BURNING HEARTS: A Historical Murder Mystery with Romance

MARK: Author Nike Chillemi's latest release, DARKEST HOUR is now available. Welecome, Nike! Give us a brief glimpse into your writing world and your latest novel.

NIKI: Mark, thank you for having me. Life has been a whirlwind recently and quite exciting. As you might suppose, as the chair and founder of the Grace Awards, I've been pretty busy with this year's literary contest. We announced the winners this week. I am thrilled with the quality of the winners. In fact, a few of the judging teams felt the finalists were so good they had a difficult time selecting a novel for top honors, but of course, they did. This should be the biggest problem facing Christian publishing today.

The other thing I want to brag about is my publisher's decision to go from ebook format to print. I'm thrilled my Sanctuary Point classic murder mystery series with romance was chosen by Desert Breeze Publishing to be among the first books to come out in paperback. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share a bit about BURNING HEARTS, the first novel in this series, now out in paperback.

BURNING HEARTS:
Historical Murder Mystery with Romance, mid-1940s
---arson/murder, action, and romance
---Sweet romance, sophisticated themes presented tastefully

Can a sheltered young seamstress, disillusioned by the horrors of WWII, escape an

arsonist/murderer who has killed her employer and mentor, while trying to decide if she can trust the dashing war hero who’s ridden into town on his Harley—who some say is the murderer?

Erica Brogna’s parents doted on her and taught her to think for herself. Many boys she grew up with had fallen in the WWII, shaking her childhood faith. In rides a handsome stranger, at the hour of her most desperate need. A woman who is her close friend and mentor is trapped in a burning house. After making an unsuccessful rescue attempt, Erica stands by as this man rushes into the inferno and carries her friend’s lifeless body out.

Lorne Kincade can’t out run his past on his Harley Davidson WLA, the civilian model of the motorcycle he rode in the war. He’s tried. He’s been a vagabond biker in the year since the war ended. His Uncle Ivar bequeathed him a ramshackle cottage in Sanctuary Point, on the Great South Bay of Long Island, NY and now he’d like to hope for a future again, repair the miniscule place, and settle down. The only problem is, a young woman with hair the color of mink is starting to get under his skin and that’s the last thing he needs.

EXCERPT:

Chapter One

Long Island, New York
September 1946

Erica Brogna hurried down Hill Street, eager to sketch her new design, a forest green taffeta dress with a swirling skirt for a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary -- her first significant assignment. She paused to inhale the salt scent on the ocean breeze, and her gaze lingered on a copse of red, rust, and gold maples near Ada's house and dress shop.

She smiled, pulling her cardigan tight around her, and dropped the newspaper Poppa asked her to bring to her mentor and employer. She retrieved the paper and saw Bess Truman smiling as she entered Walter Reed Army Hospital. With the war over, the First Lady visited broken soldiers in long-term care. Erica slapped the paper closed before rage and depression overtook her. So many boys had not come home.

Chin jutted out, she smoothed the pleats of her skirt and marched toward Ada's house.

She'd think on pleasant things and hand the paper over without a fuss as she did every morning.

Nothing would ruin this day.

She climbed Ada's wooden front steps and opened the door.

Smoke filled the living room Ada had turned into a fabric shop. Erica waved a hand in front of tearing eyes. Gray vapors, like swirling fog, partially obscured bolts of fabric stacked against the opposite wall.

"Ada! Ada, answer me please." Dropping the newspaper, Erica rushed toward the stairs, trampling Bess Truman's image. "Ada can you hear me?"

Coughing, she grabbed on to the cutting table in the middle of the room, steadied herself, and reached for the phone -- no dial tone. Perhaps the fire melted the line.
She yanked the collar of her blouse over her nose and mouth against the smoke. The stairs loomed before her, seeming as impossible to scale as Mount Everest. She lunged forward, gripping the baluster, and thrust herself up two steps. Since Ada wasn't outside, she had to be upstairs.

As Erica climbed, the smoke thickened and swirled around her. It was darker with each step.

One hand clasped the rail and pulled, and she advanced a few more steps. Heat blasted against her skin from above, and soft crackling sounds drew her gaze to the upstairs landing.

Squinting into the smoke, she lost her grip on the banister, missed the next step, and fell backward tumbling to the bottom.

The back of her head smacked against the baluster, and wooziness followed sharp pain.

She tried to stand but couldn't get her bearings.

Will triumphed over ability. She hoisted herself, ignoring the dull throb at the back of her skull. Her palms stung, the skin scraped off during her fall. She took a deep breath, and a coughing fit seized her. Shallow breaths were the better alternative.
Planting her penny loafer on the bottom step, Erica began her climb again, shaken but with new resolve. If she could reach the top of the stairs, she could also make it to Ada's bedroom.

Halfway up, the scratches on her palms pulsated as the temperature rose. So did her knees -- must've scraped those, too. The pungent smoke shrouding her darkened, and grit clung to her skin. She couldn't see the banister or the top of the stairs and each breath took effort.

Poppa's lectures on fire drills flashed into mind -- stay low in a fire to get fresh air. She dropped to her knees and crawled, ignoring her pain. A sickening smell made her stomach lurch.

Inch by inch she crept, now three quarters of the way up. Hot, putrid air assaulted her windpipe, and she doubled over, her insides trembling.

Heaving herself forward, she maneuvered up one more step, but the smoke pushed back, choking her. She sobbed, knowing she couldn't make it to Ada, and scrambled down, hoping she could find help.

AUTHOR BIO:

Like so many writers, Nike Chillemi started writing at a very young age. She still has the Crayola, fully illustrated book she penned (penciled might be more accurate) as a little girl about her then off-the-chart love of horses. Today, you might call her a crime fictionista. Her passion is crime fiction. She likes her bad guys really bad and her good guys smarter and better.

She is the founding board member of the Grace Awards and is its Chairman, a reader's choice awards for excellence in Christian fiction. She writes book reviews for The Christian Pulse online magazine. She was an Inspy Awards 2010 judge in the Suspense/Thriller/Mystery category and a judge in the 2011 and 2012 Carol Awards in the suspense, mystery, and romantic suspense categories. BURNING HEARTS, the first book in the crime wave that is sweeping the south shore of Long Island in The Sanctuary Point series, finaled in the Grace Awards 2011 in the Romance/Historical Romance category. GOODBYE NOEL, the second book in the series released in December, 2011 won the Grace Award 2011 in the Mystery/Romantic Suspense/Thriller category. PERILOUS SHADOWS, third in the series released July, 2012, and DARKEST HOUR, the fourth in the series released in February, 2013.  She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW) and the Edgy Christian Fiction Lovers (Ning). http://nikechillemi.wordpress.com/

PURCHASE LINKS:
Amazon. http://tiny.cc/wfl6ww
Barnes and Noble.  http://tiny.cc/oil6ww

Novelists and Dead Body Calls

Homicide ALWAYS Called Out?

By Mark Young

Most crime fiction has a dead body turn up somewhere near the front of the book. Emergency lights flashing, uniformed cops standing around, and a grizzled and ornery homicide detective lumbers onto the scene. The detective might be guzzling lukewarm coffee from a Styrofoam cup while scowling at the supervisor for calling him out in the middle of the night. The detective—suffering from too much booze and too many call outs—glares at the world through blood-shot eyes. A cigarette dangles from cruelly-drawn lips if the detective does not give a hoot about contaminating his crime scene. How often have we read this sort of scenario?

Want to add just a little more tension to the story?

Roll back the tape until you reach a point in the story where the dead body is first discovered—if the author felt this event significant.  Maybe cops stumbled over the body or witnesses called it in to dispatch. Maybe hospital staff or caregivers reported another death of an elderly person or a person succumbing to a terminal illness—the kind of calls that come in every day. By the time we—the reader or viewer—get to the scene in our novel, everyone seems to know a murderer is loose. We see blood on the wall, a knife sticking out of the deceased’s back, or gunshot wounds riddling the dead guy’s chest.

But what if the signs of death are more subtle? What if someone really must pay attention to details? Little hints that may have been left that tell us this death is not natural or expected.

Everyone generally thinks the cop just grabs the radio and calls for investigators to come and take over. Do you think homicide units roll out on every dead body call? You would be wrong if you answered affirmative to that last question. Heads will roll if these hard-working investigators are called out to deaths that turn out to be natural.

So who makes these decisions?

Write this key shotcaller into your story and your next scene offers more opportunities to make characters and readers squirm unmercifully. Here is where the pressure comes in. If your character makes the wrong decision, one of several things might happen. Worst-case scenario—case against the killer goes out the window. Best case—made a wrong choice and tick off everyone up the chain of command, making you the laughingstock of the entire department because everyone else knew how to handle this. Even worse case scenario—killer comes after someone the officer/sergeant loves because evidence was over looked.

All agencies handle these calls a little differently. Any law enforcement agency, however, will have buried somewhere in their policies and procedural manuals exactly how these calls should be handled. The problem lies in the fact that someone must  make the right judgment call. And humans make mistakes, particularly when policies and procedures read like the fine print in an insurance claim. Any smart patrol officer will always make sure these questionable decisions fall on a field supervisor’s broad shoulders.

Once at the scene, officers must proceed with caution. One cardinal rule on dead body calls is that no one—not even the Chief himself— disturbs the body until the corner responds or gives permission to move the body. I remember one death-by-hanging case in which the officer was crucified by the coroner, the field supervisor, and by investigators eventually called out to investigate.  This kind-hearted officer did not want family members to see their loved one—a young teenager— hanging by a rope in the garage. The officer reached up and cut the deceased down to make the scene more presentable. He never made that mistake again.

But what if the coroner isn’t coming out? The officer has given all the facts over the telephone to the coroner's office. The coroner's office—based upon the officer’s statement—authorizes the body to be moved to a funeral home. What if the officer overlooked something? A key element that might change the classification from “natural” to something more sinister.

Some of the most challenging cases are those general called  “unattended deaths.” As far as anyone knows, the person may have appeared to die alone by natural causes or expected terminal illnesses. Or did they?

For example, an elderly person dies while in a care facility. The attending physician or caregiver might make the pronouncement, sign a death certificate, and arrange for the body to be taken to a funeral home. Say a family member, distraught over the death and circumstances leading up to the death, calls the police regarding their suspicions.  Police would most likely investigate.

In these circumstances, the patrol officer walks in with a mindset that this is a natural death. Those with medical training  have signed off on it, people who should know something about how this person died. Just a formality. Right?  As seasoned mystery readers and writers, you might see where such a case could suddenly explode if each death is not closely studied.

Take for example the case of the Donald Harvey, dubbed the “Angel of Death,” currently serving four consecutive life sentences at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility for more that fifteen murders. He claims to have killed eighty-seven victims, but the officials estimate Harvey killed somewhere between thirty-six  to fifty-seven victims while acting as a caregiver in several hospitals during his seventeen-years killing spree. Not once did police suspect that Harvey might be the culprit, even when he was arrested for burglary in 1971 only two years after he began killing patients and began babbling incoherently about his murders. Finally, in 1987 a faint scent of almonds—the tell tale sign of cyanide—emitting from the decease's body finally led investigators to focus on Harvey.

This case is not isolated. There have been a disturbing number of caregivers who turned out to have killed their patients for any number of reasons over the years. Some, like Harvey, got away with many killings.

Everything hangs on the shoulder of the first responders to a death investigation. Detection begins with the first officer on the scene, or the field supervisor called to determine how this case should be handled. This is not an article on how to conduct death investigations. Rather, to focus on the critical role the first officer on the scene plays in these investigations. This officer—who initially stride onto the scene full of confidence—buckles under the stress when people he respects land on him with both feet because of stupid mistakes. Stress that writers can skillfully use as a tool to make everyone squirm.

So, writers, here is a situation that begs for conflict. Use one tidbit of evidence or one statement from a witness from that scene, and have a rookie cop walk in to investigate. Is he going to call in his grumpy sergeant or is he going to take it upon himself to make the right call and demonstrate to his superiors that he can handle these situations without anyone’s help. Did he tread on the only piece  of evidence that might give a clue that this case is murder? Or the sergeant—distracted by his third wife’s divorce attorney waiting back at the station—overlooks something that even the rookie would have caught.

How many ways do you want your characters to suffer? The possibilities are endless.

D.P. Lyle

Author Interview: D. P. Lyle

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 movie Dial M for Murder spins a tale of someone trying to plan the perfect murder. The killer miscalculates and his plan goes awry. If anyone could get away with murder—forensically—my money would be on author Doug P. Lyle. He’s a practicing cardiologist in Southern California, written several non-fiction books on murder and forensics for writers, and authored several mystery novels. He knows how to write about murder.

Author D. P. Lyle, MD is the Macavity Award winning and Edgar® Award nominated author of the non-fiction books, Murder and Mayhem, Forensics For Dummies, Forensics and Fiction, and Howdunnit Forensics: A Guide For Writers as well as the fiction thrillers, Devil’s Playground and Double Blind. His next medical thriller, Stress Fracture, will be released in April, 2010. He has worked with many novelists and with the writers of popular television shows such as Law and Order, CSI: Miami, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Judging Amy, Peacemakers, Cold Case, House, Medium, Women’s Murder Club, and 1-800-Missing.

MARK: Your next novel, Stress Fracture, is scheduled for release in April. New York Times bestselling author James Rollins writes about your novel: “If Michael Crichton had written an episode of Law and Order, here might be the result.” Is this a fair assessment? Give our mystery readers a taste of what to expect in this Dub Walker series.

DOUG: Those were very kind words from Jim and I greatly appreciate them. The story is a fast-paced thriller with little downtime for the reader. It has a brutal and confusing killer, a lot of forensic science, and hopefully it will give the reader some entertaining hours of reading and maybe a sleepless night or two. The story deals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD and its effect on an unstable individual. The reader knows the killer early on but he does not know why he is doing what he is doing. And of course Dub Walker must not only interpret the forensic information but also get into the mind of the killer in order to track him down.

MARK:  Tell us about your main character, Dub Walker? What is his background? What are the demons he’s battling?

DOUG: Dub is a character with a history. He was a good high school athlete and a very bright student who did well in college and attended medical school. Before completing medical school, in fact only months away from graduating, he failed to meet his younger sister in a parking lot near the medical center as he had promised. He was an hour late and when he arrived he found only her purse and a single shoe. She was never seen again. This happened some 12 years before this story begins, but this is the life event that will haunt him forever as he feels responsible for not being there for her. This is what drives him to solve cases. This is what drives him to figure out the criminal mind.

After his sister's disappearance, Dub became despondent and ultimately, to shake himself from his depression, joined the Marines and served as an MP for two years. After his discharge, he returned to Huntsville and worked for several years in the forensic science lab, where he gained his expertise in forensic science. He spent time with the Behavioral Assessment Unit of the FBI as an observer and student and learned more about criminal behavior. He then became an author and wrote many books about forensic science and criminal psychology. He also possesses an innate ability to read crime scenes and evidence and to dig inside the mind of the bad guys. His current role is that of consultant on difficult cases around the country. It is the murder of an old friend that drags him into the case in Stress Fracture.

MARK: Is Dub Walker a reflection of D.P. Lyle?

DOUG: I would have to say that he has many of my characteristics and some of his own. I think most authors are that way when they create a protagonist. He has a love for science and is fascinated by abnormal behavior. He likes problem-solving. He has a strong sense of justice and personal responsibility and doesn't believe that anyone should get away with a crime. Those are the things that he and I agree on.

MARK:  Tell us about the killer. Is there anything about this guy that might generate some empathy with the reader or is this villain pure evil?

DOUG: I don’t want to give too much away because this story is not so much a whodunit as it is a whydunnit. That said, even though the killer is totally out of control, there are parts of him that I believe the reader will empathize with. I'll just leave it at that and let readers decide for themselves if the bad guy has any redeeming qualities.

MARK:  In terms of genre, where would you classify Stress Fracture? Police procedural? Medical/forensic thriller? Combination of these and others?

DOUG: Genres are always hard to peg and that seems to be getting more difficult every day as one bleeds into the other. But if I had to classify Stress Fracture I would say that it was a medical and psychological thriller.

MARK:  You’ve authored an array of non-fiction books on forensics—Forensics and Fiction, Forensic Science for Writers, Forensics for Dummies, and the ever-popular Murder and Mayhem: A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic Questions for Mystery Writers. Tells us a little about your background and how you’ve become a medical forensic expert to writers.

DOUG: If you are a physician and go to a cocktail party people ask questions about their cholesterol or their gallbladder, but if you are a physician and go to a writers conference you're immediately asked questions about how poisons work and how to kill someone with a gun. So I simply began answering questions for writers on medical issues and that immediately bled into forensic issues, which in turn led me to educate myself in that arena. I was a chemistry major in college with a minor in biology and have a medical degree and specialty training in cardiology, which is what I practice here in Orange County. So my love of science has been since childhood. I never considered doing anything else but medicine and in fact knew that cardiology was the field that I would practice even before I started medical school. Forensic science is also fascinating to me. My self-education in forensic science was actually quite simple. You can't get through medical school and specialty training without being well-versed in all the “ologies.” Pathology, physiology, pharmacology,