Joe Pickett Mystery/Thriller Series - C.J. Box

C.J. Box

The primary character in this series is Joe Pickett, Wyoming Game Warden for Twelve Sleep County who lives in the small city of Saddlestring.

This is one of my favorite series of thrillers. It's quite violent, but this is nicely balanced by Joe Pickett's reputation as being a "Dudley-Do-Right." Joe is a family man who seeks to make good decisions. His wife Marybeth, and daughters are main characters in the books.

Joe's best friend is an off-beat ex-Special Forces loner named Nate Romanowski. Nate is a falconer who seems to have a special relationship with nature and his birds. Only one of the books really veers into the paranormal, but it hovers around the edges of Nate's personality.

C.J. Box states that he started the series because he wanted to write Wyoming-based stories that genuinely portrayed the attitudes of people in that state.

The series begins with Joe as a rookie warden. He and the characters age and evolve. His children grow up, and his ever-the-nemesis mother-in-law becomes more and more outrageous in her quest for power and money.

I recommend the audio books, read by David Chandler. He is one of the best readers I've come across, and once you get his voicing for the characters in your head, you'll forever hear them when you read the books.

Recurring Characters:
Joe Pickett- Wyoming Game Warden
Marybeth- his wife
Sheridan, April, Lucy- his daughters
Missy- his mother-in-law
Nate Romanowski- master falconer
many other characters appear in several books

#1 Open Season 2001
The first book in the series won more awards than any other first novel, starting with a New York Times notable book award.

Joe has just come to Saddlestring, a rookie warden with a wife and two daughters, and another baby is on the way. They live in small, old state-provided housing, and Marybeth's mother Missy has little use for Joe, believing her daughter could have done much better.

The book begins with Joe trying to ticket Ote Keeley for poaching, and Ote grabbing Joe's gun from him, an embarrassment he will never live down, along with once having ticketed the governor of the state for fishing without a license. A few pages later, that same man turns up at Joe's house one night with a cooler full of animal scat from an unknown creature, and badly injured. Ote dies before Joe finds him sprawled on the woodpile.

When Joe, the warden from the next county, and a deputy from the sheriff's department go to check out Ote's outfitter camp high in the mountains. What they find only raises more questions.

#2 Savage Run 2002
The book begins with an ecoterrorist, Stewie Woods, and his new wife being blown up by an exploding cow. It turns out to be as gruesome as it sounds, but not as ridiculous.

Two hit men have been hired to track down radical eco-terrorists and kill them.

When someone posing as the dead Stewie calls Joe's wife, Joe is both jealous and concerned. Meanwhile, he's discovered that a man with a lot of political clout has poached a massive elk just for the trophy value. True to his character, Joe is outraged and is determined to bring the man to account.

Savage Run is a sheer chasm through a geological split in the Bighorn Mountains. Legend has it that the Cheyenne once fled from enemies across Savage Run by means of a secret route down and up the steep cliffs. Joe must find a way across or perhaps be killed.

In book time, Sheridan is two years older and much more savvy in the ways of the adult world.

#3 Winterkill 2003
This book has several different plots going on which all weave together. Perhaps the primary theme is tension between government and local citizens.

Winterkill opens with Joe observing a man who has apparently gone nuts and is randomly shooting down a herd of elk. When Joe reaches the spot he is stunned to learn that it's Lamar Gardiner, a Forest Service bureaucrat whom he knows. Joe arrests him, but Lamar manages to escape. Joe chases him down as a winter storm begins to unfold only to discover that someone else has brutally murdered him in the few minutes he was out of sight.

When another government employee is killed, investigators from federal agencies show up to find out what's going on, but their ability to interact with local residents is terrible at best, inflammatory at worst.

Meanwhile, a group of outcast transients arrives in town calling themselves the Sovereign Nation, and setting up camp in the National Forest. Among this group is the biological mother of April, Joe and Marybeth's middle daughter. The problem is that their efforts to adopt April have been stuck in the legal system for all the years she's lived with them. April's mother appears with an order from a judge to have April returned to her.

The book culminates in a standoff between the Sovereign Nation and the federals with the backing of the local sheriff.

Sheridan is now eleven and in fifth grade. Missy, Marybeth's mother, is there visiting once again and is up to what will become her modus operendi- to shed a husband she no longer has use for and find a new one with more money and more power. Lucy, much more interested in fashion and trends than Sheridan, finds Missy delightful.

Nate Romanowski is introduced and is suspected of the murders mostly because of his military history and his desire to live off the grid.

#4 Trophy Hunt 2004
This is my least favorite book in the series. It relies heavily on paranormal overtones in the plot which are not something I'm crazy about. There is an infodump at the end when the guilty party confesses. Sometimes you just have to do it that way, but again, not my fav. A young Goth woman sends Joe a pornographic email. It does make sense in the plot, but this trifecta just doesn't appeal to me. Several pieces of physical evidence are never explained. That said, the backbone of the plot is based on a real event that occurred in Montana.

A dead moose is found horribly mutilated. Then some cattle suffer the same fate. The mutilations are not done by wild animals. The cuts are clean and surgical.

Meanwhile, a rogue grizzly bear whose radio collar is malfunctioning, so it can't be tracked properly, turns up in Joe's territory.

Sheridan has portentious dreams and Nate claims he is communicating with the bear and knows there is some higher plot taking place.

Then two humans are found dead with the same kinds of mutilations.



#5 Out of Range 2005

#6 In Plain Sight 2006
The brother of Ote Keely (see Open Season) is released from prison, and he blames Joe for Ote's death and also for what happened to Ote's wife and April while they were staying with the Sovereign Nation (see Winterkill). John Wayne Keely is out for revenge, but he takes the name of Bill Monroe and gets hired by one of the feuding Scarlett brothers.

The Thunderhead Ranch, belonging to the Scarlett family, is ruled with the iron hand of Opal. But when Opal disappears, her sons Hank and Arlen start battling for control.

Where is Opal? Who will take over the ranch? Sheridan, now fourteen, is best friends with Hank's daughter Julie, and she is caught up in the drama.

Everything comes to a head in a downpour of a storm that causes the Twelve Sleep River to jump its banks and bring normal transportation and communication to a halt.

Missy (now) Longbrake is still belittling Joe for his inability to protect his family from harassment. His boss is micromanaging him, and finally fires him.

#7 Free Fire 2007
After being fired, Joe works as ranch foreman for several months for his new father-in-law. His family has all moved out to the ranch and Missy is delighted they are under her control.

Then Governor Spencer Roulon, a loud and brash, but well-loved character, asks Joe to come back to the agency, but as a special employee of his. And for starters, he wants Joe to investigate the slaughter of four people in Yellowstone National Park. The shooter has taken advantage of a loophole in the law that allows him to go scott free because the small section of the park where the incident takes place does not technically have any way to prosecute him.

The plot gets more and more bizarre. Joe meets an expert on geothermal features who is convinced the volcaon under Yellowstone is about to erupt. He also is forced to come face to face with his own family's past. His youunger brother committed suicide long ago at Yellowstone.

Nate shows up to provide backup for Joe as they close in on the reason for the murders.

#8 Blood Trail 2008
Someone is hunting hunters. It takes three murders before anyone begins to suspect a pattern/serial killer, and Governor Spencer Roulon calls on Joe to look into it. He also hires a world-renowned tracker to help locate the perpetrator. Joe uses his leverage to get Nate released from Federal prison where he's been for a year.

Joe's supervisor Randy Pope, who really has no use for Joe, inserts himself into the investigation, and Joe has to wonder why.

A famous environmental spokesman appears in Saddlestring, and quickly becomes the prime suspect as he is primarily against hunting. The situation quickly gets out of hand and the deaths pile up.

Nate immediately disappers even though he's supposed to be in Joe's custody. Joe knows he's gone back to Alicia Whiteplulme, the Shoshone woman he loves. But the environmentalist and his Shoshone wife are with them, causing Joe to ask himself many questions.

#9 Below Zero 2009
Someone starts texting Sheridan claiming to be her long-thought-dead foster sister April. While skeptical at first, eventually, they all believe it is April and that she is in deadly danger. She's been abducted by two men- one a dying gangster and the other his envioronmental actvist son Robert who sells carbon credits to help people reduce their carbon footprint "below zero."

Robert is more dangerous than the gangster. He took the girl who had been sold to a brothel by her gambling foster father. She admires and trusts him. But it becomes clear that he can be quite ruthless when it comes to exacting revenge on those who have betrayed him.

When the FBI learns the name of the gangster April is with, they become highly interested.

This story has one basic plot instead of several, but the chase to find April and catch Robert and his father is not without surprises.

#10 Nowhere to Run 2010

#11 Cold Wind 2011

#12 Force of Nature 2012
Joe Pickett's friend, Nate Romanowski, has a past in Special Forces, but he ran afoul of most authority figures long ago. He lives off the grid both literally and emotionally. His former commander is out to eliminate all those who know anything about a high-level crime. He figures he can draw Nate out of hiding by targeting his friend Joe Pickett and Pickett's family.

#13 Breaking Point 2013

#14 Stone Cold 2014

#15 Endangered 2015

#16 Off the Grid 2016

#17 Vicious Circle 2017

#18 The Disappeared 2018

#19 Wolf Pack 2019

#20 Long Range 2020

#21 Dark Sky 2021

#22 Shadows Reel 2022

#23 Storm Watch 2023

#24 Three-Inch Teethy 2024

#25 Battle Mountain 2025
An old outfitter is scouting for elk herds prior to the season when he will guide hunting parties. He's training an assistant. They are ambushed and captured by a team of commandoes in camoflauge.

The new assistant turns out to be Governor Roulon's son-in-law, and Joe is called in on special duty to find out what has happened to the men.

The side story involves the continuing search by Nate and Geronimo Jones to exact revenge on Axel Solidad.

The culmination of the story is on Battle Mountain, a totally fictitious location, but it is provided with a plausible history for the name.

There is only one little paranormal episode between Nate and a falcon.

#26 The Crossroads (Putnam, February 2026)

Bullish on Business Interview with Rose Odette

I was recently interviewed by Rose Odette of "Bullish on Business." We met at a vendor event, and she invited me to participate in her regular video program.



We enjoyed chatting about everything from hiking to writing to faith.

See 2019 Interview with me on Indie Reads TV

Mystery Series- Kay Scarpetta

Patricia Cornwell

The primary character in this series is Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, based in Richmond. Forensic science and the evidence which can be uncovered by an autopsy are the forces driving the plots.

Kay's neice, Lucy, is a primary character. Through the series, she grows from a tween into a brilliant and dangerous woman. Her forte is computers, but she manages to get into all kinds of scrapes. Her mother, Dorothy, is forever jealous of Aunt Kay, because Lucy really prefers Kay. Dorothy is narcissistic and man crazy. She and Kay have numerous fights. Their mother usually takes Dorothy's side. This family tension drives many of the side plots.

Scarpetta's love life evolves throughout the series.

I like this series a lot for the solid forensics with the dysfunctional relationships as counterpoint. Lucy is a favorite supporting role.

Recurring Characters:
Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for Virginia
Lucy, her neice
Dorothy, her sister
Pete Marino, policeman
Benton Wesley, FBI Special Agent
Temple Gault, archenemy criminal, appears in several books

#1 Postmortem 1990

#2 Body of Evidence 1991

#3 All That Remains 1992

#4 Cruel and Unusual 1993
As this book begins, a death row inmate is about to be electrocuted. His sentence is not commuted, and the body comes to Scarpettas morgue. A minor accident involving some broken bottles of formalin distracts the autopsy assistant, and fingerprints of the dead man are not taken.

Then a fingerprint that matches the dead man's file turns up at a new murder scene. While trying to sort this out, they discover that all official records of the prints of this criminal have disappeared from the police files.

Lucy comes to visit her aunt and quickly demonstrates how easily someone who knew how could make changes in the database records. This is the first book where we see how adept Lucy is with computers.

When more murders occur with confusing evidence, the press begins a campaign to smear Scarpetta and make it look like she hasn't been doing her job.

#5 The Body Farm 1994
The Body Farm is a real place, correctly called the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center. There research is done to determine how bodies decompose under various environmental conditions. It plays a key role in determining the location where a murder occurred in this book.

Scarpetta, Marino, and Wesley are called to North Carolina as a special task force to help solve the murder of a young girl in a small town. The crime seems to mirror several committed in Cruel and Unusual. The harder the trio hunts for clues the more perplexing the situation becomes.

Marino is a heart attack waiting to happen, and he becomes involved with the mother of the murdered girl. Kay and Benton discover they are attracted to each other, despite Benton's seemingly placid marriage.

Lucy gets her first job with the FBI, working on a program to track violent criminals. But soon it appears that Lucy has gone rogue and broken into the FBI's entire database to sell espionage secrets.

#6 From Potter's Field 1995

#7 Cause of Death 1996

#8 Unnatural Exposure 1997

#9 Point of Origin 1998

#10 Scarpetta's Winter Table 1998

#11 Black Notice 1999

#12 The Last Precinct 2000

#13 Blow Fly 2003

#14 Trace 2004

#15 Predator 2005

#16 Book of the Dead 2007

#17 Scarpetta 2008

#18 The Scarpetta Factor 2009

#19 Port Mortuary 2010

#20 Red Mist 2011

#21 The Bone Bed 2012

#22 Dust 2013

#23 Flesh and Blood 2014

#24 Depraved Heart 2015

#25 Chaos 2016

#26 Autopsy 2021

#27 Livid 2022

#28 Unnatural Death 2023

#28 Identity Unknown 2024

#30 Sharp Force 2025

Novels Featuring Twins

Sons of Fortune by Jeffrey Archer. Archer is masterful at writing stories that span multiple generations or at least long periods of time and exploring how the people change through the years. In Sons of Fortune, we have the classic twins separated at birth plot. A set of fraternal male twins and a single male birth happen at the same hospital around 1948. The single baby boy dies and a nurse switches the dead baby with one of the twins so each family can have at least one baby.

The boys grow up in different socio-economic strata although both go to private schools when they become teens. Their paths keep creeping closer and closer to each other, but will they every meet, and even then, will they learn the truth of their history.

Mystery Series- Temperance Brennan

Dr. Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs, PhD. is herself a forensic anthropologist, one of only 100 certified in the United States. Out of this career, she writes both non-fiction on the topic, and fiction. Her book series featuring Temperance Brennan inspired the television series Bones. Temperance is the forensic anthropologist for North Carolina who also travels to Quebec regularly as part of her job.

The Fox TV show does not follow the books very closely. "Bones" is possibly on the autism spectrum, which is not at all true of the character in the books.

The books are authentic police proceedurals. Some unnecessary language. Graphic descriptions of dead bodies, particularly the ones in bad enough condition to call in a forensic anthropologist. Overall, I give the series high marks. Temperence is professional but real. There is a small amount of personal interaction so that we understand who she is and that she has some flaws. There are a lot of dream sequences in the books. Sometimes the dreams help Tempe find a clue in a case, sometimes they are just bizarre. There is a little overuse of the trite "something nagging that the protagonist can't quite remember" plot motif.

Series location:
Primarily Charlotte, NC, and Montreal, Quebec. Brennan splits her time between these two locations as needed, and is occasionally called to other cities.

Recurring Characters:
Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist
Katy, her daughter
Harry (Harriet), her sister
Andrew Ryan, fellow detective and sometimes lover

#1 Déjà Dead 1997
Temperence Brennan works for the Laboratoire de Médecine Légale in Montreal. Utility workers uncover some bones which come to Brennan for analysis. They turn out to be human, and she tentatively connects them with other skeletons which were found with one hand cut off. But the police aren't seeing the connection.

Before long, another similar body is found, but there are also differences. A hidey-hole apartment of a sleazebag is discovered, but he escapes. A map on the wall leads Tempe to yet another skeleton.

Meanwhile, Tempe's friend Gabby fears she is being stalked, and Tempe also receives threats.

For a first novel in a series, this one is full-bodied.

#2 Death du Jour 1999
The book is split between Montreal and Charlotte, NC. In Montreal, a house fire leads to the discovery of six bodies, none of which seem to have much connection to each other. The house is owned by a man in Belgium and is rented to various people. Two of the victims are infant twin boys. Four of the victims did not die as a result of the fire, including the twins. Brennan is particularly moved by their deaths.

Oddly enough, a trail of telephone calls from the house where the fire occurred leads to another house in North Carolina which is occupied by a seemingly benign but secretive group. They don't quite rise to cult status, but they are strange. They deny all knowledge of the calls and of knowing any of the victims in Canada.

Then, one young woman with a baby of her own, reaches out to Tempe for help.

#3 Deadly Décisions 2000
Tempe is working in Montreal, and the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs are escalating a gang war. A young girl is caught in the crossfire and killed. Tempe is livid about the loss of innocent life.

An informant leads the police to the old graves of two gang members in exchange for favors. At the same site, the skull and two leg bones of an other young girl are found. Tempe really wants to identify this girl, and she has a chance at it, despite the time since death because the girl had a shunt in her skull for hydrocephalus.

Her nephew Kit, Harry's son, comes to visit and he is enamored with the motorcycle culture. He makes friends with a reporter that Tempe really dislikes. Is the reporter up to no good, and is Kit more involved than having a casual interest?

#4 Fatal Voyage 2001

#5 Grave Secrets 2002
Brennan is on loan to Guatemala to do forensic examinations on a mass grave. The government carried out a genocidal program against the Mayans there from 1962 to 1992.

While she's busy recovering skeletons of people who are mostly from a single family line, she's requested to help with a police case where a leg bone with blue jeans have been found to be clogging the outlet from a large septic tank at a hotel. She spends a totally nasty day recovering most of the rest of the dismembered skeleton from the tank's sections.

Before she's even had a chance to examine it properly, a local official rudely removes the bones from her jurisdiction.

Four local teenage girls are missing, and she is supposed to figure out if the skeleton might be one of those without even having the bones any more, so she gets creative.

A journalist is stalking her, trying to get an interview about the genocide. Two of her co-workers are ambushed. There is pretty much non-stop action in this book.

My primary question is how could large chunks of a body have gotten caught in a septic tank without it being uncovered? When the tank is dug up with a backhoe to recover the pieces there is no suggestion that it was recently opened. I can't imagine a drain hole large enough to accommodate an unbroken skull. A storm drain, might work, but these don't go through a septic tank.

#6 Bare Bones 2003
Temperance is examining the sparse remains of a dead newborn baby that was burned in a wood stove. She's contemplating the personal repurcussions since she knows the baby's grandfather, when she is called to a site where there are a large number of bones buried in plastic bags. These turn out to be bear bones- of multiple bears. Almost all bear bones, except for some bird bones.

Then she has to go to the crash site of a small plane where the two occupants were badly burned. When she finally gets back to the bears... uh oh... there are some human hand bones too.

The quest to find out what the plane was doing when it crashed leads the investigation to an old house in the country with a privy full of more bones. Do any of the bones connect?

#7 Monday Mourning 2004

#8 Cross Bones 2005

#9 Break No Bones 2006

#10 Bones to Ashes 2007
Tempe is in her Montreal office and is working her usual busy schedule of examining old bones, skeletons, and damaged bodies, when she hears of a skull and its skeleton which are sitting in someone's office because they seem to be too old to trace. She requests they be sent to her.

They require extensive cleaning, but the more she examines them, the more she suspects they might belong to a childhood friend of hers who went missing at age 13. This seems a stretch of coincidence, but the possibility stirs up all the old memories and questions as to what happened to Evangeline. The friend was Acadian, and that is where these bones were found.

She convinces the police to open a cold case investigation which leads to child porn, trafficking, and unexpected answers about her friend.

#11 Devil Bones 2008

#12 206 Bones 2009

#13 Spider Bones also titled Mortal Remains 2010

#14 Flash and Bones 2011

#15 Bones are Forever 2012

#16 Bones of the Lost 2013

#17 Bones Never Lie 2014
Tempe's old nemisis Anique Pomerleau, the only one who ever got away, is back. Young girls are going missing and their bodies turn up a few days later, posed and not mutilated or sexually assaulted.

Tempe and Ryan check into a number of other cold cases that seem to fit the profile, and with the help of Tempe's mother doing volunteer computer research, begin to see a pattern forming. But Mama has cancer and is refusing treatment.

There is a huge plot twist in the middle.

And Ryan asks Tempe to marry him.

#18 Bones on Ice a novella 2015
A high society woman who has influence with all the right people wants Brennan to examine the body of her daughter Brighton who died three years previously while summitting Mount Everest. The death did not occur anywhere near Charlotte NC, but the family wants answers, although the questions are uncertain.

The body is badly battered, possibly having fallen at death and then from being transported down the mountain in a canvas sled.

None of the other people in the climbing party have any answers. They all reached the base camp and Brighton did not.

Brennan begins studying the body and discovers a number of curious facts.

#19 Speaking in Bones 2015
A large, coarse woman comes to Brennan. Her name is Hazel Strike, but her friends call her "Lucky." She's involved with online volunteer groups that try to find missing persons when the police have given up on the cases, or were never involved in the first place.

Lucky is there to discuss Cora Teague who disappeared over three years ago. Her family refuses to report her as missing, claiming she ran off with a boyfriend. The trouble is, she had no known boyfriend.

Also, Lucky is in possession of a keychain voice recorder that she claims to have found at the location of a recent partial, unidenified body dump. She simply wants Tempe to consider the possibility that the new corpse might be Cora.

The case gets more and more bizarre as Cora's brother turns up in odd places as they search the hills of North Carolina for clues.

#20 The Bone Collection 2016

#21 A Conspiracy of Bones 2020

#22 The Bone Code July 2021

#23 Cold, Cold Bones July 2022

#24 The Bone Hacker August 2023
Tempe is working in Montreal when a few scraps of a body are recovered, hacked up by the propellor on a large boat. It is assumed this is a man who jumped off a bridge. A few days later, the rest of the body washes up, but the many died from a gunshot wound. A tattoo identifies him as part of a gang from the islands of Turks and Caicos. For some reason the Medical Examiner from the islands flies immediately to Montreal.

This woman, Tiersa Musgrove, convinces Tempe to return to the Turks and Caicos with her to study a strange set of murders where each victim has had the left hand cut off. There they are sidetracked by a boat found floating with five dead bodies on board.

Continually sidetracked by other cases, Tempe always manages to get back to the mutilated bodies, although she is stymied by the lack of a good microscope and unhelpful people.

This case is a bit like a classic mystery at the end with a whole chapter to explain parts of the story that the reader has not yet heard enough about to understand.

#25 Fire and Bones August 2024
While working on her normal caseload in North Caroline, Tempe is asked by her daughter to grant an interview with a journalist friend in D.C. Brennen isn't thrilled, but agrees for Katy's sake and drives to the capital.

The next day there is a fire in an older building in D.C. that was being used as an illegal rental property. Four people die in the fire. Tempe helps with recovery, and discovers a fifth body in a forgotten sub-basement that had nothing to do with the fire, but dates from about the 1940s.

Soon another building just blocks away burns, and a man is shot in a separate incident. With some research, it is discovered that there may be a connection beteween all these incidents, but not the body in the basement whose identity cannot be determined.

Mystery Series - Lucas Davenport

John Sandford (Random House)

Lucas Davenport is the creation of John Sandford (born 1944), pseudonym of John Roswell Camp. Throughout the long series, Davenport evolves.

Davenport has various roles in the Minneapolis Police Department, or in some way connected to it, as he has several run-ins with them over the course of his career. In some books he works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, or is a US Marshall.

His family life provides counterpoint to the high-action police work.

Recurring Characters of Note:
Lucas Davenport
Sister Mary Joseph (Elle Kruger)
Weather Karkinnen- his wife
Kidd- computer genius (there is a separate series featuring him)
Letty- adopted daughter
Virgil Flowers- fellow detective (there is a separate series featuring him)

#1 Rules of Prey (1989)

#2 Shadow Prey (1990)

#3 Eyes of Prey (1991)

#4 Silent Prey (1992)

#5 Winter Prey (1993)

#6 Night Prey (1994)

#7 Mind Prey (1995)
A mother and her two daughters are kidnapped in broad daylight by throwing them into a van as the girls are being picked up after school. The woman is a psychiatrist. It is unclear if the kidnapper is a former patient or a family member. There is big money in the family and a convoluted chain of inheritance if the mother and/or children die.

Davenport's gaming company is strongly involved in the solution to the crime.

This book has some violent content involving children, so it's probably not a good read for people who are sensitive on this topic.
Lucas Davenport is trying to decide whether to ask Weather Karkinnen to marry him.

#8 Sudden Prey (1996)

#9 Secret Prey (1998)

#10 Certain Prey (1999)

#11 Easy Prey (2000)

#12 Chosen Prey (2001)

#13 Mortal Prey (2002)

#14 Naked Prey (2003)

#15 Hidden Prey (2004)

#16 Broken Prey (2005)

#17 Invisible Prey (2007)

#18 Phantom Prey (2008)

#19 Wicked Prey (2009)

#20 Storm Prey (2010)

#21 Buried Prey (2011)

#22 Stolen Prey (2012)

#23 Silken Prey (2013)
This book is full of political intrigue, and your interest in that sort of complexity could affect how much you like the story.

Child pornography is found on the computer of the man running against the governonr in the election. However, the governor himself thinks the man is being framed and calls in Davenport to find out the truth of the matter because even though it is his political opponent.

The story runs from political intrigue to cyber crime to burglary. Everyone who is pursuing the case believes that someone from the opposing team is responsible, but it's hard to see how it could be done.

This is one of the books that is a crossover with the Kidd series. Computer nerd Kidd can crack almost anything.

#24 Field of Prey (2014)

#25 Gathering Prey (2015)

#26 Extreme Prey (2016)

#27 Golden Prey (2017)

#28 Twisted Prey (2018)

#29 Neon Prey (2019)

#30 Masked Prey (2020)

#31 Ocean Prey (2021)

#32 Righteous Prey (2022)
A small group five of Bitcoin billionaires decides that they are going to rid the world of one really bad person each. And they are going to do it with high publicity, taking credit for each killing.

The first two murders take place without a hitch, but when they attempt one in the Twin Cities, Davenport finds a few cracks in their careful planning.

Things begin to unravel for the Five, and law enforcement manages to figure out who is to be the next victim. They set up an elaborate surveillance.

The leader of the Five is identified, but can the entire group be found and rounded up?

#33 Judgment Prey (2023)

#34 Toxic Prey (2024)

Inspector Lansing - Carol Carnac

Carol Carnac is a pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett.She was a prolific mystery writer from 1931 until her death in 1958. As a child she lived in both England and Australia. She is credited with creating fictional detectives Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald, Inspector Ryvet, Chief Inspector Julian Rivers, and Inspector Lansing. Some of the books overlap, featuring more than one of these characters.

Her books follow the style of the Golden Age of Mystery. They are difficult to find, and I'm still trying to determine which 18 feature Inspector Lansing. A few have been re-published as British Classics. Based on the two I have read, I'd love to find more

So far, I've only been able to find these two books, but I give them a very high rating for plot, characters, and locations.

Crossed Skis (1952)
The book begins with a group of young people who have loosely banded together to take a ski holiday to Austria by ferry and train. Sixteen people, most of whom don't really know one another travel to the ski resort.

Meanwhile, Rivers and Lansing are attempting to solve a puzzling murder in London that occurs in a boarding house. The neer-do-well son of the owner seems to be key to the solution. One of the flats caught fire, and the body of the lodger was found thrust into the gas flame so that his face and hands are too disfigured for identification. The police suspect the body is not that of the lodger.

On the ski holiday, strange events begin to happen, and the members of the party suspiciously begin sorting out who they think they can and can't trust.

The book culminates with a dangerous ski chase in a blizzard.

Impact of Evidence (1958)

This is set in the farm country of Wales in the winter. Life is harsh, and the book does a convincing job of portraying that condition. You really can feel the hills and the snow and the horrible flood that cuts the small settlement off from the rest of the country for days.

During that time of isolation, an old man who probably shouldn't be driving is broadsided by another car when he recklessly drives in front of that car. The impacted car is pushed into the river where it is lodged. The driver of the other car, though injured, stumbles down to the closest farm to get help.

When a group of men rally under nearly impossible weather conditions to rescue the old man from the car in the river, he is determined to be dead. The huge surprise is that there is another man dead in the back seat.

The story unwinds methodically with many a suspect and potential motive. In the classic mystery tradition, the guilty party is not revealed until the very end.

Victoria Trumbull - Cynthia Riggs

Cynthia Riggs

Cynthia Riggs has been a geologist, operator of the Chesapeake Bay Ferry, and a rigger on Martha's Vinyard.

This series is based on Martha's Vinyard, and stars the nonagenarian, Victoria Trumbull. The atmosphere and characters of the New England setting are wonderfully done. If you have any experience with people from and life in this area you'll have plenty to chuckle at. I love the details of the island setting and the unusual place names. This is regional fiction at its best.

Victoria is always 92, and the books can be read in any order. However, Jack in the Pulpit sets the stage for events mentioned in the other books.

One small warning- language is not toned down.

Recurring Characters:
Victoria Trumbell, age 92
Elizabeth, her adult granddaughter
Hope, her adult great-grand niece
Howland Atherton

#1- Deadly Nightshade (2001)
Victoria is waiting on the dock for Elizabeth to finish her shift as assistant Harbormaster. It is dusk. Victoria hears a blood-curdling scream cove across the water. Elizabeth returns, but she has not heard it. The Harbormaster, Domingo, believes Victoria and the go out in a small boat to track down the noise. They find a discmboweled body, and it is a local man.

Domingo is a retired cop who has been hired from out of town for the summer. A great many local authorities are not happy about that because he knows for certain that there is a lot of skimming being done due to the lax menthod of collecting and recording harbor fees. Domingo brings in someone to set up a computer program to track the money and makes quite a few enemies.

Many of the summer hires are local highschoolers, mostly children or grandchildren of the people who think they can do anything they want. Coupled with having no work ethic, they are making Domingo and Elizabeth's jobs miserable.

#2- The Cranefly Orchid Murders (2002)
This is one of my personal favorites of the series.

An elderly lady is still living in her family home on a large area of land known as Sachem's Rock. She is estranged from her family and refuses to leave it to any children or grandchildren. The Conservationists want the property. A developer wants the property. The tribe wants it to build a casino, a commune wants to take control, and the town of West Tisbury wants to turn it into a campground and park.

The developer talks the woman into selling to him, to everyone's dismay. Victoria is recruited by the conservationists to try to find some endangered plants on the property so they can have development stopped. Victoria teams up with Robin, an eleven-year-old nerdy boy, to hunt for plants by following the "ancient ways," pathways through the property that are supposed to remain public rights-of-way.

Victoria and Robin do find Cranefly Orchids. They also find fences and a man living underground. Then the orchids disappear and different ones are planted in their place.

What is going on?

#3- The Cemetery Yew (2003)
The town receives a request to disinter a casket from a ten-year-old suicide. It will be picked up by hearse because the body is going to be transferred to Milwaukee for reburial in a family plot. However, the grave is empty. The curmudgeonly cemetery supervisor blames the backhoe operator, and the blame goes round and round.

Howland Atherton's cousin Dahlia is retiring from the Foreign Service and shows up, claiming she owns half his house. She is in poor health, taking cancer treatments. She also comes with a raucous toucan that drives everyone nuts. When she and Howland can't get along, Victoria takes in Dahlia and the bird, but Elizabeth can't stand them.

Meanwhile, when the hearse arrives on the ferry, the driver has disappeared and the vehicle is locked. Then several other off-islanders appear and are somewhat quickly killed! They all seem to have ties to Dahlia, and someone is also trying to kill her.

#4- Jack in the Pulpit (2004)
Given some of the events, this book seems to be first in the series although it was not written first.

This is a book with complex layers. The previous pastor of Tisbury Church was named Jack. The new pastor is also named Jack and there is some conflict between them. Meanwhile, four people die in one month, but not of apparently related causes.

Elizabeth has divorced her husband, Lockwood, and is living with Victoria. In a rare case of poor analysis of another person, Victoria gives him the benefit of the doubt, but he's pretty much a psychopath who comes to the island to stalk Elizabeth.

It begins to look like the four deaths in one month are pretty unusual, and Victoria traces them to recipes made with deadly wild Amanita mushrooms. But who is trying to kill whom?

There is a classic who-dun-it denoument when Victoria reveals all at a meeting of the Kippers Women's Club where she was scheduled to speak on the history of police work in West Tisbury..

#5- The Paperwhite Narcissus (2005)
The publisher of the local paper, Colly Jameson, is receiving threatening letters, and all of them seem to be in response to unexplained accidents or deaths in the area. The truth is that nobody likes Colly anyway. He's a narcissistic bully with 4 ex-wives and one unhappy current wife. He is firing staff members, claiming he doesn't need them in the summer when the truth is that he just wasn't to use college-age interns for free.

However, an attempted murder, a successful murder, and an unexplained death all seem linked to Colly.

When he fires Victoria Trumbull, she goes to work for Tom Botts who is printing a weekly, one-page, alternative news sheet. She also gets Colly to pay her to find out who is sending the threatening letters.

#6- Indian Pipes (2006)
The local Native American sovereign nation is negotiating to build a casino on the island. However, there is a lot of disagreement as to the form it should take. A local contractor, Jubal Burkhart, who has to sign off on various permits is taking bribes from the factions.

Meanwhile, a motorcycle rally comes to the island. The noisy grouup is not popular with a number of the locals.

Hiram Pennybacker, an older man who doesn't know when to stop talking seems rather harmless, but he disappears. When Jubal's house burns to the ground, a body is found inside among the stacks of hoarded papers and magazines. Jubal's property turns out to be worth $18 million, but who inherits.

#7- Shooting Star (2007)
Victoria has written a new screenplay of Dracula that she hopes will be taken quite seriously by those who choose to attend the local theater production.

Instead the youngest actor goes missing, and others are being injured or killed. Substitutions in the cast result in the play becoming a hit farce, much to Victoria's dismay.

There is so much animosity between cast members and the director it's easy to draw certain conclsions about the deaths. Meanwhile, where is Teddy, the young cast member?

#8- Death and Honesty (2009)
The town assessors are jacking up tax bills and skimming the extra off the top. But someone is trying to horn in on their operation.

Meanwhile, a rather trashy and naive woman who moved to the Island and bought an old historic home had that house torn down, and she built a modern mansion. She is married to a TV evangelist. Despite her flaws, Victoria likes Delilah. Delilah is not naive enough to stand for the outrageous tax bill she receives, and she stirs up a hornet's nest.

Meanwhile, what is the good reverend up to?

#9- Touch-Me-Not (2010)

#10 The Bee Balm Murders (2011)
Orion Nanopoulos arrives on the island for an extended stay to lay fiber optic cable. He rents a room at Victoria's house. Not long after they start digging to lay the cable, a man is found dead in the trench. An all-night rain has washed away any clues as to how he got there.

It turns out that the dead man has connections to the mob, but meanwhile there is a lot of local hanky-panky going on with the contracts for the fiber optic cable.

#11 Poison Ivy (2014)

#12 Bloodroot (2016)
An older woman, Mrs. Wilmington, who raised her for grandchildren dies unexpectedly in the dentist's chair. She was not liked by anyone, including her grandchildren. When an autopsy shows she died of arsenic poisoning, there are too many suspects.

On the same day that Mrs. Wilmington dies, the dental receptionist accidentally drowns on her way home from the office.

The grandchildren are all adults now, and they all have motives to get rid of grandma, chief among them is to get her money. But a tangled web of relationships relating to the staff of the dental clinic also emerges. Maybe the receptionist's death was not an accident.

Elizabeth's psychopathic ex-husband is stalking her again.

#13 Trumpet of Death (2017)

#14 Widow's Wreath (2018)
Penny, a young cousin of Victoria's has requested that her wedding reception be held on Victoria's property on the Island. Victoria agrees, but she soon loarns that the whole affair is huge and much more complex than she would like to host.

When a body is found hanging in Victoria's seldom-visited cellar, everything is postponed. In fact, we soon learn that Penny was marrying Rocco for his money, and he was marrying her for her money. But when they each learn that neither one has money, the wedding is called off.

Rocco's family has serious ties to the mob, and several of his relatives are on the island for the wedding.

Adam Dalgliesh - P.D. James

P.D. James (public domain)

Phyllis Dorothy James White (3 August 1920 – 27 November 2014) was a British novelist and has written some of the most clever and complex mysteries of all time. Her prose is dense and rich. There are always so many personal plots going on that there are any number of suspects to consider.

Although many of the books are in rather modern settings, most of the motives and lifestyles are rooted in the past that people seem powerless to escape.

Adam is a complex person, a poet as well as a detective. His wife and infant son died in childbirth about 15 years before the series begins. He is also knowledgeable about fine art.

There are 14 books in the Adam Dalgleish series, but she wrote many standalone mysteries as well.

Recurring Characters of Note
Adam Dalgliesh, whose career spans Detective Superintendant to Commander of a special force.
Martin, his assistant who always sits quietly, taking notes
Deborah Riscoe- she appears in the first book, and Dalgliesh feels an attachement to her
Kate Miskin, one of his assistants
Benton, his other assistant
Emma, his love

#1 Cover Her Face (1962)
This opening book in the series is really more in the style of the Golden Age mysteries. Set sometime post WWII, England has not yet made much of a transition to the modern era. (From statements made in the next books of the series, we can determine that this one is set in 1960.)

Sally, a single mother, comes with her baby to the Maxie household as a maid. She had been at the local home for unwed mothers, and they had placed her in this job. But Sally isn't about to fit into anyone's expectations. She likes to tease, to create sly mischief, and play one person against another. The housekeeper has no use for her or the baby, and barely manages to conceal her contempt.

Meanwhile, the family is embroiled their own tense situations. Simon Maxie, the patriarch is dying in the upstairs sickroom, attended by most of the female members of the family and staff.

Stephen Maxie, the son, is a medical doctor who spends most of his time in London. However, his former lover Catherine spends most of her time at the house and seems to desire to continue the relationship. Deborah, the widowed daughter, lives there. and Felix who was cruelly interrogated and tortured during the war is trying to win her love.

Various villagers and the family who raised Sally also come into the story.

These strained relationships lead to the death of one of the players.

The denoument is the typical room filled with all the suspects and Detective Dalgliesh revealing secret after secret until we eventually know who did the deed and why. There are suspects and clues sprinkled throughout the book. A classic of the style, but don't expect it to reflect the 1960s.

#2 A Mind to Murder (1963)
This book can be dated specifically to 1963, and it says the previous story was three years earlier.

In a small private psychiatric clinic the senior administrator is lured down to the records room where she is knocked out and stabbed to death. Due to the fact that all the doors except the front one are bolted on the inside, and the portor saw no one unusual come or go from the front, the crime has to be committed by someone who was already inside.

Characters range from the porters (janitors) to the psychiatrists and all the associated staff, not to mention patients who may be unbalanced. Only the lowliest of the porters has a good alibi, as he was out mailing the days letters at the time of the crime.

In true form to the genre, there are motive and lies a-plenty.

#3 Unnatural Causes (1967)
At the beginning of this story, Dalgliesh is contemplating asking Deborah Riscoe to marry him. He's on his way to visit his aunt on the shores of the North Sea. She has never married, and Adam feels more at home with her than almost anyone else.

Many of her neighbors are authors, and the first night he is there, several of these people come to visit and contemplate whether to report that one of these fellow authors has gone missing. While they are talking, the police come to the door and report that his body has been found in a small boat on the shore with the hands cut off.

#4 Shroud for a Nightingale (1971)
Set in a medieval looking manor that has been turned into a teaching hospital, Nightingale House is part of a respectable medical complex. Young nurses in training and some of the staff live there.

During one of the training sessions a strange and tragic accident occurs and one of the young women dies. Some think it is murder and some think accident.

Only a night later, another student dies. Dalgliesh is called in.

There is plenty of gossip and almost no privacy in this crowded facility full of women. Everyone knows "the dirt" on everyone else, but uncovered motives for causing either of these deaths seem to petty to be sufficient.

The ending is a bit of a surprise, although the clues are all there for the careful reader.

Unsuitable for a Woman (1972)
Some lists of Adam Dalgliesh books do not include this title. It's really what we would now call a "pilot" for the Cordelia Grey series. But Dalgliesh does appear at the end of the book, and memories of things he said guide portions of the plot.

Cordelia Grey is a young woman who has become a partner in a detective agengy with Bernie Pryde. Bernie was a former policeman and was fired, partially because of Dalgliesh. Bernie never really got over that, but nevertheless he admired Dalgliesh to the point where he chooses courses of action based on quotes from his former supervisor. However, Bernie was a chronic bungler. Cordelia describes him as a man whose bread would always fall "jelly side down."

The story begins with Bernie discovering he has cancer and instead of suffering decides to take his life. He leaves the detective agency to Cordelia, and she has just enough money to try to keep the business afloat for a couple of months.

Much to her surprise, she is asked to investigate the suicide of a young man. His father does not disagree with the coroner's verdict, but he would like to understand more about why it happened.

At the end, Cordelia meets Adam Dalgliesh face to face and discovers for herself the power of his presence.

I really enjoyed this book. This is everything one would expect from a more modern "cozy." It has a female sleuth who, although not technically amateur, is not yet experienced. There are unexplained puzzles, lots of red herrings, and some danger to Cordelia.

#5 The Black Tower (1975)
Dalgliesh is convalescing from a serious illness. He receives a letter from an anglican priest who was a friend of his father. He remembers the man from his childhood. Father Baddeley asks Adam to come visit him because something is troubling him. The Father lives in a cottage near a private home for handicapped adults. The facility is struggling financially.

When Adam arrives, in a very weak condition, he learns that the Father has died of a weak heart just days earlier. Also, a man at the home, confined to a wheelchair, has gone over a cliff and died. Suicide is suspected and no evidence of foul play is found.

Meanwhile, several things are not quite right at Father Baddeley's cottage. Dalgliesh has determined to give up police work. But he keeps being drawn into the questions surrounding these deaths.

Personally, I found the ending of this book to be somewhat unsatisfactory on my first reading, but it made more sense the second time.

#6 Death of an Expert Witness (1977)

#7 A Taste for Death (1986)

#8 Devises and Desires (1989)
Dalgliesh must travel to the Norfolk Coast to take possession of a mill which his aunt, his last remaining relative, left to him in her will. While there, as a courtesy, he consults with the local police on a serial killer.

Apart from the killings, the most controversial topic in the area is the nuclear power plant. Detractors are organizing against nuclear power. A local artist is renting a cottage from an officer of the plant, but she wants him and his family out of the house. The director of the plant has been offered a better job in London, but his personal assistant does not want to stay with him.

Dalgliesh is invited to a dinner party with a great many of these people, but one of the guests is late. When he does arrive, it is with the news that he has just discovered the most recent victim of the killer.

#9 Original Sin (1994)

#10 A Certain Justice (1997)

#11 Death in Holy Orders(2001)

#12 The Murder Room (2003)

#13 The Lighthouse (2005)

#14 The Private Patient (2008)
An investigative reporter who carries a terrible facial scar from childhood finally decides to have it removed. She sets up an appointment with a famous plastic surgeon who offers care in London or at a manor house in the country. She chooses that option. We are told on the first page, that she is not going to live. About the first third of the book is about the reporter including a younger, male friend who is always asking her for money.

The staff at the Manor is a complex mix of people. The surgeon currently owns it, but his assistant is the daughter of the previous owners who had it for centuries. The surgical assistant lives on the grounds with his sister. They had been caring for their father prior to his death. The chef and his anxious wife also live on site. A young lady serves as a cleaning assistant, and several other people are on the fringes.

The Manor also includes a prehistoric circle of stones so common to the British Isles where once an accused witch was burned.

When the reporter is strangled in her bed, the obvious conclusion is that it's an inside job. Several of the characters have loose ties to her, but nothing that seems serious enough to serve as a motive for murder.

Dalgliesh and his team are called in because another patient at the manor has enough pull to insist they take the case.

The plot is complex and the reader is kept guessing until almost the end. There are several chapters of resolution and denouement which work well for the last book in the series.

Help Your Formatter

I few days ago, I published an article about using paragraph formatting rather than tabs and said it was the number one wish of mine as an editor. However, it's hard for me to say this isn't #1. This one is strictly formatting, but doing this would save SO MUCH TIME. You may be paying by the job rather than by the hour, but it would get the finished product back in your hands sooner.

The desire to see your work look like a "real book" is strong. Especially for new authors. In fact, I used to to this myself, and then would berate myself over and over, later on, when I had to undo everything to actually format the book.

If you want to play around and see what your chapters will look like, or choose small art work to accompany breaks, or whatever... just do it with a few chapters for your own enjoyment or education. This is a good way to test things and see what look you like.

It would be best for the formatter if you just sent the text, with the paragraph indents created as described in Help Your Editor -1. Leave out any other formatting "stuff" except maybe a new page for chapter breaks.

Why? All the formatting you have added will probably need to be stripped out so it can be done correctly.

Things that are a nightmare for a formatter: Using the tab key. Adding a space before every paragraph (this makes no sense to me but I know two authors that must have a nervous habit of doing this). Using the space bar to center or arrange elements. Adding extra carriage returns.

DO NOT add your own page numbers. DO NOT add your own headers and footers. DO NOT set up the page size. DO NOT use two spaces between sentences.

If you want to show the formatter an example of your desired finished product, just send those sample chapters you've been playing with.

Even better... you could copy the manuscript into a program like Notepad that takes out all the extra stuff. It has to be something that truly reduces the MS to text. Even Wordpad will keep a lot of the formatting. Save it as a *.txt file and send that to your editor.

Note various of the no-nos I mentioned in the graphic below. You can click to make it larger. I have turned on the pilcrow (formatting marks) to show them. You can do the same thing, and then you can see if your MS is a mess.

Note the following in this sample: Author has created a page break by hitting the return several times. Author has tried to center text with the space bar. Author has added page numbers. Author has added a header. Author has hit the space bar at the beginning of the paragraph.

Here is what the final copy will look like for that same section.

Your formatter should be able to clean it up no matter what, but the time spent can affect your price and your working relationship.

Samples are from the forthcoming book, The Kommandant's Last Battle, by A. Katie Wood. It will be released in December 2024, assuming I can get the formatting done fast enough. The story is a WWII romance.

Fletch - Gregory McDonald

Gregory McDonald

Gregory McDonald won back-to-back Edgar Awards for best first novel, and best original paperback, in 1975 and 1977. These books are quite raw for the 1970s. The language and themes are definitely not "cozy," and there is plenty of casual sex. However, the plots are complex and clever. The style is almost entirely dialog, and quite clipped. The humor is tongue-in-cheek, which I find pretty funny.

Fletch is variously a reporter and an art writer, having been educated in both. He's a complete free spirit. You never know from one book to the next where he will pop up.

Recurring characters:
Irwin Maurice Fletcher, I.M. Fletcher, commonly known as Fletch.
Marilyn Moxie Moonie, Fletch's friend since childhood.
Alston Chambers, he begins as a rookie attorney in a big law firm, but moves to the DAs office.
Crystal Faoni, an overweight reporter
Jack Faoni, Crystal's son

#1- Fletch 1974
Winner of an Edgar Award. A rough-and-tumble tale of a reporter, Fletch, who is hired to commit a murder. Who is to be murdered? The man who hires him! Fletch is undercover to get the scoop on the local drug dealer in his beach town. His newspaper is giving him a hard time because it's taking so long to get answers. Meanwhile, he's busy also trying to find out why he's been hired to kill someone who seems to have a nearly perfect life, and he's also busy avoiding paying alimony to two previous wives.

An example of the humor: "At eleven-thirty, the phone began ringing persitently. He knew it was... any one of several News-Tribune executives who routinely became excited, one way or the other, in pleasure if they were real professionals, in anger if they were not, when a staff member had snuck a genuine, unadulterated piece of journalism over on them." ,

#2- Confess, Fletch 1976
Winner of an Edgar Award. Fletch has been living in Europe, but comes to Boston to track down some paintings that were stolen from his fiance's father. The father, Count deGrassi, was kidnapped and held for ransom, but without the paintings, the money demanded can't be raised.

Fletch arranges for an apartment swap through an agency so he will have a place to stay in Boston. He arrives, cleans up and goes out to dinner. When he returns, the naked body of a murdered young woman is on the living room floor. Naturally, the police would like him to confess.

There are more twists to this story than you can imagine.

#3- Fletch's Fortune 1978
Fletch is blackmailed by the CIA to bug the rooms of his fellow journalists at a national convention. They say they'll make his ever-mounting tax debt and crimes go away if he complies.

On the very first morning of the convention, the President pf the Journalism Association is murdered. He made lots of enemies over the years, but which one of them hates him enough to do the deed.

The recordings Fletch collects turn out to be useful in other ways, as well.

#4- Fletch and the Widow Bradley 1981
Fletch is back to being a reporter, but he gets fired from his newspaper because he quotes the CEO, Tom Bradley, of a company as being alive when it turns out the man has been dead for a year. Fletch is understandably put out because his boss is giving his incompetent girlfriend good stories and not firing her for little errors.

Meanwhile, he finds a wallet with $25,000 dollars in it, but is having a lot of trouble returning it to the owner. The man doesn't seem to want the wallet back.

Fletch sinks his teeth into finding out what happened to Tom Bradley. The answer is surprising for 1981.

#5- Fletch's Moxie 1982
Moxie has a job acting in a movie that is being filmed. It's not a good script and it's not going well. Moxie has become concerned about her finances- her financial manager has told her some things that are concerning. However, money is not her strong suit, and she has just signed whatever he told her to for years.

Fletch shows up at the filming of a talk show interview with Moxie and Steve Peterman. Steve is the director of the show and her financial manager. During the interview Peterman is stabbed and dies. Yet nothing unusual shows up on the tapes.

Moxie wants Fletch to find out what's wrong with her finances.

Secondary story is of Moxie's father, an aging, well-known classical actor who has been drunk for decades. Keeping him in line is almost a full-time job in its own right.

#6- Fletch and the Man Who 1983

#7- Carioca Fletch 1984
This book is almost a travelogue of Carnival in Rio de Janiero with a bit of story woven in. One of the characters from Fletch, Joan Collins Stanwyk, reappears in this book.

Fletch is enjoying a vacation in Brazil when an old woman approaches and insists that he is her husband, Janio, who was murdered 47 years previously. She wants him to tell her and her children who murdered him.

Fletch ends up being cursed with Brazilian voodoo, chased by a pack of kickboxers, and hounded by Janio's young grandson who has only one leg.

Joan, who reappears in this book, then disappears!

#8- Fletch Won 1985
Although written in 1985, this is really a prequel which tells the story of how Fletch got started in journalism.

As a rookie, he is assigned to write headlines, but he is too clever, and gets reassigned to cover the announcement of a gift to the art museum. The giftgiver is murdered in the News-Tribune parking lot, and he is reassigned again to cover a thinly disguised brothel. Then he gets fired! But that doesn't stop him from pursuing both stories.

#9- Fletch Too 1986

#10- Son of Fletch 1993
Events of Confess, Fletch are recalled in this story.

Fletch is confronted by an adult man who certainly appears to be his biological son. This encounter gives us the most sympathetic and human portrait of Fletch in any of the books.

The primary plot is a set in a neo-Nazi organization bent on creating anarchy and taking over the United States for white supremacy. There are a lot of stereotypes, but it's eerie for a 1993 book. This is my least favorite of the Fletch books.

#11- Fletch Reflected 1994
This is a fairly odd story. Fletch's son is called by an old girlfriend, Shana, to come investigate the estate of an eccentric genius. The genius, Chester, has built a huge closed community. He rigidly controls his wife and four adult children who live there.

Shana is convinced that someone is trying to kill Chester. There have been multiple accidents from which the man has barely escaped. Fletch's son calls Fletch, and while they are at the estate they learn the depths of the children's hatred for their father.

I would say the story is an allegory of some kind, but I'm not sure the Fletch books are that deep. It is an interesting plot, for sure.

Help Your Editor, Help Yourself - 1

There are many things you can do to help your editor/formatter return a clean manuscript to you. Here is one of them. This has a bit more to do with formatting, but, trust me, the better job you do, the better job they can do for you.

Maybe you are saying, "I don't need to do any of that. It's what I'm paying them for."

I respond, "Yes, but unless you are prepared to pay by the hour, giving an editor/formatter a sloppy manuscript is inviting disaster."

No human being can catch all the mistakes on one pass if the errors are numerous. I charge depending on how many times I have to go through a work to make it clean. My rates are reasonable (I want Indie Authors to succeed), but if I have to go through twice, it's going to cost more. And if the formatting is a mess, the formatting will cost correspondingly more.

Here is my number one tip. DON'T USE THE TAB KEY to start a new paragraph.

Using the computer is not the same as a typewriter. Sure, the tab key was what we did "back then," but I'll bet you were drilled to use the tab key rather than to hit the space bar 5 times. This is the same kind of thing. What I'm going to show you is way better, and more powerful for those people who will come after you to work on the manuscript.

Probably the most popular word processing program is Word. Instead of indenting paragraphs with the tab, do this. (different versions may have a slightly different interface)

Begin by setting the first line indent of every paragraph this way. Under Layout, click on expanded Paragraph options (arrow points to the icon). The window you see in this graphic will open. In the upper circle, choose Special/First Line, and then whatever indent you want. The default is 0.5 inch, which I usually think is too much. I like 0.3. In the lower circle, choose Set as Default. Then you will have an option for all documents or just this one. Whichever you like is fine.

In the above graphic you can see that all the text is aligned to the left. But after you choose OK in the window, Every first line of a paragraph in the text will indent by that magic amount. The result, below, is the half inch indent. You may agree that it's too much. So cut it back to something a little less. You can change the entire document in ONE flash!

Other word processors will have some similar option. I'll show you how in Google Docs another day.

I will stop for now with just this one tiny lesson.

Write Smart! Basic Dialog

Dialog is created when characters are quoted word for word. Bill said, "I don't like squash." This is dialog. Bill told us that he doesn't like squash. That is not dialog.

#1- Dialog is always set off with quotation marks.

#2- Words that describe the speaking are called Dialog Tags. Examples are: said, exclaimed, replied, yelled, etc.

#3- Action tags are not dialog tags. This is ambiguous, and there is some overlap. In this lesson, I'll use clear examples. This is an action tag.
     Bill stood. "I don't like squash." He whirled and left the room.
     "Billy, I try so hard to make you happy." His mother turned her head and began to cry.
     Bill's father threw down his napkin. "Give me a break!"

#4- The quotation marks are always outside the punctuation. All the above examples are correct. This one is incorrect. "Sally lamented, "I just can't stand this family"!

#5- If someone who is speaking quotes someone else, use single quotes for the interior one. Examples: Bill returned to the dining room. "The problem is, Sally, we are not really a 'family.'" [Interesting note, books published in Great Britain use single quotes for standard dialog and double ones for interior.]

#6- Use a capital letter to begin a sentence, even after a dialog tag. Example: Mother said, "Oh, not now, Sally."

#7- Every time someone new begins speaking, make a new paragraph. See item 3 above.

#8- However, if one person continues a speech long enough that it needs to be broken up, leave the closing quotation marks off the first paragraph. Example:
     Sally said, "Don't you think I know that? After all, you were adopted, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I didn't even love you when you were a baby.
     "And furthermore, you didn't like squash then, either. Mother made me try to feed it to you, and you always spit it back in my face."

There are other nuances to this issue, but this covers the basics.

Write Smart! Seen vs. Saw

There are a number of regions in the U.S. where most of the population does not use seen and saw in the same format as standard English. It's very difficult for people who grew up this way to switch to correct usages. But let's make it clear what standard English says.

Probably the fast and dirty answer is that you must use "have," "has," or "had" in front of the word "seen." However, "See" and "saw" stand on their own. Never use a form of "have" with either of those.

Here are three official categories. Columns two and three are the only tenses of the verb "to see" that use "seen."

Present tense	Present Perfect tense	Past Perfect tense
I see	I have seen	I had seen
you see	you have seen	you had seen
he/she/it sees	he/she/it has seen	he/she/it had seen
we see	we have seen	we had seen
you see	you have seen	you had seen
they see	they have seen	they had seen

So just remember to always use a form of "have" with "seen."

P.S. "Seeing" is a whole different ball game. Maybe another time.

Write Smart! I or me?

Should you use I or me in that sentence? Let's get the names of those things out of the way. "I" is a subject. It can do action. "Me" is an object. Actions can be done to it.

Most of us are good with simple sentences like "I went to the store," or "He gave the book to me."

Where we get in trouble is when we add extra people. "He gave the book to Meg and I," or "He gave the book to Meg and me." It's easy to decide which is correct if you take out Meg. Most of us know that "He gave the book to I" is wrong.

Lots of people say things like "Jack and me went fishing." Again, take out Jack, and you'll know in an instant it should be "Jack and I went fishing."

There are other permutations of this same problem of mixing subjects and objects. I'll cover some of those in other hints.

Write Smart! Introductory Word Group

If a sentence begins with an introductory phrase/clause, place a comma after it. See what I did there?

Other examples:
A. Buried under the apple tree for years, the box decomposed.
A. During February, Michiganders rarely see the sun.
B. In fact, none of what Mr. Smith said was true.
C. Unlike December in Australia, Ontario's Christmas month was snowy.
D. The rain slowing to a drizzle at last, we were able to go for a walk."

A. The phrase may be an adverb clause telling when, how, or why.

B. The phrase may be transitional such as "in fact," or "for example."

C. The phrase may express contrast such as "Not surprisingly," or "Unlike..."

D. The phrase may be an absolute phrase such as "The clouds hovering all week"

Write Smart! No Comma Here

If the second part of the sentence isn’t a sentence, don’t use a comma. Example: John ate the chili and burped loudly. (“and burped loudly” is not a sentence- it has no subject, so there is no comma before the “and.”)

Example: The dog and cat fought but made up. However, if you change that last example to The dog and cat fought, but they made up, it now needs a comma because you’ve added a subject (they) to the second part and made it into an independent clause, then joined them with "but" (a conjunction).

The second part is called a subordinate clause (it will not stand alone). Some examples are:
...and gave the dog a bone.
...for two days and an hour.
...but wasn't able to keep up.
...and found the restaurant on a side street.

Write Smart! #1- Connecting Sentences

A sentence is made up of a noun and a verb. The parts of the sentence are called the subject which contains the noun and the predicate which contains the verb.

These can be simple: People is a noun; think is a verb. Subject=People, predicate=think. The entire sentence is, "People think."

The parts of the sentence can also be much more complicated.

If you have two sentences and combine them with any of the following words (which are call conjunctions): and, but, or, nor, for, yet, or so, add a comma before the conjunction. Example: Sue bought skates, but Tom stole them. OR, you could use a semicolon instead of one of those connecting words. Example: Sue bought skates; Tom stole them.

Each part that could stand alone is called an independent clause. They are independent because each could be a sentence all by itself. Sue bought skates is an independent clause. So is Tom stole them.

You can connect them with a conjunction. These are: and, but, or, nor, for, yet, and so. Put a comma before the conjunction.

Example: Sue bought skates, but Tom stole them.

You can connect them without a conjunction by using a semicolon.

Example: Sue bought skates; Tom stole them.

Both techniques make two sentences into one longer one.

(Yes, sometimes really short sentences like this don’t need a comma according to some sources, but your editor will thank you if you use them anyway. He or she can decide if the comma adds clarity.)