Category: Research

Guest Blogger ~ Glenda Carroll

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

Where Did I Put That Plot?

By Glenda Carroll

            Plots don’t come easily to me. When I first started writing the Trisha Carson amateur sleuth mysteries about ten years ago, I sat down and blithely typed away following any idea wherever it took me. But that stopped working. I aimlessly spent time chasing after dead ends … nicely written, to be sure, but instead of moving the plot along, it stopped it cold. I wasted so much time.  I realized that I needed more control over what happened and when.  I’m not a plotter, as you can tell. I enjoy the freedom of following whims. So, this hasn’t been an easy step for me. But I’m trying.

 Take Better Off Dead (BOD), the latest book in the mystery series. Like all the mysteries before it, I knew the catalyst for the plot. It’s always based loosely on something true. In the series, each book swirls with an undercurrent of open water swimming.  That’s usually the true part.

 Almost fourteen years ago, a solo swimmer in the Maui Channel Swim, a 10-mile relay race between the islands of Lanai and Maui, was sucked under a powerboat by the propeller wash near the finish line. He suffered catastrophic injuries to one arm which had to be amputated and one hand that was reattached although it had two finders missing. I wasn’t there, but I read about it. Things like that stay in the back of my mind especially when I’m swimming in open water like the San Francisco Bay in Spring and Summer and Fall.  It came to the surface when I began to think about BOD.  I knew I wanted to use the idea of a horrible boating accident. But I needed a victim, some potential murderers and a realistic answer to the question, “why?”

            I lingered over the concept of a premeditated horrific accident but could go no further. At the time, I was also tutoring first generation, low-income high school students in English. One sophomore was reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet and wasn’t thrilled about the language. He didn’t understand Elizabethan English and no amount of my prompting and wheedling made the play on par with a Marvel comic book. That is until I told him the story of Hamlet, his dead father, his uncle and his mother in everyday language. It went something like this:  Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is at university when he learns of his father’s death. While returning to the family castle, he runs into the ghost of his dad who tells him that his brother, Hamlet’s uncle, poisoned him and that he wants revenge. The revenge part sparked his interest.

 I lingered on how Shakespeare killed his actors: drowning, poisoning, stabbing with a sword, stabbing with a poisoned sword. I compared it to the violence running through video games or a superhero movie. What if Hamlet was the Hulk? That caught his attention. I convinced him to come up with a modern-day plot based on Hamlet. He bought into the idea.  So, we read the play, both the contemporary translation and the Elizabethan language version and he jotted down notes to help him with his video game. That’s when the light bulb went off.  If my student could update Hamlet, so could I. Later that evening, following Shakespeare’s plot, I started writing … modernizing the famous revenge tragedy. The moody Hamlet became Harrison. His dead father and the very much alive brother turned into Andy and Marty Barlow, wealthy Marin County financiers. That’s all the kick I needed. The story began to fall into place.

I can’t say the rest was easy, but I could see a path ahead of me. As part of the Acknowledgement in Better Off Dead, I thanked Will Shakespeare. Without him and Hamlet, there would not have been a Book 4 in the Trisha Carson series.

I’ve started Book 5, and it revolves around a skull found on a San Francisco Bay beach covered in eel grass. (That’s the true part.) Do you think I learned anything from my experience with Better Off Dead? Unfortunately, no. I have no idea what to write next.

BETTER OFF DEAD: A Trisha Carson Mystery

Successful Marin County, Ca financier, Andy Barlow, is training for a competitive open water swim in the cold San Francisco Bay. Unexpectedly, his support boat runs him over midstroke, killing the swimmer instantaneously. Consumed with grief and anger, Andy’s college-aged son Harrison, returns from London to probe what really happened. Although the local sheriff’s office and the Coast Guard have closed the case, Harrison refuses to believe their findings. He reaches out to amateur sleuth Trisha Carson to hunt down the real killer.

Trisha digs into the man’s history and finds fractured relationships in his family, his business and his marriage. There’s clearly more than one person who had reason to seek a deadly revenge, but would they go as far as murder?

Amazon – paperback, ebook

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Dead-Trisha-Carson-Mystery/dp/B0DXKTJRK2

Barnes & Noble – paperback, ebook

https://tinyurl.com/u4tt9nas

Audiobooks

Apple:  https://tinyurl.com/y5t5jw34

Audible:  https://tinyurl.com/yy5anbwr

Glenda Carroll is the author of the amateur sleuth Trisha Carson mysteries set in the beautiful San Francisco Bay area. The fourth book in the series, Better Off Dead, came out in Spring 2025. It’s available in paperback, ebook and audiobook. Alas, Carroll hasn’t won any awards; hasn’t even been short-listed for one. Glenda spends more time swimming than writing. She also tutors first generation, low-income high school students in English and History. She is the current president of Sisters in Crime, Northern California.

She lives in Northern California with her dog, McCovey.

Website: glendacarroll.com

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y5mmhh55

Indies United Publishing House Lcc: https://tinyurl.com/ycynyr8a

Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/u4tt9nas

Audible: https://tinyurl.com/yy5anbwr

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/glenda.carroll

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenda.carroll/

Bluesky: ‪@ggcarroll.bsky.social

Are You Listening to What They Are Saying?

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 2 Comments


by Janis Patterson

Books are a widely varying commodity. Some are so wonderful you could live in that world forever. Some are so bad you don’t even try to finish them. Most fall somewhere in the middle. Right now we’re dealing with a new kind of book, a kind of zombie product written by the abomination of AI and released by the overwhelming hundreds. Luckily – for now, at least – they are recognizable primarily for their lifelessness.


So what is it that binds these widely varying standards together – good, bad and zombie?


There are lots of things, but I believe a lot of it is dialogue. Good books have the characters speaking as if they were real people – not interchangeable cardboard cutouts. Of course, this is occasionally a rule that can be tweaked. In a futuristic sci-fi populated with human-android characters, the speech patterns and word choices would be different than in a light-hearted Regency romance, and each choice should be congruent not only with the time and setting of the book, but with the status/occupation/ethnicity of the individual character.


For an only slightly exaggerated example, everyone is familiar with the slave Prissy’s exclamation during the battle of Atlanta sequence in Gone With The Wind – “I don’t know nothing ‘bout birthing no babies.” As offensive as some modern readers might find it, her heartfelt cry is commensurate with her time, her status and the situation of the scene. Just imagine how jarring it would be if she were to say : “Good gracious, Miss O’Hara, I am completely ignorant of the processes involved in delivering a baby.” That would pull the reader right out of the scene. To a large extent, language equals character.


And the principle doesn’t really change no matter what the genre, though the actual words probably will. In a hard-boiled detective story, a police sergeant is not going to speak the same way as a career petty thief. In a western, a wealthy rancher with political aspirations will sound different from a brow-beaten saddle tramp. In a Regency romance a high in the instep duke will have a completely different vocabulary and range of meaning than a poverty-stricken dock worker. In a contemporary romance sometimes the difference will be less blatant, mainly because of the ubiquity of books and television acting as influencers, but there will be noticeable differences.


Just to make the convoluted even more so, know that all the above can be overridden if the plot demands. Perhaps the duke is working on the docks to find out who is stealing his fortune or something. Perhaps the weary saddle tramp is really a Pinkerton man out to investigate the rancher whom he thinks is really setting himself up as a dictator. Perhaps…. you get the idea. Confustication upon confustication. But you must play fair with the reader – not by telling him from the outset what is going on, but by allowing him to listen to the various people and find out the truth for himself.


Language equals character.


And if you’re writing a hard sci-fi about three-eyed, blue-skinned Orychiks from the Dyinolive galaxy with no humans involved you’re pretty much on your own… just remember that in almost every society the ‘elites’ (for want of a better word) speak differently than the ‘hoi polloi’ (again for want of a better word) primarily as a matter of status. I think this need for distinction, for individuality (even in a herd sense) is hardwired to people’s/being’s innermost self. Even among most animal species there is a distinct pecking order.


Just remember two things – language creates and showcases character, and you must play fair – enough that the reader can follow along with you and understand, even if you do pull a few tricks along the way.

Guest Blogger ~Joanne McLaughlin

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

Repeat That Name, Please  

            Identity is a big deal in my novels. Maybe it has something to do with all the Superman comic books I read in the barbershop while my dad was having his hair cut. Lots of identity stuff in those stories, secret and otherwise. Midwestern farm boy or big-city newspaper reporter? Mild-mannered, bespectacled guy or visitor from another planet able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?  

            Names—specifically, who we are versus the person we allow the world to see—are a common thread in my first four published novels, three darkly romantic vampire tales and a thriller. Vampires reinvent themselves from century to century; the rest of us sometimes do, though over shorter lifetimes. And, of course, in literature and in life, often all we know of a person at first is the name presented to us.

            In my fifth novel, A Poetic Puzzle, one name sets my protagonist, M. Irene “Mimi” Jones—an under-recognized, under-employed poet/English literature professor—on a mission. It’s the name she shares with internationally acclaimed poet Mary Irene Jones, who has vanished, but not before sending Mimi a cache of her heretofore unpublished manuscripts. Is the timing of these two events a coincidence? Are the manuscripts clues of some sort? And if so, why entrust them to Mimi, of all people? The same-name thing must be significant, right?

            I should mention here that the house Mimi lives in is one she inherited from yet another Mary Irene Jones, the paternal grandmother for whom she was named.

            About that: The name Mary Irene Jones is what prompted me to write A Poetic Puzzle.

            You see, my own father’s mother was a Mary Irene Jones, too, before she married my grandfather. She didn’t disappear, per se, but I never got to know her. My dad scarcely did—he was only nine years old when she died in 1931 of what was apparently characterized as “women’s trouble.” My mother suspected that meant some sort of reproductive or breast cancer. I’m not sure anyone now living would know. My father was the family’s youngest child; he, his older brother, and his two older sisters are gone now.

            I look like my father, as does my son. Both of them more closely resemble George McLaughlin, Mary Irene’s husband, my paternal grandfather. But in the lone photograph I have of her, I can see myself.

            That photo, actually a picture of a photograph, may be the only one that still exists. I don’t know whether she had siblings whose children or grandchildren might have family photo albums. I have never had close ties to my McLaughlin relatives, let alone any Jones descendants who might be her family. Judging from her husband’s birth year, I think this Mary Irene was born in the United States in the late 19th century, but I don’t know when or where. I know she married a man from northeastern Pennsylvania and ended up living in Philadelphia, but I don’t know the circumstances. Except for the year, I don’t know the date of her death or where she was buried.

            That sepia-tone image of my grandmother sits next to my laptop as I write this. I’ve studied it endlessly, searching for clues beyond the obvious. In it, she has dark hair, brown, I suppose, since my father and I and at least one of his sisters had dark brown hair. She has a long face not unlike mine—my late Aunt Vera, whom I resemble a bit, had the same long face.

            Pince-nez eyeglasses sit on my grandmother’s nose—maybe she was near-sighted the way I am. Her light-colored, lacy long-sleeved dress is cinched at the waist with a bow. And she is standing outdoors, with trees in the background. Holding her left hand is a small boy, maybe sandy-haired, maybe five years old. He is dressed for warm weather. My mother told me that she had been told that the boy was not my dad, but who offered that information, I don’t know.

            Were my grandmother and this boy, presumably her other son, standing in their backyard? Were they having a picnic in a park? Were her daughters—one older than the boy, one younger—playing away from the camera’s lens? Was my father an infant napping nearby?

            How my mother came to give me this photo, I don’t recall. Did my uncle’s wife, a distant cousin of Dad’s who married his brother, give it to my parents? My mother always suggested that particular aunt-by-marriage was the source of whatever McLaughlin family history we were aware of. Ancestry.com shows any number of second and third and more distant cousins with whom I share a bit of DNA, but because I have no details about my grandmother’s forebears, I can’t readily know which of these many cousins, if any, sprang from the same branch of the family tree she and I came from. Answers might lie at the bottom of a deep and daunting rabbit hole, to add another garden metaphor, or it might be a fruitless search.

            Truly, Mary Irene Jones McLaughlin is a mystery to me.

            Which got me thinking back in spring 2022: What if I immortalized her (sort of) in a mystery? What if, given that I knew little more than her name, that’s where my story began?

            I dropped her married name from the plot line, lest someone think this book was nonfiction. Also because, as names go, Mary and Jones are definitely common ones.

            As A Poetic Puzzle opens, the reader learns that the two Mary Irene Joneses not only have the same name, but also the same occupation, and are affiliated with the same small college in suburban Philadelphia. It soon becomes apparent, however, that what’s in a name is a confounding, confusing bit of business.

            Mimi Jones discovers much as she scrutinizes the pieces of A Poetic Puzzle, not the least of which is this:

            How well do we really know anyone?  

A Poetic Puzzle

Internationally acclaimed poet Mary Irene Jones has vanished—calls and texts unacknowledged, bank accounts emptied, car abandoned. But before she disappeared, she mailed never-published manuscripts to a lesser-known namesake poet, M. Irene “Mimi” Jones. Are the manuscripts clues only Mimi can decipher? And what about the handsome Philadelphia cop assigned to the case? He seems as intrigued by Mimi as by the missing celebrity poet. Talk about a person of interest…

Amazon.com: A Poetic Puzzle: A Mystery in 32 Pieces: 9781951967130: McLaughlin, Joanne: Books
A Poetic Puzzle – Kindle edition by McLaughlin, Joanne. Romance Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Joanne McLaughlin began telling stories in second grade, creating superhero fan fiction in the Philadelphia rowhouse where she grew up. She has worked for public media and newspapers in Philadelphia, upstate New York, and northeastern Ohio, involved in award-winning coverage of topics from politics and public health to fashion and financial markets, as well as Pulitzer Prize-finalist architecture criticism and a Peabody Award-nominated podcast. For several years, she also served as vice president of a firm that managed and booked blues musicians. Her novels include the romantic mystery A Poetic Puzzle; Chasing Ashes, a crime thriller; and Never Before Noon, Never Until Now, and Never More Human, a vampire trilogy. Her latest short fiction appears in Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Volume 1; the short stories Peppina’s Sweetheart and Grass and Granite are available on Amazon. Joanne is inspired by strong women like the ones who raised her, determined to meet challenges head on. Joannemclaughlin.net

Social media:
https://facebook.com/joannemclaugh

https:Instagram.com/joannemclaugh

@joannemclaughlin.bsky.social

Joanne McLaughlin (@joannemclaugh) / X

Joanne McLaughlin | LinkedIn

Guest Blogger ~ M.E. Proctor

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

Bop City Swing, or When Writers Click

By M.E. Proctor

We should write something together, I’ve heard these words many times. The suggestion is always vague and about as binding as the clichéd ‘let’s do lunch one of these days’. Many years ago, a friend and I planned to write a book. He was a big science fiction fan, so that’s what we decided to do. I delivered the first chapter. My friend never produced chapter 2, and I ended up doing the entire thing. It turned into a four-book dystopian series, The Savage Crown.

So, when fellow crime writer Russell Thayer typed in a social media chat that “Tom should go after Gunselle someday. Imagine the interrogation scene!” I agreed that bringing our two recurrent short story characters together was a cool idea, but I doubted it would go anywhere.

I was wrong. We’re a year later and Bop City Swing is on the bookshelves. Even better, Russell and I are working on another mystery featuring the same two leads.

Russ’s creation is Vivian Davis, aka Gunselle, a contract killer. He has written more than twenty short stories spanning the late 1930s-early 1950s with her in the starring role. My guy (he’s in a dozen stories so far) is Tom Keegan, a homicide detective in 1950 San Francisco. A professional killer and a cop, in the same place at the same time … sounds like a match made in Noir heaven.

Early last year, Russ and I both happened to have pieces published at the same time in two different magazines. A mash-up—in the vein of CSI meets Law & Order—was top of mind again and we started brainstorming ideas for a short story. What if she’s hired to bump him off … What if they’re after the same killer… We eventually decided to build the story around a political assassination that would involve both characters, coming at it from their respective angles. The detective investigates the case, in straight procedural fashion, and the contract killer is embroiled in it sideways. She didn’t commit the crime.

We never discussed the mechanics of the collaboration. It felt natural to tell the story from a double point of view (POV), Russ writing the Vivian-Gunselle chapters, while I wrote Tom’s scenes. The differences in our styles fit the particular voice of our respective characters. If there were awkward disparities or rough edges, we figured we could polish them off after the first draft.

Russ sent me a snippet of Gunselle being hired for a job she dislikes—fixing somebody else’s mess, i.e. the assassination (that plot line was discarded later on)—and a few days later, I sent him Tom’s arrival at the crime scene, the ballroom of a luxury hotel. The suspect is a musician in the jazz band hired for the event.

Everybody knows that most of the research should be done before starting to write the story, it’s a lot more efficient, but we were both eager to get something going. Now, with two scenes drafted, we had to make sure we were historically correct on the when and the where.

The when would be 1951, an election year. That November, San Francisco re-elected the incumbent republican mayor, Elmer Robinson. The fictional who (the victim) would be Charles Forrester, the democratic challenger launching his campaign at a June fundraiser. Where would be the Palace Hotel, conveniently located downtown, with a good size ballroom—an internet deep dive delivered period-accurate floorplans.

We knew when, where, and who, but like our two lead actors, we were stumped by the motive. Why was Charles Forrester shot? We wouldn’t find out for a while.

Writing a story is like a treasure hunt. Every sentence, written on the fly, contains potential clues. Here’s an example. The decision to make the killer a jazz trumpeter gave the plot a definite slant. It also gave us the opportunity to dig into the rich Bay Area music scene of the early 50s, the various clubs, the talent on display, the racial tensions, the lure of the city at night, the early involvement of the Mob in the drug trade. Russ had touched on the music angle in some of his stories and brought all that background into the plot, with great secondary characters. One of them, Maggie, became central to nailing down the motive and the final resolution. Through Maggie, we also touched on the war, only six years in the past, and its aftermath, how deeply it scarred many characters in the story.

Very soon, the project was no longer a short story. Bop City Swing had turned into a book.

During the months it took to complete a solid first draft, we had a couple of mini-debates. One of them was about who would enter the scene first.

Homicide cops always get there after the fact, by definition. We decided to start with Gunselle and put her in the ballroom, at the very beginning, before the shots ring out. That gave us the story hook. She was hired for the hit and somebody beat her to it. She’s pocketed the down payment. For doing nothing. As a professional, it sticks in her craw.

Another discussion was about the key confrontation between our two characters. Up to that climactic moment, they’d both gone through their moves separately, with only a glancing accidental contact that showed mutual interest. Yes, this is where it gets sexy … Who would write that scene, in whose POV? We considered writing it twice, in a ‘he says, she says’ tango, but it proved clunky. I wrote the initial scene, from Tom’s voice, then Russ took it and turned it around. It worked a lot better that way, Gunselle initiates the event and is the more active character. It was also fun to write Tom’s reaction afterwards.

We initially wrote our respective scenes separately. After a few weeks, we built a master document that we carried all through to the end, highlighting changes, constantly adjusting things. Russ writes snappy action scenes and I tend to be atmospheric. In the master document, we started blending things. He added bite and I added background.

Mid-way through the process, we built a timeline. The characters were all in motion and the investigation picked up speed. A beat-by-beat sequence of events helped us figure out the ending. None of what happens in the last act was in the cards from the start.

The time we took to consider options, writing them and discarding parts of them, might appear to be a waste but was crucial in coming up with the best solution. The beginning of the story, in particular, was rewritten multiple times. Part of the fun in a collaboration is having your partner put something on the table that you would never have come up with on your own.

Writing is a solitary pursuit. Sometimes, it feels good to share. Russ and I had so much fun, we’re doing it again. There will be more Tom and Gunselle in the future. I’ll keep you posted!

—-

Bop City Swing

San Francisco. 1951.

Jazz is alive. On radios and turntables. In the electrifying Fillmore clubs, where hepcats bring their bebop brilliance to attentive audiences. In the posh downtown venues where big bands swing in the marble ballrooms of luxury hotels.

That’s where the story begins, with the assassination of a campaigning politician during a fundraiser.

Homicide detective, Tom Keegan, is first on the scene. He’s eager, impatient, hot on the heels of the gunman. Gunselle, killer for hire, is no longer there. She flew the coop, swept away in the rush of panicked guests.

They both want to crack the case. Tom, because he’s never seen a puzzle he didn’t want to solve, no matter what the rules say. Gunselle, because she was hired to take out the candidate and somebody beat her to it. It was a big paycheck. It hurts. In her professional pride and wallet.

The war has been over for six years, but the suffering and death, at home and abroad, linger as a horror behind the eyes of some men. And one young woman.

Bop City Swing is the brainchild of Russell Thayer, author of the Gunselle stories, and M.E. Proctor, who occasionally takes a break from Declan Shaw, her Houston PI, to don Tom Keegan’s gray fedora.

Buy Links:

Bop City Swing is available in eBook and paperback

On Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Bop-City-Swing-Proctor-Thayer/dp/B0F4DSSQ9V/

From reviews:

“A wild ride down the neon-lit streets of post-WWII America, with bebop wailing in the nightclub on the corner, the white witch pumping through the veins of the junkie on the barstool, three slugs draining the life from the charismatic politician with a shady past, and enough snappy dialogue to light up the faces of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.”

M.E. Proctor (www.shawmystery.com) was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. The first book in her Declan Shaw PI series, Love You Till Tuesday (2024), came out from Shotgun Honey, with the follow up, Catch Me on a Blue Day, scheduled for 2025. She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments, and the co-author of a retro-noir novella, Bop City Swing. Her fiction has appeared in Vautrin, Tough, Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly among others. She’s a Derringer nominee.

Social Links

Author Website: www.shawmystery.com

On Substack: https://meproctor.substack.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/martine.proctor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEProctor3

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/meproctor.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/proctormartine/

Russell Thayer’s work has appeared in Brushfire, Tough, Roi Fainéant Press, Guilty Crime Story Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Close to the Bone, Bristol Noir, Apocalypse Confidential, Cowboy Jamboree Press, Hawaii Pacific Review, Shotgun Honey, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Rock and a Hard Place Press, Revolution John, Punk Noir Magazine, Expat Press, Pulp Modern, The Yard Crime Blog, and Outcast Press. He received his BA in English from the University of Washington, worked for decades at large printing companies, and currently lives in Missoula, Montana. You can find him lurking on Twitter @RussellThayer10.

Pesky little thing called research.

~ patyjag ~ 8 Comments

When I learned about an event that is held every year in the area where I set my Gabriel Hawke novels, I decided I would write a book around that event. How hard could it be to have my character, who is a Fish and Wildlife State Trooper, become involved with finding a person or a killer during a sled dog race competition?

Well… Let me tell you, now that I’ve been digging into the logistics, the multitude of volunteers, the less than 60 hours for the total of the 200 mile race, and that doesn’t even count the weather conditions, I’m starting to wonder if this was a good idea.

Map of the race

I’ve had my first interview with a person who has volunteered for this event for 20 years. She gave me some good insight into logistics and more people I will need to interview. This book won’t be ready to write for at least two more weeks as I talk to the head of technology, mushers, the race marshal, and judge.

What had started out as a “fun idea” has now blossomed into much more of a project. I can’t even start my suspect chart or decide how someone would be murdered or missing without doing all the research. There are so many uncertainties that I can’t even begin to fathom what the motive would be.

This is so out of the norm for what I normally do when writing a book in this series. By the time I’m ready to start writing the book, I have mulled over every aspect of the death, did the bit of research I needed and am ready to roll.

Now I sit, watching one more video, reading one more blog, and waiting to interview people so I can start this book. The next book my fans are waiting for me to publish. But as I dabble in the research, waiting to do the interviews, I may have to start working on the next Cuddle Farm Mystery book or even the next Spotted Pony Casino Mystery book, because my hands and imagination can’t sit idle for that long.

Depositphoto

I’ve already learned a lot that I didn’t know. Especially, about the dogs. A good mushing dog isn’t big and thick. It’s long and lean, like a marathon runner. They have high energy and stamina. The Alaskan Husky is nothing like the Siberian Husky. The Alaskan has been bred through the centuries to be fast and tough. They have a multitude of breeds in them that make them the marathoners that they are.

Now I need to learn more about the tracking of the participants during the race, the area where they sleep, and why someone, in a sport where you are dependent on one another to survive, would kill.