Do You Need a Dead Body?

What I'm reading: Robert B. Parker's Killing the Blues, by Michael Brandman

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Last week, on The Graveyard Shift, Lee Lofland shared some important information about property crimes, and how patrol officers work to solve them. He presented a lot of good information, including how useful fingerprints are (usually they aren't), and how people talk to cops. Take a minute to read it here.

But my takeaway from his post, and one that was followed up in the comments of the post, was that there's a lot of police work that has nothing to do with solving homicides. If you tell someone you write mysteries, odds are pretty good they automatically hear "murder mystery."

Can't you have a mystery that doesn't include a dead body? There are certainly enough other crimes out there, and they'll impact the lives of your characters even if nobody dies. And for me, it's always about the characters.

When I wrote FINDING SARAH, I thought it was going to be a mystery. But it began with a robbery (Anyone know the difference between a burglary and a robbery? The terms aren't interchangeable.) which brought a detective onto the scene. Now, maybe I got away without having the detective solve a murder because I discovered, thanks to my beta-reading daughters, that I was really writing a romance.

Getting the Setting

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Right now, we're experiencing the change seasons, something that was so subtle in Orlando, that I always said there were two seasons there: Summer and February 3rd. But as I type this, I'm looking out the window at the aspen trees.


They've been going from green to gold over the last week, standing out in stark contrast to the dark green pines. Not long ago, they were just getting their leaves.

Setting. I love being in the book with the characters. I may not have ever been to that location, but I want to think that if I ever did visit that locale, it would feel like I'm coming back to somewhere I've been.

When we left Los Angeles for Miami back in the dark ages, the television show CHiPs was popular. (Note-I didn't say it was good). We watched it primarily to get glimpses of the city we'd just left. We also laughed at the way Ponch and John would bike from San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley in a matter of minutes.