[Note, please, that in one week, Back to the Garden will be on the shelves–in the USA, at any rate. You can find a long excerpt here. ]

I turn 70 this year. The world is literally burning around us, I’ve had some energy-draining health issues, and there are books more than one series that I really really want to write before I become too decrepit to figure out what’s going on with those characters I love but have left on the shelf, bemoaning their abandonment.

So isn’t it…irresponsible of me to turn my back on Kate Martinelli and Harris Stuyvesant and Rae Newborn and the rest?  Certainly the fans of those characters are justified in grumbling.

Still, I’ve flitted between fictional worlds from the beginning.  My first fiction was a stab at SciFi, left half-finished to spend a couple books with Russell & Holmes, before moving from 20s England to the modern world of Kate Martinelli (which became the first one in print.)  For most of my career, I have alternated—a Russell or two, a Martinelli or a standalone, two Stuyvesant & Grey books—because I hated living with one set of characters for too many years in a row.

(It’s no accident that Garment of Shadows, in which our heroine Mary Russell wakes with injuries so severe she has amnesia, comes after an unbroken string of three other Russell & Holmes novels plus a novella. When I realized the pattern, I pointed out to my editor that while it was nice to have a popular series, if I didn’t take a break from those two, one of them was going to wake up dead…)

But readers love the others—at pretty much every event I do, someone asks when Kate Martinelli is coming back.  And I love them too, so I did write and self-pub a novella three years ago (“Beginnings.”)  However, when I talked to my editor about a new Martinelli novel, she didn’t say no, but she did gently point out that while loyalty was nice, a series that tries to start up after a nearly 20-year gap does make for a marketing challenge.

But “Beginnings” did remind me that I liked writing about my own time and place. And with Covid shutting things down, it would be a while before I could travel for research. Plus, there were some other things about “Beginnings” that I enjoyed, such as the dual time line of Kate’s own personal cold case.  And I’d always wanted to do a book set in the 60s or 70s.

So…

Enter Raquel Laing.  Of Kate Martinelli’s world, but only connected to her through their mutual partner, Al Hawkin.

Still, it’s going to be a series. You never know what other SFPD Inspector is going to wander through in future days.

 

 

 

Find my upcoming events here.

You can order a signed copy from Poisoned Pen or Bookshop Santa Cruz, or unsigned from your local bookshop, Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle.

Santa Cruz, California, is a quiet town even now. In the 1970s, it was a community of retirees, Italian fishermen, and people associated with the brand-new University of California. It was (and is) a beach town that attracts year-round surfers and summer visitors to the beach and Boardwalk.

In October, 1970, in the hills south of town, a resident named John Linley Frazier bound and murdered an eye surgeon, his wife and secretary, and the couple’s two children, in an attempt to usher in World War III.

Two years later, in four short months between October 1972 and February 1973, another local resident, Herbert Mullin, brutally murdered 13 people: a girl hitchhiking, a priest in his confessional, a man outside his home, a couple he knew. A woman and her two young sons. Four teenagers camping in Henry Cowell state park. (I’d camped there myself, the previous summer. Alone.) He was caught and arrested when a neighbor of his last victim spotted his license plate.

And yet the deaths continued. Not because the police had the wrong man, but because in May, 1972, Edmund Kemper—a wannabee cop who’d been turned down because he was 6’ 9”—had turned from giving girl hitchhikers rides to abducting, raping, and dismembering them. One pair of girls, then a 15 year old who had missed her bus to dance class, an 18 year old student, another pair of girls—ending with his mother and her friend in the spring of 1973.

Kemper phoned the police to turn himself in—although when they recognized his familiar voice, at first they didn’t believe him.

Both men went undetected, primarily because there seemed to be no pattern in the victims, who were all over the place in age, sex, profession. And yet, pattern there was.

Under the impetus of these and other multiple killers of the time, the FBI started up a Behavioral Analysis Unit, interviewing convicted serial killers in search of patterns and setting up lines of communication between local jurisdictions. Those developments, in addition to profiling, DNA, crime scene analysis, nation-wide databases, and other investigation techniques, mean that instead of the more than 180 US serial killers estimated to be operating in the 1980s, there are now probably fewer than 20.

One of the men mentioned in Back to the Garden is Joseph DeAngelo. A cop and investigator during the early 1970s, he turned from investigating burglaries to committing them. Soon he escalated to rape, then murder, tormenting his surviving victims with mocking letters and phone calls. His last murder was in 1986, although the cruel phone calls continued until 2001. Slowly, the FBI and far-flung Californian jurisdictions put information together, narrowed suspects, and finally identified his DNA—in 2018.

DeAngelo remains in prison. Frazier committed suicide in 2009. Herbert Mullin died last week, on August 18. Edmund Kemper is still alive, at a prison medical facility in Vacaville, where he records books for the blind.

And Santa Cruz, “Surf City,” tries to remain as quiet a town as possible.

In Back to the Garden, published September 6, SFPD Inspector Raquel Laing hunts for traces of a serial killer of the 1970s.  Excerpt here. Order signed copies from Poisoned Pen or Bookshop Santa Cruz, or unsigned from your local bookshop, Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle.

(Photos thanks to Wikipedia.)

In the spring of 2021, it was time for one of THOSE conversations. No, not with my kids; with my long-suffering editor.

I’ve never been a writer who was satisfied with writing one set of characters, even if they are Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes.  Plus that, the Russell series generally involves foreign travel research, and covid was making that pretty tough. So, I said to my editor, what about something closer to home?  I’d played with an idea for another Kate Martinelli story, but the last full novel was published in 2006, which is long gap for maintaining a series. Plus that, by now Kate had to be getting close to retirement age for the SFPD, right?

What about Martinelli’s world—but with someone new?

Kate Martinelli was a cop.  Granted, she was not entirely comfortable with the somewhat paramilitary nature of any big-city police department, but basically, with the help of her partner Al Hawkin, she came to find a home in the Homicide Detail.

This time, I wanted someone who didn’t fit quite so comfortably. Someone definitely square-peg to the Department’s round hole, but whose abilities made her fellow officers, albeit grudgingly, willing to put up with her quirks, because she could do things no one else could. Things like notice details no normal person would.  Or catch a fleeting microexpression that betrayed a lie. Or use those subtle betrayals to manipulate her suspect into giving himself away.

But maybe this young cop could also use a mentor like Al Hawkin, who had always been a much rounder peg and was now comfortably semi-retired into the SPFD Cold Case unit.  In fact—why not make her mentor Al himself? Her opposite in so many ways, he even tended to break suspects using warm sympathy rather than prod them with analytics.

Sounds great, says my editor—go for it!  So I went for it, diving into these new characters and their cold-case investigation.

I finished the first draft of Back to the Garden, sent it off, let it sit for a while.  But when I sat down for a cold read before the rewrite, I found myself puzzled by Inspector Raquel Laing.  My first drafts always lack detail, because I write by letting the story grow unedited.  But in this case, Raquel’s almost complete lack of backstory, her elusive personality, even the reason she’s in the Cold Case Unit to begin with were all things I had set aside to fill in when I knew more. And now that the time had come to do so, I couldn’t find the right way to do so.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have a personality—she was every bit as complex and colorful as a writer could want.  However, she didn’t really want to talk about it.

It took a while to dawn on me, although I imagine many of you reading this are already there.

The reason Raquel Laing was playing hard to get not because I didn’t understand her, but because I understood her so very thoroughly. After all, I’d been writing her in a different guise for more than thirty years.

Readers are told next to nothing about the character Arthur Conan Doyle spent the most time writing. Sherlock Holmes has a brother, a vague family, an even vaguer past.  His physical description, education, tastes, friendships are given as quick sketches alone.  We learn about his habits and interests only when a story requires it.

In a nice bit of irony, I realized as I looked at my first draft that I had even mentioned Inspector Raquel Laing’s colleagues mocking her as “the Sherlock of San Francisco.”

I guess I didn’t get far from Mary Russell, after all.

You can pre-order a signed copy from Poisoned Pen or Bookshop Santa Cruz, or unsigned from your local bookshop, Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle .