5th Week Frenzy

May 24, 2017May 24, 2017 ~ patyjag ~ 11 Comments

I just noticed that there are 5 weeks in May and we only have 4 weeks scheduled with our regular bloggers so…. any mystery writer so sees this, post your latest release or a book you have at a reduced price.

Please follow this format.

Title
Author
Tagline of book
Price
buy link

I’ll start here to show you:

Fatal Fall
Paty Jager
Shandra Higheagle becomes wrapped up in another murder when the doctor is a no-show for her appointment and his elderly aunt has a fatal fall.
$0.99 till May 29th.
https://www.books2read.com/u/bQZ5d7

Fingerprinting by Paty Jager

May 8, 2017May 3, 2017 ~ patyjag ~ 3 Comments

canstockphoto17652788 My current work in progress has been interesting and fun. I’ve had numerous conversations with forensic and law enforcement employees about fingerprints.

While the fingerprints on an object doesn’t help find the killer in my book, the illusion they are important draws the reader into a speculation of what-if and hopefully lets an important piece of the puzzle become a throw-away thought.

What I discovered while asking questions about how fingerprints are stored and who might have access to the fingerprints came from a variety of people and, not surprisingly, they all had a bit different take on it all. Which led me to believe, I could do what I wanted in discovering who had their hands on the weapon. 😉

When I looked up fingerprinting, I discovered there are many jobs where fingerprints are required. Medical, educational, and of course law enforcement. But also, companies that contract government work.

What I wanted to know dealt with my medical examiner, a local doctor given the honorary title and honor of pronouncing people dead, and a person who came from another country but had gained U.S. citizenship thirty years ago. Would they have fingerprints in “the system”? The answers were varied on the M.E.. Yes, most would have had their prints taken, but they wouldn’t be held in a local police database or AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System). They also said my new citizen would not have had fingerprints taken unless arrested or had a job that required it, and they would only be in the system if arrested.

So millions of people have their prints taken for jobs. What happens to those prints?

According to the law enforcement people I contacted, the employees either send the prints to a local print collection business or they are sent to AFIS. If the prints come up clean, the ten-print cards are then either put in the employees file or trashed. They don’t go into a national system.

So, if you haven’t done a crime and you are fingerprinted, you have nothing to worry about. And your prints shouldn’t wind up in any databases. But what if you had a crooked person running one of the databases, and they did keep your prints to use when committing crimes????

That just may be another book!

photo source: © Can Stock Photo / peshkova

Walk the Walk by Paty Jager

April 10, 2017April 7, 2017 ~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

paty shadow (1) The whole reason I picked an amateur sleuth was to avoid having to be too technical with cop speak and legalese.

I’m working on Book 8, Fatal Fall, in the Shandra Higheagle Mystery series. Shandra has the flu and her boyfriend, Weippe County Detective Ryan Greer, has had more time in this book than in previous ones. I didn’t think this would be a problem. Usually Shandra is sleuthing, and Ryan is backing her up with his credentials. This book, he’s doing the investigating, and I find myself having to look up cop jargon and legal words.

My poor son-in-law who is in law enforcement has had more emails than he probably likes from his mother-in-law lately. 😉 I’ve also googled, and I remembered seeing a couple of blot posts on the crimescene yahoo group about cop speak.

I had a suspect who had been arrested before. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say on felonies or misdemeanors. I googled and found a wonderful dictionary of legal terms that helped me out.

Misdemeanor

A lesser crime punishable by a fine and/or county jail time for up to one year. Misdemeanors are distinguished from felonies which can be punished by a state prison term. They are tried in the lowest local court such as municipal, police or justice courts. Typical misdemeanors include: petty theft, disturbing the peace, simple assault and battery, drunk driving without injury to others, drunkenness in public, various traffic violations, public nuisances, and some crimes which can be charged either as a felony or misdemeanor depending on the circumstances and the discretion of the District Attorney. “High crimes and misdemeanors” referred to in the U. S. Constitution are felonies.

Felony

A serious crime, characterized under federal law and many state statutes as any offense punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year. Under the early Common Law, felonies were crimes involving moral turpitude, those which violated the moral standards of a community. Later, however, crimes that did not involve moral turpitude became included in the definition of a felony. Presently many state statutes list various classes of felonies with penalties commensurate with the gravity of the offense. Crimes classified as felonies include, among others, Treason, Arson, murder, rape, Robbery, Burglary, Manslaughter, and Kidnapping.

I needed to know about warrants- I asked my son-in-law and Wikipedia.

Search warrant is a court order that a magistrate, judge or Supreme Court official issues to authorize law enforcement officers to conduct a search of a person, location, or vehicle for evidence of a crime and to confiscate any evidence they find. Typically, a search warrant is required for searches police conduct in the course of a criminal investigation.

Since I am in the cop’s point of view so much, I needed to use words that I wouldn’t use for Shandra. This is where I remembered seeing, and I had thought I’d bookmarked, blogs that Lee Lofland had posted on the Crimescene and Sisters in Crime yahoo loops. I posted to the crimescene loop, and he sent me the URLs to the blog posts. Here they are for your viewing and perhaps writing pleasure.

http://www.leelofland.com/wordpress/cop-speak-wtf-did-he-say/

http://www.leelofland.com/wordpress/?s=cop+slang

All of this information will help to make my character, Detective Ryan Greer, sound as if he and I know what we’re talking about.

Have you ever come across a book where the character said or did something that didn’t jive with what you knew of their profession?

Paty

SH Mug Art

Staying Small Town by Paty Jager

March 13, 2017March 11, 2017 ~ patyjag ~ 9 Comments

20170311_100646 (400x225)

As I was contemplating the next Shandra Higheagle Mystery, I thought I needed to take her out of Huckleberry and away from the reservation to not have critics saying there are too many murders in the ski resort or on the reservation.

Then there was a timely blog post at Mystery Readers.org about small town cops, which had me thinking about my small town amateur sleuth.

While we all know small towns have a lower rate of murders, the small town atmosphere is what makes placing a mystery there so enticing. My character, Shandra Higheagle knows many of the local people. Her conversations are much like that of Miss Marple in the Agatha Christie books. She doesn’t wander about in an apparent aimless way asking questions like Miss Marple, but she does use the knowledge of the people in Huckleberry or the Reservation to learn the information that helps her, along with her dreams, unravel the murders.

From the blog post on small town murders, it seemed readers are willing to put up with an unusual amount of people being knocked off in a small area if you give proper reasons for the murders and give them a good test to their detective skills.

After reading the post, I moved the next book back to Huckleberry and the crime and suspects came to me like a barrage of hungry dogs. (No offense, Sheba). Putting my story back in the town I knew, with people I knew, and using one of the scenarios I’d already set up in previous books, I couldn’t wait to get started on this book.

The only thing eluding me now is the title. All the other books in the series, I had the title before I started writing. But this one is still waiting to come to me. I’m thinking Fatal Fall, because the body is found at the bottom of the stairs, and the word fall could work into the premise of the story. But I could also use Fatal Tale, as the dead person is telling her memoirs to a ghost writer. So who knows. It may end up something completely different. 😉

SH Mug Art

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Guest – Marian Allen

March 4, 2017February 17, 2017 ~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

A DEAD GUY AT THE SUMMMERHOUSE

How the DEAD GUY was born

When I began college in 1 968, I had read enough Gothic Romances to be contemptuous of the formula: Orphan girl in her late teens is hired by a brooding older man to work at a spooky, reclusive mansion; is drawn to two men, one of whom seems charming and one of whom seems threatening; pries into the secrets of the house, in spite of being warned not to; is plunged into seemingly occult danger and learns that the real threat is the supposedly charming man and that her savior and true love is the supposedly threatening man.

As an amusement, I began writing a sort of Anti-Gothic Romance: An orphan boy in his late teens is hired by an elderly ex-flapper to work at a mansion where nearly everyone is active in the community; is only drawn to one woman and stops being drawn to her when she turns out to be weird; tries his hardest to get people to STOP telling him the secrets of the house; is plunged into seemingly occult danger and learns that things just may be a little on the spooky side, after all.

After I wrote it, I decided I liked it too much to let it be just silly. As I matured in years and writing experience, I dragged it out occasionally and reworked it, adding characterization and (I hope) depth. At last, I decided it was as full as I could make it and submitted it to an agent. She loved it, and got back some very encouraging letters from publishers, but no sale.

I put it away again for a few years, decided I could improve it at this stage of experience, and reworked it again. By this time, small press publishing had blossomed, and I sold the book to Hydra Publications. During a business transition, Hydra offered me my rights back and, not knowing where that press was headed (it turned out to be getting even stronger and better) I retrieved my rights, went in with two friends and fellow writers to found Three Fates Press (which died and was transformed, under the amazing Amanda Rotatch Lambkin, into Line by Lion Press) and then Per Bastet Publications, and A DEAD GUY AT THE SUMMERHOUSE was finally born.

The cover delights me. The cover art is one of the first works done by my #4 daughter, Sara Marian, who is also one of our partners and one of our authors. Our other partner, T. Lee Harris, a fine arts graduate who does our formatting and cover design and is also one of our authors, found the perfect font for the time period.

A DEAD GUY AT THE SUMMERHOUSE is available in print, eBook, and audio.

Mitch Franklin thinks he’s got it made when the town’s wealthiest eccentric hires him to look after her two lapdogs. Then he meets her family. Five years ago, the last guy she hired played head games the family and servants are still trying to recover from. He also wound up dead. Now, some people think Mitch might be just like him. Some people think Mitch might BE him, back from the grave. Will Mitch survive the anniversary of his predecessor’s death, or will he be another DEAD GUY AT THE SUMMERHOUSE?

Indiebound http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781942166085

Amazon http://bookshow.me/1942166087

Audible http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/A-Dead-Guy-at-the-Summerhouse-Audiobook/B01B1Y5K4Y/

Marian Allen bio:

ma2015 Marian Allen writes science fiction, fantasy, mystery, humor, horror, mainstream, and anything else she can wrestle into fixed form.

Allen has had stories in on-line and print publications, including multiple appearances in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s SWORD AND SORCERESS anthologies. Her latest books are her YA/NA paranormal suspense, A DEAD GUY AT THE SUMMERHOUSE, her collection of science fiction stories, OTHER EARTH, OTHER STARS, and SHIFTY, her collection of fantasy stories set in the world of her fantasy trilogy, SAGE, all from Per Bastet Publications. She blogs every day at Marian Allen, Author Lady.

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