Soft Launch of IN THESE DISCONSOLATE WOODS

                              

 

We're pleased to announce the soft launch of the sixth March and Walker crime novel, IN THESE DISCONSOLATE WOODS. Paperback copies are available now via Amazon or may be ordered through your local independent bookstore. E-book copies may be purchased online now from Amazon and soon from Kobo as well.

 

Synopsis:

Someone murdered former professional hockey player Grant Burnham on his private woodlot north of Perth, Ontario. In a violent fit of rage, they beat him to death with a baseball bat made by his own woodworking company.

 

Ontario Provincial Police Detective Inspector Ellie March must cope with an acute shortage of detectives as the Lanark County Crime Unit investigates, and while the loan of Detective Constable Kevin Walker from the Leeds County detachment helps, the unit struggles to work the case effectively. With no shortage of suspects, including a scornful ex-wife, a surly former business partner, and a next-door neighbor drawn to the athletic Burnham like a bee to honey, can the team prevent a vicious killer from getting away with murder?

Once again we've released a video teaser to promote the novel. We hope you like it!

 

Credits:

 

Design and development: Michael J. McCann

 

Video credits: Matthias Groeneveld/Pexels (forest 1); Peter Fowler/Pexels (forest 2); Ravendra Singh/Pixabay (crows); Kelly Lacy/Pexels (walking; crime scene tape); Christian Bodhi/Pixabay (forest 3).

 

Sound track: Alena Smirnova/Free Music Archive ("Modern Minimalism").

 

Thanks to these talented people for sharing their work under Creative Commons By Attribution licenses. Enjoy!

 

And never fear, March and Walker #7, Forgotten Loyalties, is now under construction and will be coming your way soon.

A DEATH IN WINTER - MARCH & WALKER #5

 

We're excited to announce the launch of A DEATH IN WINTER, the fifth March and Walker Crime Novel.

As the worst storm of the winter settles in, a funeral takes place in the village of Westport for an elderly Toronto crime lord who retired several years ago to the quiet beauty of Rideau Lakes.

Shortly afterward, a man is found beaten to death behind the local hardware store, and OPP Detective Inspector Ellie March discovers that the victim was an important employee of Dante Tassone, heir to the crime lord's vast empire.

Stuck in a snowed-in village with dangerous organized crime figures, Ellie and OPP Detective Constable Kevin Walker search for answers that will connect Tassone and his rebellious son to a violent family struggle threatening the safety of villagers and police as the bodies begin to pile up and a deadly pandemic looms on the horizon.

Fans of the series will be pleased to encounter several new characters who are being added to the lineup, including Detective Sergeant Prez Raintree and intelligence analyst Charlotte McKinley. The narrative style is also slightly different this time out, with parts of the story being told from the points of view of Dante Tassone and his son, Rick.

Interested? You can order the paperback (autographed) from The Plaid Raccoon webstore or from Amazon (not autographed!). If you're in the UK and you shop at Waterstones, you can order it here. Or, order it from your local bookstore!

Prefer an eBook? Purchase it from Kobo or Amazon (US), (Canada), or (UK).

Thank you, all, for your ongoing support of this series. It's greatly appreciated. Stay safe, and stay well.

NO SADNESS OF FAREWELL IS NOW AVAILABLE

Yes, the wait is over.

NO SADNESS OF FAREWELL, the fourth installment of the March and Walker Crime Novel series, has been published and is now available for purchase.

When human remains are found behind a barn on a property along the historic Rideau Waterway, OPP Detective Constable Kevin Walker finds himself riding herd on a forensic anthropologist brought in by the coroner to supervise the removal of the bones.

But as the wildly eccentric Dr. Ash Latimer excavates the unmarked grave, the bodies begin to multiply and Detective Inspector Ellie March is abruptly forced to recuse herself from the case. Her next-door neighbour, Ridge Ballantyne, may have known the victims, and General Headquarters decides that the possibility of a conflict of interest necessitates her removal from the investigation.

As Ridge struggles to recover from a stroke, he must deal with the possibility that an old friend from Scotland and his young son may have been murdered five years ago and buried in an unmarked grave thousands of miles from home, while Ellie March fights an uphill battle against internal politics to return to the case.

NO SADNESS OF FAREWELL is available in paperback from your local independent bookstore. In Ottawa (Canada) for example, Perfect Books and Books on Beechwood carry the series and will order the new one for you. It's also available online through Amazon. More links will follow soon.

The novel may also be purchased in eBook version from Amazon for Kindle and from Kobo for those of you who use an epub format.

This is a really good one, folks. It may also be the last, depending on how things go, so if you enjoy the series, please give it a read and let me know what you think.

Thanks for your ongoing interest in my work. -- Mike

PERSISTENT GUILT NOW IN PRODUCTION

I'm very pleased to be able to announce that PERSISTENT GUILT, the third installment in the March and Walker Crime Novel series, is now in production. The scheduled release date is August 3, 2018.

PERSISTENT GUILT is a police procedural featuring homicide investigators of the Ontario Provincial Police. The series is set in Leeds County, Ontario, which is located on the St. Lawrence Seaway corridor between Toronto and Montreal.

On a cold morning in late April, a man and his dog discover the nude body of a young woman in the ditch alongside the picturesque Thousand Islands Parkway in Leeds County. The woman was stabbed repeatedly before being dumped.

Detective Constable Kevin Walker of the Ontario Provincial Police discovers that the victim worked for a high school acquaintance of his. Kyle Baldwin now runs a charity that raises funds for mobile medical clinics in Kenya, but he had a brief affair with the victim several years ago that ended badly.

At the same time, Detective Inspector Ellie March is investigating the mayor of the nearby city of Brockville for alleged criminal wrongdoing. With two cases to manage, she and Kevin Walker must determine if the mayor is somehow connected to a wider circle of crime or if Kevin's acquaintance murdered his ex-lover in a fit of jealous rage.

Write it down in your notebook, folks. Ellie March and Kevin Walker are back!

THE DONAGHUE AND STAINER BOX SET

Many readers know my work through the March and Walker Crime Novel series, thanks in part to SORROW LAKE and its nomination for the 2015 Hammett Prize, and the second novel in the series, BURN COUNTRY.

Some of you may not have had a chance to read the police procedural series that preceded March and Walker. With that in mind, I'm offering THE DONAGHUE AND STAINER BOX SET this weekend at a ridiculously special price of only 99 cents.

The Donaghue and Stainer series, set in Maryland and Virginia, includes four novels to date: BLOOD PASSAGE, MARCIE'S MURDER, THE FREGOLI DELUSION, and THE RAINY DAY KILLER. The fourth in the series, RDK, was a semi-finalist for the 2014 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel in Canada.

Want to see where it all began? You can find the box set in eBook format for your Amazon Kindle here: https://www.amazon.com/Donaghue-Stainer-Four-Novel-Crime-Novel-ebook/dp/B00V0WCPGO/

If your e-reader uses ePub files (iPad, iPhone, Kobo, Sony, Nook etc.) you can purchase the box set from Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/donaghue-and-stainer

Homicide Lieutenant Hank Donaghue and Detective Karen Stainer are special characters I know you'll enjoy. At this price, you can't go wrong if you love crime fiction!

The Police Procedural and Its Cast of Characters

The March and Walker Crime Novel series, which currently includes Hammett Prize nominee SORROW LAKE and its recently-published sequel BURN COUNTRY, falls into the "police procedural" category.  To enhance the experience of readers as they explore the series, it might help to consider the basic characteristics of police procedurals in general with particular emphasis on their cast of characters.

As crime fiction scholar Kerstin Bergman explains in an essay on Swedish procedurals,

To be a police procedural, a novel must have a set of police characters and--preferably detailed--descriptions of their work as they investigate one or more crimes.... Police procedurals generally display a police 'team of individuals, separated by age, experience, gender, race and ethnicity, [who] work collectively to restore and maintain social order.' *

Unlike other types of mystery such as the private detective novel or the cozy mystery, which tend to feature a single protagonist solving the crime with the help of one or two assistants, procedurals reflect the reality of actual police investigation in which a team of professionals, including homicide detectives, supervisory and management personnel, forensic specialists, and forensic pathologists or coroners come together to play their respective roles in the investigation of the case.  In order to maintain a level of verisimilitude that readers of procedurals demand, the author must depict these various team members to some degree or other as the case unfolds.

As The Guide to United States Popular Culture further tells us,

The method for solving crimes also helps define the police procedural. The investigative process involves a set of established professional procedures for collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, examining crime scenes, and conducting forensic inquiries.... The group dynamics are often highlighted, re-creating in fiction the friendships and hostilities that exist among any group of people that work together.**

With these critical explanations of the sub-genre in mind, readers may better understand that they will encounter a roster of characters in the March and Walker series, rather than two protagonists working in relative isolation to close the case in super-hero fashion, and that the respective roles and various relationships of the characters will be clearly explained in the story. 

As an Amazon Vine Voice reviewer stated about BURN COUNTRY, "Kevin Walker and Ellie March each go their own way in this case, as part of a larger investigative team. The interplay between the various characters feels genuine, with dialogue and exchanges that give us a good sense of each of them as well as their relationships with each other."

So whether it's Swedish police procedurals, American Ed McBain and his 87th Precinct, or the March and Walker Crime Novel series, readers who favour this sub-genre of mystery stories understand that a realistic cast of characters is all part of the police procedural experience.

---------------------------

*Kerstin Bergman, "The Well-Adjusted Cops of the New Millennium: Neo-Romantic Tendencies in the Swedish Police Procedural," Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas, eds. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011, pp. 34-45.

**"Police Procedural." The Guide to United States Popular Culture, Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne, eds. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001, pp. 617-18.

Marcie's Murder, the second Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel

In our previous post we began a refresh of the Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel series with Blood Passage. We now move the clock forward to the second novel in the series: Marcie's Murder.

Premise
While on vacation four months after the events of Blood Passage, Hank Donaghue stops overnight in the small town of Harmony, Virginia. Without warning, local police kick down the door of his motel room in the middle of the night and drag him off to jail on suspicion of having strangled a local woman. Hank calls Detective Karen Stainer to help him get released from custody and find the real killer.

The Story
Hank Donaghue sees Marcie Askew briefly as he walks into a bar in Harmony for a beer before turning in for the night. She looks upset, and is clearly waiting to meet someone. As Hank later learns, within an hour or so of this chance encounter she has been strangled to death behind the bar and her body dumped in the ravine beyond. An eyewitness in the kitchen believes he saw Hank walk around the back of the bar at about that time, and the local chief of police is determined to make Hank pay for the crime, because the victim is his wife!

Hank and Karen must convince the powers that be in Harmony that he had nothing to do with Marcie's brutal murder. Beyond that, Hank can't help but take personally the knowledge that if he'd done something differently he might have saved Marcie Askew's life. As a result, he's determined to probe Marcie's personal secrets to find the identity of her killer. Their suspects include the abbot of a monastery in Burke's Garden which operates a free health clinic, an instructor at the local college, and the chief of police himself!

The Inspiration for the Story
Tazewell County is a rugged, beautiful spot located in the rolling hills of the Appalachians in southwest Virginia.  Home to only 40,000 people, it has a proud rural heritage and rich local history, and violent crime is a rarity. The story ranges from Harmony up to Bluefield, on the border of West Virginia, down to Tazewell, the county seat, and over to spectacular Burke's Garden.

Cast of Characters
Hank and Karen are joined by Deputy Chief Neil Branham, the tall, handsome local cop who's sweet on Karen, Detective Ansell Hall, the alcoholic cursed with a perfect memory, and Chief Billy Askew, the violent, distraught husband of the victim.

Where to Buy It
Marcie's Murder is available in paperback from any bookstore that has online access to the Ingram Catalog. They can order it for you right away. It's also available online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sources throughout the world.

Marcie's Murder is available in eBook format from Amazon for Kindle, Barnes & Noble for the Nook, iTunes for any Apple device with an e-reader app, Kobo, and Sony.

Knock and Talk

"Knock and Talk," the third short piece in the collection STORIES from the Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel series, has been uploaded to Smashwords and is now available free of charge at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/83383.

In this short story, which is about 5,421 words in length, Hank and Karen follow up on the tip from Jimmy Yung concerning the shotgun killing of four men on a front porch on Devin Street. They interview the widow of one of the victims who confirms that the murders were likely the result of an unpaid gambling debt. They question a local biker, who tries to get rough with Karen and lives to regret it, then follow a lead to South Shore West, where they track down the man named Fanshawe and close the case.

Stay tuned for more uploads, and visit Smashwords on a regular basis to download all the free Donaghue and Stainer short stories in this collection.

Crime Fiction

Welcome to my blog on crime fiction, writing, and other stuff. I’m also maintaining a blog on my website at http://www.mjmccann/apps/blog and I encourage you to skip over there to check things out. I’ve decided to open up shop here as well, however, because Blogger has outrageously good search engine indexing and better opportunities to interact with the bloggiverse. So, in the immortal words of Darkwing Duck, “let’s get dangerous!”

As I was preparing Blood Passage for publication I found myself wrestling with questions of taxonomy. How would I categorize a novel in which attention shifts between homicide investigators, a murderer who is a high-ranking organized crime official, and a little boy who claims he is the reincarnated spirit of the murder victim at the center of the investigation?

The most appropriate category available from Mother Amazon is Mystery & Thriller, and so Blood Passage has been duly listed there. While other novels in the series may be more accurately described as mysteries, Blood Passage isn’t so much, because while the killers of Martin Liu are eventually identified through the investigations of Donaghue and Stainer – as well as Peter Mah, the Triad Red Pole – the killings perpetrated by Peter are not at all mysterious in nature.

As a result, I took a little comfort in slotting Blood Passage into the Police Procedural subcategory of the Mystery & Thriller category, because it does in truth focus on the investigative procedures of Donaghue and Stainer in some detail. I spent a fair amount of time researching homicide investigation and tried to present a reasonably accurate picture of how police detectives work and live.

But when it came time to settle on the name of the series of which Blood Passage is the debut installment, I balked at calling it the Donaghue and Stainer Mystery series. Instead, after a little experimentation, I settled on “the Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel series.”

Wikipedia defines crime fiction as “the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred.”

While you could argue that this is a typically fuzzy Wikipedia effort, I like it because it touches on all the important elements in what I’m writing. Crime. Its detection. Criminals. Their motives. This works well for Blood Passage and will work well for the other novels to follow.

This distinguishes it from the kind of story in which the mystery and its solution take center stage, usually a story in which the detective follows clues and uses logic and sound reasoning (ratiocination) to identify the perpetrator, as in the Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie vein, or investigators sift through thousands of bits of physical evidence to solve the crime, as in the CSI-centered stories.

The more general definition of crime fiction allows me to position your point of view as reader anywhere in the story I wish. I can withhold the answers from you and make the mystery and its solution the primary focus of your attention, but in some instances I might prefer to position you closer to the characters than to the mystery. In the case of Blood Passage I prefer to have the characters dominate your attention as you move through the story. I want you to learn about Hank, Karen and Peter. And Smoke Archer. And Uncle Sang. And Anna Haynes Donaghue.

So, crime fiction it is.