Goddess Fish Promotions Presents

Off the Books
by Dana King

A randomly drawn winner will receive a $20 Amazon/BN GC – Enter Below

Nick Forte has lost his detective agency and makes ends meet doing background checks and other paperwork. He pays for everything else through jobs he takes for cash and without any written contract. What starts out as a simple investigation into a traffic accident exposes Forte to people who have truly lost everything and have no viable hope of reclaiming their lives. That doesn’t sit well with Forte, leading him and his friend Goose Satterwhite to take action that ends more violently than anyone expected.

“The return of Chicago private detective Nick Forte, the tough protagonist of two Shamus Award nominated novels, is well worth the wait. Nick’s latest escapade Off The Books—the first in nearly six years—will surely earn additional praise for the acclaimed series.” -J.L .Abramo, Shamus Award-winning author of Chasing Charlie Chan.

“Nick Forte reminds me of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser: a PI with a finely tuned sense of justice who doesn’t take anyone’s s***. Any fan of hardboiled detective fiction is in for a helluva ride.” –Chris Rhatigan, former publisher of All Due Respect Books

What are the key elements to writing a good mystery/thriller?

It’s interesting that you ask “What are the key elements to writing a good mystery/thriller?” when a lot of people see them as two different things. The definitions I hear most are a mystery is about finding out what happened, while a thriller is about keeping something bad from happening.

Those may be true but if asked to describe which of the two categories my books fall into, my answer would have to be “both?”

How can they be both?

The inciting incident in my books is always a crime, typically a murder. The point of the book is then to solve the crime. For me, though, that is rarely the end result. My killers are typically known to the reader not much more than halfway through the book, sometimes sooner in a multi-point of view story like my Penns River novels. Even private investigator Nick Forte, protagonist of Off the Books, typically has the miscreant identified well before the end. The open question then becomes “What is he going to do about it?” So they end up being about half mystery and half thriller, using the definition we started with.

Okay, fine, King, but this is not a political debate where you can evade the question if you don’t have a good answer. What are the key elements?

Characters. Think of your favorite books. How many plot details do you remember? I’ll bet the characters stuck with you  a lot better. Characters have to seem real to the reader, whether they’re good guys, bad guys, or just people passing through. It’s also important to remember no one is all good or all bad. The most memorable bad guys have a glimmer of good in them, or at least something you can empathize with. (Maybe not Hans Gruber in Die Hard, but Alan Rickman made that character memorable.) Neither are the best good guys saints. There was never a more tireless and conscientious cop than Harry Callahan, but he’s not someone you’d want to spend a lot of time with. You can empathize with Harry without liking him much. Popeye Doyle in The French Connection is much the same.

Dialog. This goes hand-in-hand with character, as there is no better way to show character than to listen to one talk. (And maybe compare what they say with what they do.) Dialog is also what keeps stories moving even when the pace must slow down to allow the reader to catch his or her breath.

Pacing. You knew this was coming after the dialog comment, right? Books where too little happens are tedious. Books where too much happens are exhausting. Just as in life, our escapist pursuits should allow our minds time to catch their breath. The perfect balance varies by type of book and how well the author writes each element. Which brings us to…

Action. Action does not have to be a car chase or shootout. There are few films more action-packed than Glengarry, Glen Ross, yet the most exerting thing anyone does is walk across a room. “Action” means things are happening; exactly what happens is less important.

Plot. I bet you were wondering when I’d get to this. I waited until now because, frankly, plot is the least important element. Plot is mechanics. It’s logistics. It’s making the sausage. In a perfect book it recedes into the background as its only purpose is to supply the scaffold on which to hang the

Story. This comes last because it is so important. Everything I’ve mentioned is subordinate, and subservient, to the story. Nothing else really matters. Characters give you someone to care about, whether you love them or hate them. Dialog helps make the characters real. Pacing keeps you from either losing interest or burning out; action is inseparable from that. As mentioned before, plot is the scaffold on which the story is built. None of them are worth anything if the story isn’t good enough. 

Have doubts? We all know of bestsellers where the characters are one- or two-dimensional, the dialog is wooden, the pacing drags, the action is unrealistic, and there’s no plot to speak of. How do such lizards become best sellers?

It’s the story. Story is everything. 

I first saw him standing under the “employees only” sign near the exit to the truck service bays. Early twenties, a little under average height, short blond hair. Caroline was unaware of him, focused as she was on a three-way text conversation with her friends Maria and Arielle.

The next time the kid caught my attention he was half as far away, standing where the food court opened into the convenience store. I only noticed him this time because I recognized him, and he was the only Love’s employee on the floor. His name was Jimmy, and he was definitely looking our direction. 

I’m an old-school father with an only child. A daughter, no less. My primary purpose in life was to make sure no one messed with her. Everything else—work, food, clothing, mortgage payments, staying out of prison—comes after. Jimmy hadn’t done anything wrong, but the Dadar had activated.

All fathers think their daughters are beautiful; I had empirical evidence. If the steady stream of boys circling the periphery of her life looking for an in wasn’t enough, I once overheard another kid in the band describe her to a friend as the “archetype of virginal beauty.” (What can I say? Magnet school.)

The next time I caught sight of Jimmy he stood three feet behind Caroline, checking her out with rapt attention. I sidled over, using my best stealth technique. He never saw me coming until I leaned in close and spoke in my most quietly menacing voice. “She’s thirteen years old.”

Jimmy evaporated faster than a snowflake in a  microwave..

I still got it.

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Off the Books is Dana King’s sixth Nick Forte private investigator novel. Two of the earlier books (A Small Sacrifice and The Man in the Window) received Shamus Award nominations from the Private Eye Writers of America. Dana also writes the Penns River series of police procedurals set in a small Western Pennsylvania town, as well as one standalone novel, Wild Bill, which is not a Western. His short fiction appears in numerous anthologies and web sites. He is a frequent panelist at conferences and reads at Noirs at Bars from New York to North Carolina. 

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