Are you ready for a great mystery?
Six years ago, I helped sell the company that had been my long-time employer. When the sale was done, I had two ‘sensible’ offers that would have kept me in the corporate world. To make a long story short, neither option appealed.
There was something else I wanted to do, something that had been on my mind for a couple of decades: I wanted to see if I could write fiction.
Not the Great American Novel. Not poetry. Not some thinly disguised autobiographical cathartic work. I wanted to see if I could tell a rousing good story using believable characters people would root for. I wanted to write stories with satisfying conclusions that sprinkled enough clues about the outcome throughout the story to make a reader say, ‘why didn’t I see that coming?’ Oh, and I wanted to write stuff that people would actually go out and buy. In short, I wanted to write mysteries, suspense, and thrillers.
Since then, I’ve published four books: Murder Imperfect, The Accidental Spy and The Garden Club Gang are all in both print and Kindle editions and are now available at Amazon.com. The most recent, A Murder in the Garden Club, is just now available in book stores and at Amazon. And, I’m working on others. Here’s a synopsis of my four titles:
Murder Imperfect
The essence of suspense is not ‘whodunit’ but, rather, ‘are they going to get away with it?’ Murder Imperfect is without question a work of suspense. In the opening paragraph, the protagonist, Kat writes, “You can call this a confession if you must” and then says that she murdered her husband in cold blood. But then she immediately withdraws the word ‘confession’ because she has neither guilt nor remorse. And she says, “where I am right now is of no importance to this story”. So, did she get away with it or is this in fact a confession told to some unknown law enforcement person? It will be a cat-and-mouse game all through the book.
If you’re looking for a sweet, innocent heroine, Kat is definitely not for you. But she’ll grow on you as you hear her story. She’s had some tough breaks in her life and her late husband was no saint. But love her or hate her, you’ll find her compelling.
Murder Imperfect moves a torrid pace, aided by Kat’s irreverent and sharp-tongued narrative. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. You can get more details and read the opening chapter here. You can purchase a copy here or here. You can see an interview about the book here.
The Garden Club Gang
Then, there’s The Garden Club Gang. The members of the ‘gang’ are four women, aged 51 to 71, who are at a turning point in their lives. When one of the women proposes that they steal the daily gate from a New England fair, they all agree, each for their own reasons.
The robbery is successful, but getting away with the perfect crime is just the beginning of their problems. When they count the money, there’s far more that there should be. In a matter of hours, the four women find themselves in a battle of wits with the local and state police, a determined insurance investigator and the criminals who were using the fair to launder money. Instead of a lark, they’re in danger, and dependent upon their own resources to outwit both the law and the crooks determined to find the money and silence those who stole it.
The Garden Club Gang offers four nuanced portraits of interesting women with all-too-credible motives for doing highly unladylike things. If it sounds like a ‘cozy’, then be prepared for a cozy with quite a kick. The characters are memorable, the action is non-stop and the plot twists until the final page. You can read the opening chapters here. The book is now available in print and Kindle formats. You can purchase a copy here or here. If you have half an hour to spend, you can see an interview about the book here.
The Accidental Spy
The Accidental Spy is a work of suspense, to be certain, but it also has a dash of romance. It’s a story about a Pan Am stewardess, a lost suitcase, and a spy.
Here’s its genesis: my ‘day job’ was in technology and the field is rife with historical questions where the answers are, at best, murky. One such question is why the Soviet Union was always so far behind the U.S. in microelectronics. The question may seem quaint today but, during the cold war, computer chips – however rudimentary – were the difference in the accuracy of missiles, among other things.
Thus was born the idea for The Accidental Spy. The plot: It’s 1967 and Susan Delaney is your carefree airline stewardess with aspirations that go no higher than working her way up to serving first class on flights to Paris, and meeting Mister Right. Then, one day she accepts fifty dollars to escort a misplaced suitcase to its owner. Before she knows what’s happened, she’s part of a cross-country chase by the KGB to get hold of the suitcase and its contents. Her allies are a handsome Mossad agent named Joe Klein and a grandmotherly El-Al air marshal named Sadie whose knitting bag contains a lethal arsenal.
What’s in the suitcase? Joe says it’s the plans for and samples of the world’s first microprocessor, a device thought to be years away from reality. Engineers at IBM and a California semiconductor company agree that it’s the real thing. Everyone – including the Mafia and a shadowy anti-Castro group – wants to buy it. The KGB and the East Germans want to steal it. To be part of history – and to hold onto Mister Right – all Susan has to do is keep herself (and Joe Klein) alive. But as readers, we also know one other important thing: that in 2011, a body has been discovered in Susan’s back yard. We know the body has been there since the 1960s. What we don’t know is whose body it is.
Although written as a work of romantic suspense, The Accidental Spy is carefully researched and historically accurate. The crux of the story – the ‘McGuffin’ as Alfred Hitchcock would have put it – is that all the pieces were in place in 1967 to create a working microprocessor (a device that would not make its appearance until 1971). The Accidental Spy posits that an effort was made to sell the technology to the Soviets, who rejected it only to discover that American companies had authenticated the device and were bidding for rights to it.
You can read the opening chapters here. You can buy a copy of the book here or here.
The Hardington Mysteries
The Hardington mysteries are about three things. The first is Liz Phillips, fifty-something suburban matron with a hole in her life where her absent family ought to be. The second is John Flynn, retired Boston detective who has gone to work for a suburban police department where, to put it mildly, he is overqualified. The third thing is the town. You won’t find Hardington, Massachusetts on a map, but you’ve heard of towns like it. It’s a quaint exurb of Boston where ‘starter castles’ are replacing the tract houses from the fifties and appearances are everything.
The series starts with A Murder in the Garden Club. Liz finds the body of close friend Sally Kahn at the bottom of her basement stairs. It takes Liz just ten minutes to determine it wasn’t an accident. It takes a lot longer than that for her to convince John Flynn that Hardington has its first murder in a decade. By the time their investigation is over, the trail will have wound through email inboxes and wireless Internet routers, hazardous waste disposal and the economics of tearing down houses to build ‘McMansions’. Their search will also take them through an emotional landscape of adultery and the simmering resentment between ‘townies’ and the new-money affluent. You can read more about it here, or buy it here or here.
Is it a cozy? If you mean, does it emphasize character development and plot equally, is the violence off-screen, and do you want to see these two characters again, then the answer is, yes, it’s a cozy. But if you mean, does it feature a nosy, dithering amateur female sleuth with a weight problem and a bumbling detective who can’t see a clue to save his life, then the answer is a resounding ‘no’. Further, if cozies are a ‘Red States’ genre, then A Murder in the Garden Club has some decided ‘Blue States’ overtones. A key one is that there’s a definite attraction between Liz and Detective Flynn. It may not be acted on, but it’s there.
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The opening chapters of these manuscripts, as well as backgrounds to the stories and links to plot summaries, are on this website and can be found by using the the navigation bar at the top of the page. I always enjoy hearing from readers, so please feel free to drop me an email (n_h_sanders <at> yahoo <dot> com) with your comments.
Many thanks for visiting. I’d love to turn you into a fan!
Neal H. Sanders
15 Wild Holly Lane, Medfield, Massachusetts 02052