1) Tell us about Bullet for One.
John Coburn is a private
eye who won’t let the law get in the way of justice.
Five years ago Coburn
watched as his father was gunned down by a masked man. Tortured by the fact
that the killer was never caught, he fights the feelings of failure that haunt
his every waking moment.
Now, history has repeated
itself. When his best friend Felix is murdered after agreeing to
protect a witness, John Coburn dives in to catch the killer before
the police and FBI. Battling official law enforcement and his
own demons, Coburn turns over every lead, rattles every cage, and stretches his
own moral code to the breaking point. As he digs deeper into a
mystery that involves a team of thieves, corrupt businessmen, and a mafia kingpin
with a price on his head, Coburn realizes that revenge has a cost he cannot
calculate.
If he fails, can he live
with another ghost?
If he succeeds, can he live
with the consequences?
2) In this book
you wrote about a private detective. In Justified
Sins you wrote about a vigilante. Many short stories in Reaper’s Dozen feature crime busters who
are not cops and one or two feature criminal protagonists. Show
No Mercy was about a CIA agent.
So most of your work features “outsiders” who do not operate within an
organized bureaucracy. Why does
the independent hero appeal to you?
Truthfully
I’ve never noticed the pattern, but since you ask I can say that members of a bureaucracy
are locked into a culture that prevents them from doing anything productive, so
only an outsider can solve a problem.
He’s not loyal to anybody or kissing up to get ahead. When you mix an outsider like Coburn
with the FBI agents and police officers he encounters in Bullet for One, you get a great cocktail of conflict and suspense.
And
I can’t believe that you used “organized” and “bureaucracy” in the same
sentence.
3) You have said
on your blog that Mickey Spillane had a strong influence on Bullet for One. Why?
There’s
a narrative power behind Spillane’s best work that grabs you by the throat and
demands attention and his sucker punch twist endings have no equal. The final line of Vengeance is Mine always makes me smile and no writer since has
been able to end a book like that one.
I wanted Bullet for One to
have the same effect. I think the
ending is shocking in its own way.
4) Why should
readers care about this book?
On
the surface you might think it’s just another Death Wish rip off but I tried to do something different with that
subject matter. I wanted to treat
the subject of “revenge” in a different way. Coburn wants to kill the man who killed his friend. In any other book, that’s the extent of
the emotional content and there’s a shootout and the bad guy gets it. I wanted a story that showed that such
an effort does more damage than the personal loss that instigated the
effort. The futility of revenge became the theme of the book, and I think
that’s what makes it different from others like it and why readers should
care. What happens in Bullet for One will follow Coburn into
future adventures and he’ll have to deal with it somehow.
5) So we can
expect a sequel?
I
have at least two planned that will tie up certain plot points in Bullet for One which I decided not to address
because it’s part of the back story that motivates events. But it’s from that back story
that we will get the sequels. I’ll
do one or two in 2012.
6) What else is
coming next?
I
have another novel called The Rogue
Gentleman that will be out in September or October. That finishes my writing schedule for
this year. Starting in January, I
will release a novella once a month featuring the Rogue Gentleman character and
his fellow buccaneers. Each story
will have its own adventure but there will be a common plotline running through
each that will be resolved at some point.
I want these to be like an episodic television show, along the lines of White Collar and Leverage, which feature a similar formula. And, of course, I will do a couple of
stand-alone novels. The novellas
are already written and I’m waiting for January 2012 to release them.
Please leave a comment for your chance to win a copy for your Kindle will draw names at Noon Eastern Standard Time July 4th
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