Here I Come A'Castle-ing

I don't mind admitting it, I thoroughly enjoy the television show Castle. If I could only watch one show each week, that would be the one. Now I get to do a little of what Castle does.

I am doing research to help add more police realism to my next couple of novels about the small town police who first appeared in my debut novel, Crossbow. I have received a lot of fan mail from people who enjoyed the quirky characters in the book, and I have decided to bring them back for more.

I will be joining members of the local detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in night watches, traffic patrols and more. I want to add a female officer to the mix in the novels, so I will also go on patrol with a female RCMP officer. 

It seems that one thing that all the fans of the book who have written to me so far have in common is a love for Duke, the pee-mail communicating, snack-sniffing Springer Spaniel that one of the deputies is vainly trying to train as a police dog. I'll be watching a K-9 officer and his human counterpart, as well.

Castle is right. As he says, "There are two kinds of people who spend their time thinking about ways to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers." In Crossbow, I found ways to kill off 12 characters, and it definitely is the better paying of the two. I may not kill as many in the book I am working on now, but I can assure your their deaths will be unique.

Have I got a great job or what?

A recent reader review of Crossbow:

Having read all I could get in my Kindle of his other books, I approached Crossbow with a pleasant sense of anticipation. Thinking it would be a book of hilarious mishaps with the eventual solving of a murder, I was quickly brought up short by the seriousness of it. I love humorous fiction, and this was not it. It was better. Much better. It was not as light a read as, say, Charlotte MacLeod or the like. But I absolutely loved the quirks and twists and convoluted nature of the whole thing as it unraveled. And the humor WAS there ... right where it should be in a story like that: in the background a bit, subtle, always hovering around the edges to soften the hideousness of the crime(s). Also, unlike many mystery writers, he neither gives you the knowledge of "who dun it" right up front, nor does he make you wrack your brain and then have the mystery solved by someone who had knowledge all along that the reader had no way of knowing. The hints are there. 

But Duke, by far, steals the show.