Harassing on Pause

mark@marktreble.com

Stepping back from Harassing to do some rewrite. I’m happy with the plot and the characters, but it’s a mystery and there ought to be a lot more mysterious stuff going on. I’ve asked a couple of readers for help, and should be back in the saddle shortly.

Writing a mystery

mark@marktreble.com

Writing a mystery is a bit more difficult than it might seem. The story is easy; building the tension and dropping clues in the right places means a whole lot of rewriting.

As time is available, I’m working on Harassing, the sequel to Taunting. Homeless women are being abducted in Mississippi and Louisiana, too many to be a coincidence. The obvious conclusion is that there’s a sexual predator on the loose. The only problem with that is that the women are returned unharmed, with no signs of sexual assault.

Local law enforcement in the two states get together to go over the cases, and tap Buzz Bakersfield, local miscreant doing community service, to help with clerical work. Buzz starts connecting the dots, the first step in what becomes a nationwide investigation for who and why. There seems to be a lot more to this than meets the eye, but without knowing why women are being kidnapped, there’s no way to learn who is doing it. An analyst in the New Orleans FBI office proposes a far-fetched theory, which would have been ignored if someone hadn’t tried to kill him that night. The FBI halts everything until the source of the leak can be identified. Danny Flint and the High-Profile Crimes team keep going on their own, convinced that both the leak and the murder attempt were local.

They were right, but the only person who could identify the source of the hit order is killed in a gunfight. Kidnapping patterns change significantly, to include mass abduction raids on homeless encampments, and taking citizens off the street. Danny and his team put together patterns, clues and reasonable assumptions, most of which turn out to be correct. Still, nobody has answers to the big questions, and when a state senator is kidnapped, what had been a low-profile investigation becomes a national frenzy. What do the abductors want from these women, and what is their fate? Read and find out.

Free Promotion March 9-10

mark@marktreble.com

To celebrate its recent positive review, Finding Friendship, volume one of the Finding Series, is on free promotion March 9-10, in Amazon's Kindle Store.

"This was a good book but like I said you definitely do not want to read this one unless you are planning to read the next one soon after because of the way it ends abruptly. I enjoyed this series. I think others will also."

Read the entire review here.

Five-Star Review for Four Seconds on the Cloock

mark@marktreble.com

" ,,, hopefully there will be another book for these two in the future."

You can read the entire review here. There are three more books planned in the Four Seconds series, and, spurred by a reader's request, I've started pre-draft notes on Book Four of the Finding Series.

Mark