Law & Disorder - The Next Big Thing

21Nov12

At my first Bouchercon (debrief here), I met the charming and bubbly C.L. Phillips, who wasted no time recruiting me to participate in a blog “chain” in which authors discuss their Next Big Thing. C.L.’s is called Second Drink, and you can read about it in this post here.

But there was a catch, you see. I had to recruit five others who will keep the chain alive. At this rate, I anticipate that every published author in the world will have been solicited by February 11, 2014.

So here is a shout out to those who will follow me, Adam Sifre, Viva Barkowski, Valerie Douglas, and Kai Wilson.

With luck, you’ll be able to find their blog posts next week.

So, my next BIG THING (sounds dirty) is LAW & DISORDER, which sits at this very moment on an editor’s desk at an imprint whose handcuffs I would gladly wear.

One Sentence Synopsis

LAW & DISORDER is the story of Marty Bishop, a recovering sex addict whose homicide investigation of a murder implicates politically powerful people and leads to revelations he wishes he’d never had.

The Story

Marty Bishop’s family and career are in tatters after the discovery of his tawdry sexual liaisons with his boss’s wife – and dozens of others. Called to the home of a notorious drug kingpin, he finds the subject dead among teeming evidence of a wild party that likely involved members of the District Attorney’s staff. But the one piece of evidence that is missing – a laptop computer with video images of what occurred in the kingpin’s master bedroom suite – holds the clues to not just the murder, but to secrets that hit too close to home.

Marty’s witness interview of the elderly socialite across the street plants a seed he cannot shake, leading him through an investigation that ends with dirty laundry very much like his own.

What is the hook?  What’s this book really about?

As the title might suggest, LAW & DISORDER is a story about the dysfunction that accompanies power and privilege, and what the ruling class is capable of doing to preserve their reputations.

What inspired the book?  Where did you get your idea?

In the early 1980’s, the gruesome murder of a Cape Cod drug dealer during a wild party fostered many rumors. None of them were proven. This is a fictional tale about the worst that might be imagined.

What genre is this book?

It is straight up crime. There are bits of police procedural, bits of mystery. But there is a dead body on page one, and the objective is to solve that murder. In the end, the murders themselves are inconsequential. It is what is behind the murders – retribution, and the motive for it – that is the revelation.

Where and when can I read the book?

That depends entirely on how my wonderful agent, Christine Witthohn, fares in her tireless efforts to sell it. But you can read the first chapter, which is appended to the end of Diary of a Small Fish.

Make sure to check out what my friends are doing next week!

Filed under: crime fiction   |  6 Comments
Tags: crime fiction, law and disorder, next big thing, work in progress