Designed to Kill Is Free Today

If you're new to retired Air Force investigator Greg McKenzie, and his wife, Jill, here's your chance to get started for free. Today (Saturday, Sept. 14) through Monday (Sept. 16), the second book in the series, Designed to Kill, will be available in ebook format for the Kindle at no cost.

Don't have a Kindle? No problem. Download the free version to your Windows computer or tablet, Android phone or tablet, iPhone, iPad or MAC, Blackberry or Windows phone. Just go to the Free Kindle Reading Apps Page and pick your device.

Designed to Kill is a tale of greed that leads to murder. It involves a high-rise condo on the beach at Perdido Key, Florida designed and engineered by the son of Greg and Jill's best friends from the first book in the series, Secret of the Scroll. A party in the 15th floor suite celebrating completion of the project ends abruptly when the balcony falls, killing two celebrants.

The investigating sheriff's officer tells Tim Gannon his balcony caused two deaths. The next morning Gannon is found dead of a gunshot wound at the nearby Gulf Islands National Seashore. The deputy says "suicide" and the medical examiner agrees.

Tim's dad, Sam Gannon, Greg's best friend, disagrees. He asks Greg to go down to Florida and find out what happened. As Greg digs into the case, assisted by Jill, he finds lots of disturbing facts.There are plans missing, an obstinate contractor, a too-slick developer, and an inspector angry over a disrupted love affair.

When Mafia goons rough him up, Greg realizes it's time to target a murderer. But who? Jill's help with the case leads to a partnership that goes through the next three books. And there's another in the works.
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Carl Brookins Reviews The Good, The Bad

Veteran Minnesota mystery writer and reviewer Carl Brookins has checked in with this review of The Good, The Bad and The Murderous:

This is Campbell's seventh novel of crime fiction. There are a number of strings to the plot and a sub-plot or two as well. They are all nicely balanced, in that the main crime, murder and Medicare fraud remains at the center of attention. Sid Chance is a private investigator in Tennessee. His occasional assistant is a wealthy ex-cop improbably named Jaz LeMieux. LeMieux has inherited a successful retail travel business. In this story, she's besieged by erroneous reports of having made damaging racial slurs and as the book develops she shares some risks with her buddy, Sid.

Chance is a former Special Forces veteran, a former Forestry ranger and small town police chief. Now he's dipping an experienced toe into different waters as he establishes himself as a private investigator. When a young man, fresh out of prison, is arrested for a murder, the case appears to be a slam dunk. But the accused man has a fervent supporter in his grandmother and she appeals to Jaz who turns to Sid. And as Sid remarks, "Do I sense Messers Pro and Bono arriving?"

Things spiral out of control as the motive for the murder becomes much more than originally considered and both Sid and Jaz are targeted. The writing is straightforward and very believable. There's plenty of detail but it's rarely more that we need. Characters, setting, plot points are all rational and nicely handled. Readers won't finish this novel musing over revealed heavy philosophical truths, but they will have a bang-up satisfying time skulking about and sliding through dark tunnels with Sid Chance and Jaz LeMieux.

Crime up front? Murder she wrote?

On the Make Mine Mystery blog, Marvin Wilson referred to an article on the Top 10 Rules for Mystery Writing by Ginny Wiehardt, which you can find by clicking on the title. Marvin wrote about her number one rule: in mystery writing, plot is everything. I decided to comment on a couple of related rules a little farther on.

Her Rule 3 says to “introduce the crime within the first three chapters of your mystery novel.” She adds, “The crime and the ensuing questions are what hook your reader. As with any fiction, you want to do that as soon as possible.”

I agree that something criminal needs to take place up front or you won’t have much of a mystery. I’m not a big fan, though, of rules that say “you must do this by Chapter X.” In The Marathon Murders, my fourth Greg McKenzie mystery, the first body doesn’t show up until Chapter 8. But by the end of Chapter 3, it’s clear somebody is missing and not under auspicious circumstances.

This leads to Ginny Wiehardt’s Rule 4, “the crime should be sufficiently violent -- preferably a murder.” I’ll accept that. After all, murder is so…final. It isn’t a reversible error, as a lawyer might say. She continues, “for many readers, only murder really justifies the effort of reading a 300-page book while suitably testing your detective's powers.”

However, unless the book features a police detective pursuing a case, murder may not be the central crime, at least initially. Since private detectives aren’t normally involved with murders, unless it’s a cold case where the family wants to know what happened, our PIs are usually pursuing some other crime when they encounter the aftermath of a murder.

In my new book, The Surest Poison, my detective is investigating the origin of a massive toxic chemical dump. He is involved only peripherally with the murders until close to the end. There are kidnappings and assaults and explosions, but he isn’t looking for a murderer.

How do you feel about it? Should the actively-pursued crime be murder, and does it need to occur right at the first of the story?

Deciding how to commit murder

Early in the process of writing my last Greg McKenzie mystery, I decided on the title The Marathon Murders. At the time, I had no idea how many murders would occur or who all the victims would be. Since the story revolved around a man missing in 1914, I knew the identity of the first victim, but not how he died.

In his blog awhile back at Murderous Musings, Ben Small wrote “Bump ‘Em Off, Eh?” and mentioned several methods of dispatching people who needed killing. I wound up using different methods for each murder in the Marathon book but didn’t consciously plan it that way.

As a “seat of the pants” plotter, I let the story develop as I write. The characters move the plot as they do their own thing.

I didn’t get very far into the Marathon story until somebody was pulling a body out of a lake. Hmm, I thought. How did he die? At first it looked like a blow to the head. To be sure, I turned to the mystery writer’s favorite medical forensic guru, Dr. D. P. (Doug) Lyle. I emailed him with the situation my characters found and asked a few questions. He sent an answer and referred me to his website for more elaboration. All things considered, it turned out the guy had drowned.

Two more murders occurred in the book before Greg and Jill McKenzie could lay the case to rest, but based on the circumstances, they were pretty straightforward.

One of my blogging colleagues mentioned a book on poisons that provides plenty of fodder for writers trying to decide how to kill. I bought two of Dr. Lyle’s books, Forensics for Dummies and Murder and Mayhem. The latter is subtitled “A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic Questions for Mystery Writers.” It is organized under three main headings: Doctors, Hospitals, Illnesses, and Injuries; Methods of Murder and Mayhem; and Tracking the Perp.

The good doctor has revised his website since I last visited. Now www.dplylemd.com has a section called The Writers Forensic Community where questions from authors and Doug Lyle’s answers are archived. He also has a section with articles of interest to writers written by himself and Lee Lofland, a former cop who has a blog called The Graveyard Shift that is a goldmine of police info.

The goal of all this, of course, is to make our fictional murders sound authentic. As Dr. Lyle says in one of his articles, “To write a good mystery that will keep the reader guessing to the end, you must plot the nearly perfect murder.” Deciding what makes it nearly perfect is the writer’s number one task.

Why do they murder?

I haven’t indulged in any scientific study of the subject, but it seems to me that in crime fiction the most popular motive for murder is greed. I say that using the dictionary definition of greed: “An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves.” Most often it involves money in some form or another, but it could be almost anything, including somebody else’s wife.

One of the classic Bible murders occurred when David got his henchmen to arrange the death of Uriah. That left him free to marry Uriah’s widow, Bathsheba. James M. Cain used a similar plot (sans henchmen) in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is a classic tale of greed. All the killing is done in an attempt to acquire the supposedly ancient black bird.

Another popular fictional murder motive is revenge or retribution. This has spawned the good guy killer fad seen most notably in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. The hero doesn’t consider them murders but retribution for injustices to himself or other friendly characters.

Interestingly enough, this type of rationalization is similar to that of the schoolyard killers. At Columbine and Virginia Tech, the students rationalized that they were punishing other kids who had bullied them, ostracized them, made fun of them, or generally made them feel unwanted. In the fictional world, authors make sure their targets are painted black enough that there’s no doubt “they deserve it.”

Actually, rationalization is the balm that most murderers use to justify what they’re doing in their own minds, even when they know it is against the will of the law and society. They become determined to do it anyway.

I say most murderers, because there are always the psychopaths—serial killers. These guys (and a few gals) are so egocentric and socially disconnected that they know what they’re doing is right. Nobody else matters, so what’s to rationalize? Psychologists say there are plenty of them around. Fortunately, only a few drift into the murderous category. Except in fiction.

So why do they murder? If you’re writing a novel, they can do it for any good (or bad) reason you can dream up. Just try to keep it believable.

My fascination with murder

My fascination with the subject of murder began back in 1948, during my early days as a newspaper reporter. I had gone to work for The Knoxville Journal the previous fall, at the start of my junior year in journalism at the University of Tennessee. It would make a lot more interesting story to say I was involved in writing about murder cases back then, but no such luck. My assignments were on the order of reporting on dog shows. However, I read a couple of books by Horace McCoy—They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and No Pockets in a Shroud—during that time, firing up my imagination. The latter featured a reporter covering a murder case.

I sat down at my little portable typewriter in the dank depths of my fraternity house and banged out a murder mystery. It featured (what else?) a reporter helping solve a homicide. The editor at a Philadelphia publishing house declined, saying he had too many manuscripts already. Yeah. And though it was twenty years before I tried my hand at another novel, I was hooked on murder and mysteries.

I’ve often thought about what gets us all, writers and readers alike, so jazzed up on murder. To most of us (with the exception of those mentioned below), taking a human life is the ultimate crime. The damage done by thieves and robbers can be overcome, but death is as final as it gets. We love to delve into the motivations of a killer, peel away the layers of cunning behavior and rash activity that lead to the inevitable outcome. And we stare through voyeur eyes at how the crime affects those around the victim.

Serial killers have been a staple of crime fiction for several years now, but I’ve found few who could match the real thing we encounter occasionally on TV. There’s one type of killer who hasn’t appeared much in fiction yet, or maybe I just haven’t read enough books. That’s the unconscionable youth who kills without remorse. The news in Nashville, my hometown, deals too often with a teenager who robs a clerk and then shoots him or her for no apparent reason. We may see more of that in fiction soon.

Writers flock to murderous subjects since that’s where the action is. The mystery genre, taken in its broadest context, ranks second to romance in terms of book sales. I suspect man’s inhumanity to man will keep mystery writers busy at their keyboards for years to come, and as long as I’m around, I’ll be right there among ‘em.

If you’d like to read the long version of how I got started and where I’ve been, check out “Reflections on the Writing Life—my 60-year odyssey with the written word” at http://www.chesterdcampbell.com/Reflections.htm.