In this short story, homicide Lieutenant Hank Donaghue reflects on the troubled life of his oldest brother, Tom. A talented jazz pianist who became a heroin addict as a young soldier in Viet Nam, Tom Donaghue split away from his family and drifted from city to city until he met a woman who took him home with her and helped him put his life and music back together.
Look for more background stories to be published each Monday during the month of August, 2011.
"The Tom Donaghue Story" and the short piece that will appear next Monday, "The Ambition of William Chow," are both based on material from the original manuscript of Blood Passage. Cut during the revision process in order to get the manuscript down to a manageable size, these vignettes were well-received by ms. readers but weren't central to the plot of the novel, and so had to be removed. It's stuff I liked too well to delete altogether, and they provided background information important to the understanding of the primary characters, so I decided to publish them in electronic format through Smashwords as free e-book downloads.
I hope that readers will enjoy them as vignettes in their own right. When there are enough of them, I'll gather them into the collection STORIES from the Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel series and republish them as a full-length book.
Opinion poll: should I charge something for the collection when it's published, or release it as a free download as well?
Let me know what you think!
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