Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff

Forensic scientist Lisa Black brings all of her expertise to play in Defensive Wounds, the newest forensic thriller featuring investigator Theresa MacLean.

This is the fourth in the series, and there’s no question Black knows her stuff, so the story spins out with enough CSI-like details to keep crime junkies happy. But Black balances these with a deft hand at sly humor, which keeps the story rolling without becoming too scientific.

The pace hums along when Theresa is called to the Presidential Suite of Cleveland’s Ritz-Carlton to attend the murder scene of defense attorney Marie Corrigan, which happens in the middle of a huge lawyer’s convention. Known her history of corrupting evidence and witnesses, as well as making most forensic and police testifiers look bad, Corrigan’s hate list is too numerous to count. Add in her rampant sex appeal and use of it, and even Marie’s lovers could have had a motive for her murder.

What immediately ratchets up the tension is that Theresa’s only child, daughter Rachael, is working the front desk, dating a young man from the hotel’s kitchen crew. Then a second lawyer is found murdered in the hotel, and just as she gets involved in this second murder, Theresa is given information that leads to serious misgivings about Rachael’s beau. Add in the forensic nightmare of trace evidence left at at the hotel by hundreds of former guests, and Theresa’s nightmare is only beginning.

Black does a fine job of making Theresa complicated and real, as the crime unfolds and the investigation includes a detective with terrific chemistry with her. The struggle between mother and daughter is nicely done, too, and adds to the layered feel of the novel.

Next up is Angel of the Dark, the combined work of the late master storyteller Sidney Sheldon, and using his archives, novelist Tilly Bagshawe to round out the story and the complicated action.

This is novel with a theme of obsessions, dark and brooding, with action and lies at its heart.

Continuing in Sheldon’s style of heavy violence and lusty scenes, Bagshawe introduced LAPD Detective Danny MacGuire and his the big murder case that threatened to do him in. Millionaire art dealer Andrew Jakes has been brutally murdered and his lovely wife raped and beaten, then left died to her husband’s dead body. Drawn to the beautiful widow, but when he tried to question Angela Jakes about an inconsistency in her statement, she’s vanished without a trace.

Ten years later, McGuire is happily living in France, working for Interpol and enjoying life with the love of his life, Celine. Until the day Andrew’s son Matt appears, bringing evidence of three other unsolved identical slayings. Soon the two men are flying around  the globe in pursuit of the most brilliant murderer McGuire has ever seen.

Bagshawe does an admirable job of coming close to the intensity of Sheldon’s original novels. This is one readers will be able to picture on the big screen, larger than life, and filled with those endings that are not real resolutions at all.

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Please welcome UK author Danny Kemp, whose spy thriller THE DESOLATE GARDEN has been sold to a London production company.

To try is such a worthy thing. To wait; a worthless thing. Those who try stand to fall. While those who wait gain nothing at all. Danny Kemp.

Living ‘The Desolate Garden’ and the newly found frustrating life of a writer.

An image grows from a dream and becomes ‘real’ to the story teller. My story, The Desolate Garden, came directly from a dream. I saw, in my minds eye, an attractive woman sitting in the martini bar of a famous London Hotel, saying to a ‘supposed’ stranger, “tell me a joke.” I then enlarged on that dream, turning it into the tale that it became.

The writer in me lived that dream all day, going through the life of the central characters as if it was me walking those streets in their shoes.

My father, when alive, said I was deceitful, meaning I told lies . . . That’s really a story in the making, as you become aware that you have to remember the initial ‘lie.’ With a story you write that ‘lie,’ and easily refer back to it. Father was right, incidentally.

Some, I believe, over complicate storytelling with needless grammar that only the esoteric can recognize. I want to understand the tale, not have to refer to a dictionary.

All my life I’ve been around people of different breeding, speaking to them and hearing them speak and, perhaps more importantly, listening to them. Dialogue makes a story solid to me. As a writer you paint the broad strokes, then let the characters come alive and fill in the detail, as you or I would if you come across a stranger who asks about your life. The beginning, the hook, is important. The end is important. The middle is what joins the two together and makes or breaks that story.

If you live an interesting life, and are lucky, it never goes from point A, birth, straight to point B, death. It has many diversions . . . that’s the story.

I saw it once described as packing a suitcase. The stuff you pack in the middle are the essential bits; in my case, that’s the story. Some, I find, fill it with dull, bland prose that rolls on and on, full of dross. In the case of a film they use the bedroom to hide the mundane. To me, the story never stops being told. Never an item of clothing of waste in the suitcase, or a passage in the novel, that isn’t necessary.

I have always a beginning. I have two stories at various stages underway now, and another beginning of one in my head. The middle leads off from that . . . leading to an end that I never know when I start.

It excites me that way, as nothing is forced. If there is a defined ‘end’ when you start, it seems to me that you are governed by that ‘end.’ I’m open all the way until it’s obvious, to me, but not the reader. (There’s that deception that my father recognized.) Then I might go back and change something in that middle if needs be, or simply redefine the dialogue, perhaps a hint of that end. Here’s a brief synopsis of the story of The Desolate Garden, which I hope you will read and enjoy:

Only months before the murders of Lord Elliot Paterson and his youngest son Edward, an address in Leningrad is discovered hidden in the ledgers of the Families Private Bank in Westminster, dating back to the 1930’s.—-There is a spy in the Family, but on whose side?

Elliot’s eldest son, Harry, is recruited into the British Intelligence Service to uncover the traitor. Lord Harry Paterson, Earl of Harrogate, is introduced to an attractive woman from the Foreign Office and together, desperately, they try to unravel the intricate web before the killer strikes again.

The Desolate Garden is a twisting tale of deceit and intrigue, spanning decades when the truth was best not told!

The Desolate Garden is on forty worldwide internet sites and in major bookshops in the United Kingdom. It comes in Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle and Nook.

The Amazon link where four chapters can be read from either the Book or The Kindle is: http://www.amazon.com/The-Desolate-Garden-ebook/dp/B008BJWJ2Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0

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