JUSTICE DELAYED
The release date for the mystery, JUSTICE, has been pushed back to late summer. So many books are being printed these days it’s hard to get a place in the queue. The trouble is not many of these are selling very well, so the name of the game becomes promote, promote, promote. We now have six months to do that. I like simple, straightforward, ways of doing things, so what I’m going to do with all this time is to drive you crazy.
I’m a practicing lawyer who writes mystery suspense novels with a political twist. I labor under the impression that I can do this, because my background material comes from real world experiences helping real clients around the globe . . . plus, my mother always said I had a good imagination.
I sit in a dingy bar in Djakarta, Indonesia with an explorer who has discovered new microbes under the ice in Tibet. This guy is a born hero for some exciting fiction, I tell myself. It’s not just because he’s an explorer working in far off places, it’s because he’s also 6’8”, 350 pounds, and off-the-wall brilliant.
I’m sent from New York to bail an American expatriate businessman out of jail in Caracas, Venezuela. I find the jail he’s in is a dungeon . . . a real dungeon, like the ones we see in the old movies . . . down three levels into a dark, dank, cave, with heavy, creaking steel cages and rats running around. Nooooo, you say . . . that can’t be . . . not in Caracas, Venezuela. Oh Yes, and his crime, if you can imagine it, was questioning the honesty of a government servant. We get him out after a while using good local lawyers . . . not the U.S. Embassy, which don’t want to be associated with him or us. It’s another experience shaping what goes into my fiction. Venezuela looms large in my still-in-progress book and the State Department sits over in the corner in all of them.
I love Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where he shows the generals making decisions based on the view they have of the battlefield in a given moment only to find the situation has changed by the time the orders get to the soldiers in the field. It’s the same with decisions and policies formulated in corporate headquarters or in the White House. By the time they get through the labyrinth of compromise and debate, their commands are outdated to the point of being useless or counter productive. I’ve been at both ends of that chain.
JUSTICE is an individual to get to know as well as a mystery to solve. You can’t do one without the other. It’s both easier than first appears and more demanding than imagined. I’m sorry you have to wait until late summer to read it.
