Do Some Damage discussion

I'm trying to word this as best I can because I really enjoyed the book but want to ask the question anyway. So, apologies up front.

There seemed to be hints of an alternative novel below the surface. A couple of times the book seemed it was going to explore more conventional crime fiction plots before shunting them off to the side for more character depth and familial interactions.

For example the brother on death row who says he didn't do one of the crime he's accused of and wants his brother to investigate and prove it. This suggested that there was going to be some sort of investigation by what amounted to an amateur sleuth.

Also, the sisters boyfriend who offers the prodigal brother a spot on the crew. He could have involved himself and all sorts of this could have gone wrong, but didn't.

Did anyone else notice that some of these potential sub-plots were shunted aside for character development and/or introspection? Did Pic make the right decision?

A part of me wonders if those sections went through different variations over the time it was written. Especially when you consider how plot/action oriented past crime novels were.

I don't now, just rambling/participating here.

Yeah, I wonder if this is just setting up expectations only to do something more interesting.

There also could have been more with Gilmore and his family and how Terry's dad was looking into that. Then that could have come into play more.

It's like a huge limb of a tree with all these branches. They're all part of the big story, but any of them could go off into its own big limb at any time.

Wait, that's not right.

I mean that as you're reading, you're set up to accept any of these stories as important. Maybe it's because they're developed well enough that they feel as if they could keep being developed.

I've read many lesser books in which a "sub-plot" is so haphazard, you'd never buy it. You don't expect it to develop.

But here, as with the Gilmore red herring, you feel as if these pieces could be true.

Well, I do want to say that from the start I was always interested in persenting extra threads and strands of sub-plots/themes/storylines because that's what a family is. That's what a history is. You've got all this baggage, all these possibilities, all these questions, and some you get an answer to and some you never do. Some you drop for now and pick up again later. With this novel and this family and this series I was making an attempt to really reproduce the messiness of family life and drama. Sometimes you only find out a piece about your own past, you discover some weird bit of information about your parents that you never knew before, etc. So I wanted all of these folds and portions of other stories (lesser or greater stories) to collectively have meaning, even if you don't always get to the end of that particular thread.

Some do get picked up in the sequel THE LAST WHISPER IN THE DARK. Some don't. Some I might save for later books in the series (assuming there are any more). But I wanted the ability to head back in and pick up pieces and go, "Oh yeah, I mentioned this...now let's go investigate that further."

It's also true that across the various drafts some elements were changed, either intentionally by me or in deference to things brought up by editors along the way.