location, location, location. The mantra isn’t just for real estate agents. Writers have long known that a place works better as character than background. NPR does, too, which makes the radio program “Crime in the City” a delight for tourists of murder and mayhem.
The series features well-known authors and their beats—George Pelecanos’ Washington, D.C., Walter Mosley’s L.A.—as well as writers exploring smaller venues—Archer Mayor and Brattleboro, Vt., Julia Keller’s fictional town in West Virginia.
“Crime in the City” also gives armchair detectives a travelogue of international venues—Mary Lou Longworth in Aix-en-Provence, Ann Cleeves in the Shetland Islands, Richard Crompton in Nairobi, Paco Ignacio Taibo II in Mexico City.
Big or small, noisy or quiet, home or abroad, these locales illuminate both the authors and their characters in unexpected ways.
NPR’s correspondents intersperse the ambient sound of streets and cafes with the voices of police, shopkeepers and the writers themselves. As the sun becomes a distant memory in North America, the summer series offers armchair travelers a glimpse of the often superheated habitat of their favorite novelists. (In addition to the live broadcasts, the programs are available on the NPR website as downloadable MP3 files.)
As a reader or writer, what role do you think place can play in crime fiction?
Kids aren’t the only people who like to hear a story.
According to the Pew Research Center, 14% of Americans listened to an audiobook in 2013. Adults with higher levels of education are more likely to have read audiobooks than those who did not attend college. And the vast majority of those who read e-books and audiobooks also read print books.
Good news for writers who like to listen to as well as tell stories.
Convinced audio could prove a way to boost my audience, I contracted with an Amazon service called ACX to produce an audio version of my first novel, Peak Season. ACX connects authors with producers and distributors of digital files, in this case, iTunes and Audible.com. It does not produce CDs.
ACX made it easy to import cover art and relevant details of the novel from Amazon. I completed a form with the specs I wanted–a female narrator with a voice in the lower range, speaking in American English with no regional accent. After uploading a short script that called for multiple voices, I listened to sample readings from producers, asked for auditions and even reached out to friends who have a flair for this kind of work.
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Choosing a narrator from the auditions proved difficult. All of them sounded professional. Most handled the multiple voices well, even the male characters. A few got creative and tossed in southern or Jersey accents. Two producers offered to include a short musical segment at the beginning and end of the narration, just as traditional publishers do.
The decision was entirely subjective. At the risk of sounding deranged, it came down to a choice of who sounded most like the voices in my head. I chose Pamela Almand, who does business as The Captain’s Voice. (She’s a former pilot. More on that in a later post.) The Audible.com cover appears at left. The audio version of the book should be listed on Amazon by the end of October.
For those of you who’d like to hear your work produced as an audiobook, a few suggestions:
Research the format before you head over to ACX. These projects take just as much work and time as independent print and e-book publishing. Fellow writer Erika Liodice (Empty Arms) has written a pair of insanely detailed posts on creating and marketing audiobooks, Navigating the Next Frontier in Digital Publishing: Audiobooks and 9 Easy & Inexpensive Ways to Promote Your Audiobook. The posts are encyclopedic.
Read the contracts. ACX says it delivers royalties of up to 40% but one example shows authors receiving a little more than $2 on a $30 audiobook. Audible gives free product to new customers and discounts to members, actions that will reduce the list price of your audiobook, and your royalty. Some producers will accept half of your royalty payments in exchange for their narration. Others want an additional stipend for narrating a book that may not sell enough to earn royalties. And unlike other Amazon services such as CreateSpace for print and Kindle Direct Publishing for e-books, ACX doesn’t allow authors to set the price of their audiobook, so you can’t control the profit margin.
Finally, learn from the experts. Indie author Joanna Penn offers several tips for creating and marketing your work as an audiobook. When it comes to running your writing career as a business, she’s one of the leading voices in the field . . . and well worth a listen.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has approved the registered mark of my publishing company, Allusion Books. Right now I’m only publishing books that I write, such as Peak Season, Riding with the Blues and a new crime series, Mr. Mayhem, due at the end of November.
The examining attorney for the USPTO did have to amend the identification of goods and services in my application to state that no claim is made to the exclusive right to use the word “books” apart from the mark as shown. All you folks at the Big 5 publishing houses–Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster–you can breathe now.
Today I’m working on the sequel to Peak Season and I’m stuck. The sequel’s called Tourist in Paradise. Someone is hunting visitors in the idyllic beach town of Spanish Point and CW McCoy will either solve the murders or wind up a victim of one.
The first 11 chapters went fairly well, with a bit of a rough patch during an open house at her new real estate office. I struggled with that scene for weeks until I hit upon the solution: cut the chapter. And like an ice-breaker in the arctic, that cleared the path.
Synopsis and scribbling
Until I got to Chapter 12, the bar scene where two of the Three Stooges (you remember them from the first novel) reappear to menace our heroine. Well, maybe I hadn’t paid attention to motive or maybe I hadn’t laid the groundwork for the scene, but it just didn’t work. And it went on forever. So, where is the ice-breaker when you need it?
When in doubt, think it through. Why is CW at the bar in the first place? What does she want to know? What would she logically do in the preceding scenes that would place her there?
I need a scene before this one. I actually have a scene I can use, one I’d placed further on in the book, one that addresses the logistical issues. What if I move that one? Chapter 12 becomes lucky Chapter 13, and now things makes sense.
Or will, whenever I get around to rewriting the new scene. Right now I need a break. My drink is warm.
I need some ice.
The heat is on this summer as National Public Radio takes on one of the steamier segments of the publishing industry.
NPR Books is focusing on romance novels. And their recommendations are not so-called “bodice rippers” or historical romances—they’re contemporary stories that straddle the categories of fiction.
The works blend the genres of romance and mystery or romance and humor to create contemporary novels that can appeal to a wide range of readers, not just those raised on Barbara Cartland or Janet Dailey. (Who hasn’t read at least one of the books in the Calder series? OK, don’t answer that.)
The NPR project features a more contemporary group of works like Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie, Match Me If You Can by Susan Elizabeth Phillips and Something About You by Julie James, a murder mystery involving an attorney and an FBI agent.
No mention of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. How would you categorize them, as romantic suspense?
You can listen to the series on the NPR website.
A police officer shoots an unarmed civilian. A criminal assassinates a deputy. People march, riot, while others call for peace. Across a widening divide, battle lines form. Black Lives Matter. Blue Lives Matter. In the middle, a sheriff suggests that all lives matter.
America is coming apart. America is coming together. The people we hire to protect us attack and are themselves attacked. Support erodes. Doubts replace trust. In an increasingly hostile environment, what can law enforcement do to help society regain its balance?
It can show the public how policing works, the dangers, the challenges, the limitations officers face. Two agencies in Sarasota County do that, the Sarasota Sheriff’s Office through its Citizens Law Enforcement Academy and the Sarasota Police Department through its Citizens’ Academy. I’ve attended both, riding with officers, conducting mock investigations, standing in the use-of-force simulator with a gun, a TASER and the feeling that life has spun out of control.
It’s an issue all of America faces, one that prompted me to write a book about the experience. The book is called Riding with the Blues, Behind the Badge with the Sarasota Police Department. It’s an attempt to find out what law enforcement does when the cameras aren’t rolling. Here’s the first chapter:
Chapter 1: Simulated Fear
My partner and I sweep into the office building, weapons held in firing position, stomachs bouncing like trampolines. There’s an active shooter in the building. People move in and out of the frame, a jumble of corridors and desks, the wounded lying on the floor, workers, police officers, some calling for help. We have no time.
A tall man with shoulders rounding a white polo shirt crosses between several desks and turns into an office. He raises his arm and fires. We edge closer. As the man backs out of the office he spots us and, half-turned, starts to raise his pistol. My partner and I yell “Police! Drop the weapon!” but he doesn’t and we fire, hitting him several times. As he goes down, silence crowds the air, and as we inch forward, a dark figure climbs from behind a desk.
Is he a shooter, a victim, a hostage? Is he armed? We’ve been briefed about the law, how shooting unarmed civilians can land us in jail, how hesitating may get us killed. As the man rises, we have a nanosecond to make a decision.
We freeze. He’s too far away to see his eyes but he’s got something in his hand, and we’re in the open, nothing between us but raw space. Crawling around the side of the desk, crouching in the corridor, the man raises a handgun and starts shooting. We return fire until he collapses. I have no idea if we’re hit, just that he’s not moving.
The officer behind the computer freezes the frame. On a screen larger than the biggest home theater, crosshairs dot the shooter’s chest, marking the places where we’ve landed rounds. As the adrenalin cools, we come back to a different reality.
In the dim light, everything looks gray, the walls, the carpet, even the screen. We’re standing in a classroom on the third floor of the Sarasota Police Department (SPD) in Sarasota, Florida, experiencing the use-of-force simulator as dozens of rookie officers have over the years. Only we’re not recruits. We are civilians enrolled in the SPD’s Citizens’ Academy, a twelve-week program designed to reveal the realities of police work and the people who live in the often closed world behind the badge.
The simulator is a humbling experience. It pinpoints our lack of training and resolve. It highlights the violence of our culture, and the risks that officers and civilians face in any encounter. This is the dark half of policing, the part we see in movies and on TV, always from the spectator side of the camera, the focus on how the situation looks, not how it feels. As we turn in our weapons and return to class, I recall the shooting of civilians by police in Ferguson, Baltimore, South Carolina. I think back to the first session of the Citizens’ Academy and the chief’s talk about community policing, the part about cooperation and understanding, about winning the hearts and minds of the citizens, and I wonder how the two halves fit.
Jeff Widmer 