Going AGAINST Your Gut

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HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: We've all wondered--what would I do if? 

And sure, some people have training for some kinds of things...but sometimes, in this unpredictable world, unpredictable things happen. It's easy enough to say--well, I'd just  go with my gut. And figure out what to do when the time comes. IF the time comes.

Reading the fab Hilary Davidson's essay today I realized I might have to think again.  And then her amazing new book, One Small Sacrifice, confirms it.

You know Hilary, right? A dear pal, and a dear friend of Jungle Red, and a terrifically talented author. Truly one of the loveliest people in the biz.  (Did you know she used to be a travel writer?Ask her about finding gluten free food in the Peru. I bet she knows!)

The Case for Going Against Your Gut

By Hilary Davidson

How many times have you have you heard the phrase “Go with your gut” or “Trust your instincts”? 

When I was a kid, that always made me think of the scene at the end of the original Star Wars movie, when the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi whispers to Luke Skywalker to trust the Force, and Luke turns off his targeting system and lets instinct guide him to destroy the Death Star. 

The idea that the truth you need to know is already inside you is an intoxicating one that comes up over and over in popular culture. But there’s another side of the story we need to be honest about: Your gut is entirely capable of leading you astray.

That’s not a popular point of view, because it can feel like an insult to one’s instincts, which are deeply personal. But that’s the point: our gut reactions are the products of our own personal histories and beliefs and biases, and they’re influenced by what happens to us, good and bad. 

I learned this the hard way.

At my first job out of college when I was twenty-two, I was a victim in a workplace violence attack. I was working in a government office that served veterans, and one very disturbed vet decided that he wanted to kill his counselor and everyone else in the office. The fire he set destroyed three floors of our office building and injured several people.

 I would be the first to admit that, on that day, my gut worked perfectly well. Some of my coworkers saw the flames and froze; I ran like hell.

 But in the weeks after the trauma, my instincts started to malfunction. I would notice someone on the subway who seemed shifty or suspicious, and my gut would whisper that this person was getting ready to attack. My brain knew that this was deranged, but my gut looked at strangers through a dark prism, ever-ready to run like hell again.

 I didn’t understand for some time that I had PTSD, but I knew early on that my gut was no longer able to discern a genuinely threatening situation from an everyday scene. The trauma I’d experienced had colored my perceptions.

 The experience made me think more critically about gut reactions. We’re all marked by what we experience, for good or ill, and those imprints can stay with us for all our lives. 

  In my latest novel, One Small Sacrifice, the fallibility of gut instincts is a question my main character, NYPD Detective Sheryn Sterling, grapples with. She’s investigating a case in which a doctor has vanished, and the case is particularly troubling because the doctor’s boyfriend was involved in another woman’s death a year earlier.

 Sheryn knows that the boyfriend suffers from PTSD, and that deepens her suspicions. In her gut, she knows he’s guilty, and that belief shapes her investigation. But Sheryn’s husband forces her to take a harder look at what her gut is telling her; he’s aware that Sheryn’s father suffered from PTSD, too, and that has shaped Sheryn’s world view.

 “Instinct’s not a superpower,” he tells her. “It’s made of experience and memory and belief. Prejudice is part of that.”  

 That’s not to say that there aren’t times to trust your gut. But we should think about where those instincts come from, and how our own histories can blind us to what we need to see.

PS Thanks for having me visit again, Hank and the rest of the Reds. It’s always an honor to stop by!

HANK: And it happens, too, in less stressful situations. You think--oh, that guy just LOOKS guilty. Hmm. 

On the other hand--the gut can be pretty darn smart.

What do you think, Reds and Readers? And a copy of ONE SMALL SACRIFICE to one lucky commenter! 

(US only please--sorry, I know,  international postage mail is more expensive than the book itself. 

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(and the winner of THOSE PEOPLE is Triss! Email me with your address! And congratulations!)********

Hilary Davidson has won two Anthony Awards as well as the Derringer, Spinetingler, and Crimespree awards. She is the author of the Lily Moore series—which includes The Damage Done, The Next One to Fall, and Evil in All Its Disguises—the standalone thriller Blood Always Tells, and a short-story collection called The Black Widow Club. Her latest novel, One Small Sacrifice, was just published by Thomas & Mercer, and received a starred review from Library Journal, which said, “Fans of Karin Slaughter, Tana French, and Lisa Gardner will devour this new police procedural, which boasts a strong female detective and an intriguing antagonist. Sheryn [Sterling] will draw in readers, and Davidson’s complex storytelling will keep them wanting more.” Visit her online at https://www.hilarydavidson.com

In Flanders Field, Thoughts for Veteran's Day

RHYS BOWEN: Today we salute all veterans, those still living and those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. This year the day is especially significant as it marks the hundred year anniversary of the end of WWI.


Also known as the Great War, and for many years as THE WAR TO END ALL WARS, it was the deadliest war in human history. It killed nine million military combatants and an estimated seven million civilians. It also weakened the world population with hunger and deprivation so that when the flu struck in 1918 with a particularly virulent strain it became a worldwide pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide.

It was particularly brutal for those who had to fight as it was run by generals used to cavalry charges, who instead sent their troops against tanks and mustard gas. Imagine living in a trench, wet, cold, often knee deep in mud, then being sent "over the top" while bullets and grenades fell around you. And all to gain maybe five yards of territory, before losing it again the next day. Each assault resulted in thousands of lives lost per yard gained. It was insane. Apart from the physical wounds, the blinding and damaged lungs of mustard gas, there were the psychological wounds. To be sitting on the lawn in England, eating strawberries and cream one minute and the next day being sent back to that hell was too much for many young minds. And PTSD was not understood in those days. When they cracked and simply couldn't join an assault they were shot for cowardice.  The men who made it home were horribly damaged.

And all of this started because an anarchist assassinated an obscure archduke in a small Balkans town! I hope it makes us all think how little it takes to light the flames of ambition and conquest and how devastating the effects of the smallest act can be.

I've actually just been immersed in this topic as my next novel, that comes out in February, takes place in the Great War, and it deals with what happens when the men in a village are not coming home and women are called to do things they did not think possible. It's called The Victory Garden.

So let us all pause for a moment of silence this morning and think of all the men and women, in all of the wars, who did what they were called upon to do, with bravery and stoicism. Who died far from home in foreign fields, or came home broken. We salute them all.
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My Tour Buddy, Nick Petrie

INGRID THOFT

I had lots of fun on my "Duplicity" tour in January, largely because of my tour buddy, Nick Petrie.  Some of you may be familiar with Nick from his debut novel "The Drifter," which is nominated for the Edgar and Barry Awards for Best First Novel and the Hammett Prize for Best Novel.  The second book in the series, "Burning Bright" was released in January, hence the shared tour dates.  Nick's main character, Peter Ash, has been likened to Jack Reacher, by Lee Child himself!  His books are critically acclaimed, thought-provoking thrillers, and I have nothing but acclaim for Nick as a travel companion and friend.  He was recently in Seattle, and we caught up,

INGRID: Tell me about your main character, Peter Ash?  What inspired you to write a character who is a veteran?

NICK: Peter Ash is a highly-trained Marine Corps veteran who signed up to help his country and make a difference.  After eight years of war, he returned home with an unwanted souvenir, what he calls the White Static – an intense claustrophobia caused by post-traumatic stress that makes it hard for him to be indoors for more than a few minutes.  Like many veterans I’ve met, Peter has a deep need to be useful and a profound sense of right and wrong, which combine into a powerful drive to help others out of trouble.

I’m not a veteran myself, and for many years I didn’t think I knew many people who’d served in the military.  But in my day job as a home inspector – I’m that guy you hire to tell you (hopefully) everything wrong with your dream house – I realized during the early stages of the Great Recession that many of my inspection clients were veterans just coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.  I’m a pretty curious guy, and I found myself having some truly fascinating conversations with my clients.  They really opened my eyes to the challenges our veterans face coming home from war.  I didn’t know I was researching a novel, but as it turned out, I’d already started writing “The Drifter” somewhere in the back of my mind.  Funny how that works.

Anyway, Peter is a lot of fun to write – he gets himself into some fairly crazy situations – and he’s a great excuse to keep learning more about the evolving lives of veterans and anything else that my oddball brain finds interesting.

INGRID: “The Drifter” takes place in Milwaukee, and “Burning Bright” is set on the West Coast, including some heart stopping scenes in a forest of giant redwoods.  Why did you change locations, and can you tell us where the third book is set? 

I love writing about place – I think of the setting of a novel almost as another character – and certain stories lend themselves to certain settings.  Milwaukee, a rust-belt city suffering hard in the Great Recession, was the perfect place for "The Drifter."  With "Burning Bright," I wanted to write about technology, and the west coast was the logical setting for that.  I also lived in Seattle for ten years, have travelled all over the west, and wanted to write about some of the places I truly love.

Another answer, to be completely honest, is that I’m deeply afraid of getting bored, and changing settings feels like a great way to keep a series fresh and evolving.  I can change the subject matter and the scale of the story easily just by dropping Peter in a new town with new characters.  Plus each new setting suggests a new plot – so the truest answer, I suppose, is that I’m kinda lazy.

My third Peter Ash book is called “Light It Up” and is set in Colorado.  Peter gets involved in the new cannabis industry – drugs, guns, and big money.  It was big fun to write, plus it gave me a great reason to go explore Denver and Boulder and spend a few days backpacking in the Rockies.  

INGRID: That's the first I've heard of the title!  Very apropos!  So what do readers think about Peter?  What kind of feedback do you get from them?

NICK: I was really nervous, writing about a veteran when I’m not a veteran myself.  This is a subject I’ve grown to care deeply about, and it was important to me to get things right.  Since “The Drifter” came out, I’ve had many conversations, both in-person and online, with veterans and their family members, telling me how much they appreciate the care I took with the emotional details.  One of my favorite conversations was at a library event.  Two sisters, whose husbands both served in Vietnam, told me the book helped them understand their husbands better.  Honestly, I can’t think of a higher compliment. 

INGRID: What has surprised you most about becoming a published author? 

Frankly, I was surprised I’d ever become a published author to begin with!  I’d written three books I couldn’t get published, and I’d given up on ever publishing anything.  I wrote “The Drifter” just for myself, writing the book I most wanted to read.  To discover not only that a major publisher wanted the book, but that so many people would actually read it and enjoy it and tell their friends about it?  Pretty much blows my mind on a daily basis.   

Another great surprise is how welcoming the crime fiction community has been.  Who’d have thought that people who write about death and dismemberment would be so nice?  (I’m from Wisconsin, so I’m required to be nice.  Otherwise the authorities make you move to Illinois.) 

INGRID: It is an amazingly supportive community.  Is there a wannabe book lurking in the back of your brain, something you would write if you didn’t have to consider agents, editors, and fans?  A romance?  Sci-fi?

Oh, I have a few ticklers in the dark recesses of my demented brain.  I’d like to write about Milwaukee again – it’s a fascinating place, with a lot of layers.  The book would be something gritty and weird and maybe internet-y.  I’d like to try my hand at writing for young adults – maybe Peter Ash’s teenage years?  I’m so impressed by good YA writers.  Those books have to be extremely tight, and I think it must be really difficult to make them look so damn easy.  But those two ideas actually seem fairly reasonable.  The true leap would be some science fiction space opera – I’m a sci-fi geek from waaaay back, so that would be loads of fun.  If I could pull it off. 

If you haven't read "The Drifter" or "Burning Bright," you're missing out on a terrific series.  Nick will be here today to answer your questions, and he's giving away a signed copy of "Burning Bright."  Be sure to include your email in your comment!

BURNING BRIGHT

In the new novel featuring war veteran Peter Ash, “an action hero of the likes of Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne” (Lincoln Journal-Star), Ash has a woman’s life in his hands—and her mystery is stranger than he could ever imagine.

War veteran Peter Ash sought peace and quiet among the towering redwoods of northern California, but the trip isn’t quite the balm he’d hoped for. The dense forest and close fog cause his claustrophobia to buzz and spark, and then he stumbles upon a grizzly, long thought to have vanished from this part of the country. In a fight of man against bear, Peter doesn’t favor his odds, so he makes a strategic retreat up a nearby sapling.

There, he finds something strange: a climbing rope, affixed to a distant branch above. It leads to another, and another, up through the giant tree canopy, and ending at a hanging platform. On the platform is a woman on the run. From below them come the sounds of men and gunshots.

Just days ago, investigative journalist June Cassidy escaped a kidnapping by the men who are still on her trail. She suspects they’re after something belonging to her mother, a prominent software designer who recently died in an accident. June needs time to figure out what’s going on, and help from someone with Peter’s particular set of skills.

Only one step ahead of their pursuers, Peter and June must race to unravel this peculiar mystery. What they find leads them to an eccentric recluse, a shadowy pseudo-military organization, and an extraordinary tool that may change the modern world forever.

 

Nick Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington and won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan.  His story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in The Seattle Review, a national literary journal.  His first novel, "The Drifter," was nominated for 2016 Edgar and Barry awards for Best First Novel, and the 2016 Hammett Prize for Best Novel. A husband and father, he has worked as a carpenter, remodeling contractor, and building inspector.  He lives in Milwaukee.  "Burning Bright" is his second novel, and the sequel to "The Drifter."

Karen Odden: Trains and Trauma

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Today I'm delighted to introduce debut historical mystery writer Karen Odden. She's the author of A LADY IN THE SMOKE: A VICTORIAN MYSTERY:

Following a humiliating fourth Season in London, Lady Elizabeth Fraser is on her way back to her ancestral country estate when her train careens off the rails and bursts into flames. Though she is injured, she manages to drag herself and her unconscious mother out of the wreckage, and amid the chaos that ensues, a brilliant young railway surgeon saves her mother’s life. Elizabeth feels an immediate connection with Paul Wilcox—though society would never deem a medical man eligible for the daughter of an earl.

After Paul reveals that the train wreck was no accident, and the inspector who tried to prevent it dies under mysterious circumstances, Elizabeth undertakes a dangerous investigation of her own that leads back to her family’s buried secrets. The more she learns, the more she must risk. Not only are her dowry and her reputation at stake; Paul’s very life hangs in the balance when he is arrested for manslaughter. As the trial draws near, and Parliament prepares for a vote that will change the course of the nation, Elizabeth uncovers a conspiracy that has been years in the making. But time is running out for her to see justice done.

Today Karen's visiting Jungle Reds to talk about Victorians, railway accidents, and trauma. As someone who writes about war and PTSD (before it was even diagnosed or named that) I found this piece fascinating. Welcome, Karen!

KAREN ODDEN: When I first began researching railways over a decade ago, my interest was actually in trauma. I’d been reading Oppenheim and Freud, whose late-1800s treatises began to describe traumatic neurosis. But as I read, I found myself thinking, OK, these guys are clever, but surely the notion of “trauma” didn’t spring into their heads out of nowhere. As I began to read histories of trauma and PTSD (a diagnosis officially accepted in 1980), I realized that to some extent, trauma began with the accounts of Victorian railway disasters.

One of the most famous accounts came from Charles Dickens, who survived a horrifying crash in 1865. He crawled out of his toppled railway car, dragging his mistress Ellen Ternan, her mother, and his manuscript for Our Mutual Friend behind him. He spent several hours ministering to other victims, serving them brandy from his hat. Then, he walked home. But in the days following, he had ringing in his ears; he had nightmares; and his hands shook so badly he couldn’t sign his usual flourish. By the 1860s, some medical men attributed these symptoms to “railway spine” or “concussion of the spine.” But most admitted they didn’t really understand it.

Intrigued by all this, I headed off to the London libraries to see if I could find other accounts. Little did I know. I found hundreds of newspaper articles, poems, sensation novels, parliamentary papers, cartoons, pamphlets, and medical treatises. Clearly, Victorians had a lot of anxiety about railway accidents! What I began to notice, though, was how many accounts hinted at how the experience was beyond words: “This railway disaster is simply too terrible to describe”; “the horror of it defies all description.” 

On the other hand, there were often strange overlaps or excesses in the accounts. For example, this illustration from a medical textbook is of a spine, but it’s drawn in a way that suggests a railway track too; thus, one illustration suggests both the cause of the injury and the injury itself. With a jolt, I realized that these failures of language and excesses of meaning were akin to the unspeakability and profusion of symptoms that we now associate with trauma and PTSD.

What began to interest me—after I recovered from the painful dissertation process—was how creative writers since the late 1800s have experimented with different literary elements to represent trauma.

One modern example is Tender is the Night. Beginning in 1925 and drawing on his experience of his wife Zelda’s mental illness, Fitzgerald wrote this story about a psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his former patient/wife Nicole, who suffers from mental illness brought about by the (arguably) traumatizing experience of being molested by her father. Significantly, in the first version, the novel contains three sections: the troubled present; a jump to the past (when Dick treated Nicole); and a return to the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, his critics didn’t like the “novel” structure. After Fitzgerald’s death, his friend Malcolm Cowley revised it so the story became chronological. But I think part of the power and discomfort that the original novel generates comes from the ruptures. 

Jump forward to after WWII, when the symptoms of “shell shock” (a post-WWI diagnosis) were well known. One of my favorite J.D. Salinger’s stories, “For Esme—with Love and Squalor” (1948) concerns a WWII soldier who meets a precocious young girl in an English tearoom before he leaves for the front. He survives five campaigns, but afterward he suffers from nervous tics; he can’t sleep or eat; he smokes incessantly; he has chewed his nails down until they bleed. Halfway through the story, there is a gap of white space, followed by:

            This is the squalid … part of the story. I’m still around, but from here on … I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.   

            It was about ten-thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor of the civilian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had been quartered, even before the armistice.

The shift from first-person to third-person, the white space, and the meta-comment about the “disguise” suggest that by this point, conventions existed for representing the trauma of war, and people could begin to acknowledge war’s effects on those who survived it.

Now for the twenty-first century. I just read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel “Fun Home,” which demands a constant, even jarring switch back and forth between words and pictures. As I read, I felt in some way that the constant switching made me feel the unease of shuffling between two realities: the pain of knowing a frightening truth about a father and the desire not to know it.

What I love about literature is that it evolves. Maybe, as Christopher Booker once wrote, there are really only seven plots; I don’t know. But the ways stories are told changes over time. The flashback that breaks Tender is the Night doesn’t seem so “novel” any more. We’ve all seen the wry type of “meta” that Salinger uses in “Esme.” But what keeps literature vital is that writers are continually experimenting with form and structure and language, daring to stretch the bounds for representing human experience.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you, Karen! Reds and lovely readers, we all read lots of mysteries and thrillers. Many of them deal with murder in an intellectual way (Sherlock Holmes, for example), yet others let their protagonists take the brunt of what they have witnessed and experienced. Who's your favorite character who's experienced a profound change in life/personality/outlook due to trauma? Who's your favorite character who seems to remain perpetually trauma-free? Please tell us in the comments!

Karen Odden's interest in the Victorian era and specifically railway crashes goes back to her New York University doctoral dissertation, which explored how the medical, parliamentary, and literary representations of railway disasters helped to create a discourse out of which Freud and others fashioned their ideas of “trauma.”

Karen has served as an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and taught classes in English language and literature at New York University and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She has contributed essays and chapters to books and journals, including Studies in the Novel, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation; and she has written introductions for Barnes and Noble’s Classics Series editions of books by Dickens and  Trollope. Prior to receiving her Ph.D. in English, she worked as an Editorial Assistant at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and McGraw-Hill, as a Media Buyer for Christie’s Auction House in New York, and as a bartender at the airport in Rochester, where she learned how to stop being shy. She is a member of SCBWI and Mystery Writers of America; and she currently serves as an Assistant Editor for the academic journal, Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP).

Karen currently resides in Scottsdale, Arizona with her husband, her two children, and her ridiculously cute beagle, Rosy.

Confronting the Past

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Whodunnit? Is a classic question in crime fiction. It’s so classic that our books are often called whodunnits. But every mystery author will tell you—it’s not only the who. It’s the—all together now: Why. We write whydunnits, right? Because that’s what’s interesting and compelling. And in exploring the whydunnit for his new book—the talented/hilarious/adorable/surprising Simon Wood found out something about himself.

I Thought I was Fine

                  by Simon Wood

The emotional fuel that stokes my new book, THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY, is survivor guilt, which is one symptom of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For my research into this topic, I had a series of long meetings with a psychologist at the VA.  Like all my research projects, I entered the room with a bunch of preconceptions about a subject that got thoroughly turned on their head after a couple of minutes.

One symptom of survivor guilt is the desire to recreate the circumstances of the original trauma—either directly or indirectly.  The reasons for this behavior are two-fold.  One part is to get a second crack at that traumatic moment and hope for a better outcome.  The second part is more self-destructive.  Guilt is caused by surviving something others did not, so the survivor puts themselves back in the firing line with the subconscious hope that they won’t survive – since losing is the only penance they can make. 

Listening to the psychologist illustrate his points, a sense of unease washed over me.  It was all starting to sound eerily familiar.  Rather than stay quiet, I decided to share something personal.

Twenty years ago, I’d been in an incident where I’d walked away unscathed while someone else didn’t.  The event changed me, and my life.  I quit my steady job and took a less stable one, I bought a racecar, I learned to fly, I traveled to unsafe countries and I skydived—all in the space of a few months. 

In some ways, if it hadn’t been for that incident, I wouldn’t be in the US today and I never would have become a writer.  I explained all this to the psychologist and he asked me to explain the character change.  The incident had taught me a couple of lessons.  One, I was living a stressful life that I wasn’t particularly enjoying.  Two, life could end at any moment and I didn’t want regret not doing the things I wanted to do.  Essentially, I started living life like it was my last day.

It all seemed reasonable at the time, but as the psychologist pointed out, all the life changes I made were dangerous—the racecars, the flying, the skydiving, the travel, the job, etc.  Every one of them put me in harm’s way. In most cases, I involved myself in endeavors that could cost me my life at the very worst or ruin my financial stability at the very least.

That was a wakeup call, because I hadn’t ever thought of my behavior in those terms.  To me, everything I had done at the time had been justified.  I was following my dreams and passions and nothing else mattered.  I believed in what I was doing wholeheartedly, regardless of whether it met everyone else's norms. The psychologist asked me if I ever thought of what I was doing as dangerous and reckless.  I said no.  

Truly, I didn’t.  I was on a quest to discover what life held in store for me.  I was conscious of what had happened and that it was driving me, but I thought I was on a heroic journey–not a self-destructive one.  Looking back on it now, it was reckless and self-absorbed behavior.  Another aspect of PTSD.

This was quite a telling moment for me and the development of the book.  I had believed what I was doing after my incident was normal and justified.  I really felt that there was nothing wrong with me on a conscious level.    If that was true of me, then it was also true of my heroine, Zoë Sutton, and my villain, Marshal Beck.  Their behaviors are damaged.  The world sees it, but they don’t.  Both of them feel what they're doing is just. For me, that’s when the story took on a life of its own as I knew how to treat these characters.  We might not agree with their methods but hopefully we can see their struggles and understand them.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  It’s how our past creates our future, right? Who’s had PTSD experiences—on any level?  Simon’s in California, so he’ll be here when the time zone allows!

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THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Graduate students Zoë and Holli only mean to blow off some steam on their road trip to Las Vegas. But something goes terribly wrong on their way home, and the last time Zoë sees her, Holli is in the clutches of a sadistic killer. Zoë flees with her life, changed forever.

A year later and still tortured with guilt, Zoë latches on to a police investigation where the crime eerily resembles her abduction. Along with a zealous detective, she retraces the steps of that fateful night in the desert, hoping that her memory will return and help them find justice for Holli. Her abductor—labeled the “Tally Man” by a fascinated media—lies in wait for Zoë. For him, she is not a survivor but simply the one that got away.

Simon Wood is a California transplant from England. He's a former competitive racecar driver, a licensed pilot, an endurance cyclist and an occasional PI. He shares his world with his American wife, Julie. Their lives are dominated by a longhaired dachshund and four cats. He's the Anthony Award winning author of Working Stiffs, Accidents Waiting to Happen, Paying the Piper, Terminated, Asking For Trouble, We All Fall Down and the Aidy Westlake series. His latest thriller is THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY due out March '15. He also writes horror under the pen name of Simon Janus. Curious people can learn more at http://www.simonwood.net.