A few years ago, not long after putting New Blood out and hoping that it would magically make a million dollars so that I wouldn't have to work anymore, I started writing the second book. 

It was going to be the sequel to New Blood, set in Tazewell County, a few months after the happenings with Sheriff DuBois and Wayne Trueblood, and it was going to show Dana getting his feet wet again, getting used to his new relationship with Kelly, getting comfortable with his new life.

I got about fifty pages in and I shelved it.

There were two reasons for this: one, someone told me that I needed to go back and write the story of the Chicago Shopper, because THAT was a story, and two, because getting comfortable just doesn't make for anything very interesting.

Comfortable is what I was doing last night, which was binge-watching The Walking Dead because my wife was attending a birth (she's a doula). Comfortable is working from home and making my daughter go get the groceries (she's sixteen). It's ordering library books online and then waiting a few days to go pick them up.

But as far as mystery thriller / crime books go, comfortable is, well, meh. 

So I shelved it. I wrote Blood Origin, spent my summer being...comfortable...and then I picked up those fifty pages and started over. With a new idea. With something interesting, something fun. At least I thought so.

I found myself thinking back to a man whom I didn't even know, but whose girlfriend I took out on a date once, when I was in college. Without knowing she even had a boyfriend. A man whose face I saw across the quad, shouting out her name, before turning away and leaving.

"Who was that?" I asked.

"Oh, that's just my boyfriend."

A boyfriend whose face I have never forgotten, although there is no reason for me to have retained the memory of that event. Even though it turned out that the relationship wasn't "already over," as far as I knew, he never did get back together with her (neither did I), and I can only assume that he went on to live a long and fruitful life, hopefully with someone more loyal than the woman in question.

For whatever misfiring-neuron strange reason I remember him, though, I started wondering: What if he didn't go on to have a happy life, but a very bad one, riddled with addiction and a bad marriage and death and all sorts of mental illness? And what if, in the process of reframing his life, he goes back to that one single moment and decides that's where everything first started to go wrong?

That this horrible, complicit, evil man who had stolen his girlfriend was responsible for all that had gone bad in his life?

More importantly, what if he decided to do something about it? Something just as bad?

At any rate, my friends, I don't want to spoil too much at this point. I just want to show you the cover. It would be great if you would let me know what you think. About it or anything else. Sometimes it gets lonely over here:

I almost forgot. There is a sale going on over at Book Funnel, if you need something to read. These books are not free, but they are discounted. Let me know if you find something good.

And watch out for guys across the quad. They might not come back to get you, but you never know how long they might decide to stay in your head.

Take Care, Stay Healthy, Stay Home and Read

Shane