by Frank Zafiro
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GENRE: Mystery (police procedural)
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BLURB:
Detective Katie MacLeod has her hands full.
It has been four years since her promotion to detective, and after paying her dues in property crimes investigations, she has made it to the Major Crimes unit. This is where the highest profile cases land—homicides, robberies, serious assaults, and sexual assaults.
Katie catches two rape cases almost back-to-back. One victim is a prostitute with an unknown suspect… who Katie fears may be gearing up for more assaults. The other victim is a college student who has accused her boyfriend, a popular baseball player, of raping her at a party.
Both cases have their own set of perils. Katie juggles her time investigating each one, encountering many obstacles—a lack of evidence in one, and wondering how to parse conflicting statements in the other.
As she battles past these difficulties, Katie faces another fact… that both cases hit home with her in very different ways. Solving them becomes more than just a job for her, but something deep-seated and personal… something that may exorcise some of her own demons from the past.
Or will they consume her?
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EXCERPT
The woman in the emergency room hospital bed glanced away from Detective Katie MacLeod to fidget with the edge of the blanket. She looked down at her hands, avoiding Katie’s gaze. Her greasy brown hair with blond highlights hung limply past her shoulders. The state identification card she’d given Katie only a few minutes prior stated she was twenty-seven-years-old and five-foot-five. Not tall, Katie thought, but not tiny, either. Even so, she seemed smaller to the detective at the moment. Thinner, too, than the weight listed on the state ID.
“Nicole?” Katie asked gently. “Do you remember what happened next?”
Nicole nodded but didn’t speak.
Next to the bed, Crystal Docking took Nicole’s hand. Crystal was even thinner than Nicole, with sunken cheeks, black stringy hair, and dark eyes filled with anger. “He raped her, okay?” Crystal snapped. “She already told the nurse, who called you. Why does she have to say it again?”
On patrol, and even during her first year or two as a detective, Crystal’s interference would have frustrated Katie. She was a professional police officer, trying to accomplish an important task. People who got in the way of that were obstacles to her getting the larger job done. To make matters worse, hers was a job that usually had high stakes, so impediments had consequences.
Maybe it was her years of experience—seventeen years as a cop now, all told—or perhaps it was the result of staring down the big four-oh a couple of birthdays away, but she’d become far more patient these days. Instead of getting frustrated, she became efficient.
And right now, the most efficient thing to do was to ignore Crystal Docking.
A Word With the Author:
1.Did you always want to be an author?
Yes. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think of myself in those terms.
2.Tell us about the publication of your first book.
It’s actually been published three times! The first was by a small press in 2006 called Wolfmont Press. I’d contributed to an interesting anthology called Seven by Seven that they published. The editor liked my work and we got to talking. He ultimately took on Under a Raging Moon, my first published novel and the beginning of the River City series (which starts in 1994).
Unfortunately, when I turned in the second book, the editor said he couldn’t publish it. Though he thought it was better-written than book one, his opinion was that readers wouldn’t accept a child victim. I disagreed, especially since nothing happens to her on the page. Not only that, but I pointed out that the popularity of Law and Order seemed to disprove his theory. Ultimately, we remained at an impasse, and so I took the second book elsewhere.
When the contract ended a few years later, I got my rights back. By then, the series was with a Spokane-based publisher, Gray Dog Press (River City is a thinly veiled Spokane). GDP published the first four books in the River City series in print in 2010 and 2011, so that is the second time Under a Raging Moon was published. I did a slight revision for that edition, adding in a couple of deleted scenes, and polishing the previous draft.
At the time, GDP wasn’t interested in ebooks, so I digitally published all four so that they’d be available. Around 2017, GDP discontinued its fiction line (they still publish trail guides), so I got the print rights back. That was when I re-published all of them under my own imprint, Code 4 Press. That’s the third publication for the first book!
3.Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?
Colin Conway, without a doubt. We co-author the Charlie-316 series together but I am a big fan of his solo work. His writing universe of the 509 includes the main series of procedurals, a hard boiled PI series, and a lighter-hearted PI series. The procedurals feature an ensemble cast of rotating lead protagonists. They’re outstanding, gritty police procedurals. The John Cutler series is hard boiled in a mature way, and the Flip-Flop Detective series has great mysteries with some humor. And if none of that appeals to you, he writes the Cozy Up series of cozies, too (starting with Cozy Up to Death).
If that’s cheating because he’s my friend and sometimes co-author, then my answer is Dennis Lehane. He seems to be able to ride the line between literary and crime fiction in a way that is honest to both.
4.What's the best part of being an author? The worst?
The best part is that first flush of creation, when a scene comes together under your fingertips. It’s like a first kiss. Even better than that—it’s like your very first kiss ever. It is, as Queen sang, a kind of magic. The second best thing, by the way, is spending time with the characters over the course of a series. One is like a first date, the other like a long marriage.
The worst part? The self-doubt. The self-inflicted comparisons. The vulnerability. Like much of art, writing a book (or a story, or a poem) is like walking into a party with no clothes on, waving your arms in a flourish, and saying, “So? What do you think?”
5.What are you working on now?
Four things at once, which is fairly typical.
1. I’m almost finished with the first draft of my middle grade sports novel “Double Shifting” (Sam the Hockey Player series). It might be done by the time you read this, actually. I write those under my given name, Frank Scalise.
2. I’m about to start the final revision process for the new SpoCompton novel (#4), Live and Die This Way. LaDTW comes out in early October, so I’m unusually tight on this timeline. The SpoCompton series is the opposite side of the badge to the River City series—that is, the criminals are the protagonists.
3. I’ve been outlining the fourth Stefan Kopriva mystery and will be hard at work on the first draft by the time you read this. The Kopriva series is a spinoff from River City.
4. I’m in the early stages of developing the next River City novel, which will also feature Detective Katie MacLeod.
There are other projects—a collection of stories and poems, a novella-length family saga, a couple of PI novellas, as well as my editing duties on the novella anthology series that I created called A Grifter’s Song, which is about to enter its fifth and final season in January. But the four items listed above have the most urgency to them at the moment.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Frank Zafiro writes gritty crime fiction from both sides of the badge. He was a police officer from 1993 to 2013, holding many different positions and ranks. He retired as a captain.
Frank is the award-winning author of over three dozen novels, most of them crime fiction. These include his River City series of police procedurals, Stefan Kopriva mysteries (PI), SpoCompton series (hardboiled), Jack McCrae mysteries (PI), and Sandy Banks thrillers. He has also co-authored multiple series with other authors, including the Charlie-316 series (procedurals with Colin Conway), Bricks and Cam Jobs (action, dark comedy with Eric Beetner), and the Ania series (hardboiled with Jim Wilsky).
In addition to writing, Frank hosted the crime fiction podcast Wrong Place, Write Crime. He has written a textbook on police report writing and taught police leadership all over the US and Canada. He is an avid hockey fan and a tortured guitarist. He currently lives in the high desert of Redmond, Oregon.
Buy/pre-order The Worst Kind of Truth: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B72GF6SW
Website: http://frankzafiro.com
Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/dfab1c274c36/zafironewsletterhome
Blog: http://frankzafiro.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FrankZafiroAuthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Frank_Zafiro
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frankzafiro370/
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/frank-zafiro
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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION
Frank Zafiro will be awarding Winner #1 a box set of River City series 1-3 (Kindle version) AND Winner #2 a surprise package of out-of-print versions of Zafiro titles (paperbacks) - US Only. International readers may substitute digital version of any title in the author's back catalog to two randomly drawn winners via rafflecopter during the tour.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
I love the cover and think the book look good.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I knew before I even wrote a word what the cover would look like.
DeleteYou are a new author for me- after reading the excerpt I was hooked-thanks
ReplyDeleteThat's great to hear!
Delete