You can take Jack out of L.A. — in this case, all the way to Napa Valley — but you can’t take the L.A. out of Jack, as this excerpt from THE LAST HEIR at CriminalElements.com conclusively proves.
Meanwhile, I talk to The Sirens of Suspense about the writing process, and how my three careers — lawyer, author, and vigneron — all came together for this book:
As a writer edits his novel-in-progress, he invariably leaves chunks of feeble prose on the cutting-room floor. More often than not, the discarded material ends up where it belongs, and what remains is improved by its absence. Sometimes the cuts are painless, and sometimes they hurt a little. “Murder your darlings,” wrote the Edwardian author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and for generations, novelists have reluctantly followed his advice in pursuit of a tighter, leaner manuscript.
When editing Hush Money (Minotaur), my 2012 debut legal mystery, I was compelled to lop a limb or two that still, a full year later, tingle with phantom sensation. Below is a scene that never made it to the final, published novel, but that was fun to write, and therefore, painful to excise. While the prose may have died in utero, I did salvage the character name Jordan Mardian, and it will appear – in a very different context – in Green-Eyed Lady, the next installment in the Jack MacTaggart mystery series, which will be in bookstores in June of 2013. Continue reading
The art director of Minotaur Books posted this fascinating entry about the evolution of the cover and packaging of HUSH MONEY, the first in a series.
When the subject of cover art for HUSH MONEY first came up, I immediately thought of a Pasadena artist named R. Kenton Nelson, whose work I admire greatly. I went as far as to contact Kenton, who expressed interest, but, alas, too late, as the folks at St. Martin’s Press had already begun working with John. Continue reading