After 25 years of doing this job, I’ve found that asking the right questions can make the person sitting on the other side of my desk quite uncomfortable. If I push hard enough, I can even make them wish they never walked through my door. Take this lady, for example. She’s spent the better part…
Father Night by Eric Van Lustbader is a spy thriller in the Jack McClure/Alli Carson series (available September 18, 2012). A rocket propelled grenade missing you by a whisper would shake you up less than this cracking piece of writing. It starts off as one thing then becomes another then just when you settle down,…
There’s a place in our society that holds a different breed of men. They are prisoners, true; but they are not the normal breed of arsonist, rapist, thief, junkie, or killer. These are men (statistically almost exclusively men) who have not only been determined to have killed with premeditation and received the charge of “Murder…
Sometimes when I travel I feel paranoid and delusional. But am I really? After all, I could be standing beside a terrorist and not even know it. With the growth of home grown terrorists in America, I could be swapping football woes with someone contemplating blowing up a public building! I don’t bother with profiling…
Recently, I had the opportunity to go on book tour with Marcia Clark as she ushered her second crime novel, Guilt by Degrees, into the world. (Translation: Marcia Clark went on book tour and I independently followed her as she traversed the East Coast—three states in four nights!) Seeing as she gamely refrained from taking…
When I was in the sixth grade, a girl was abducted not far from where my mother lived. Her body was later found lying facedown in a wheat field. That event became the demarcation line between my childhood and an early adolescence. From the day she was snatched away, I began searching the world for…
Families all have secrets and events which they would rather keep under wraps and behind closed doors, so imagine my surprise when I discovered a relative of mine had been convicted of a major crime and dealt with in the harshest possible way. Walter is his name and his crime involved fire and general malicious…
Having spent many years on the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, assigned to various duties, I’d have to say my stretch as a detective assigned to the Career Criminal Unit was among the best of times. Like so many criminal investigators, what attracted me most to the field was criminal behavior. Specifically, the maturation…
We’ve all seen this one, or read it. Detective assigned to the case visits the crime scene after forensics and photographers and search teams have conducted their examination of the location. He wanders around soaking up the atmosphere and getting his head around the evidence. Then something catches his eye. A glint or a twinkle…
It’s no secret that people consider CPAs to be hopeless nerds. After all, only a total dork with lousy social skills would want to sit at a desk all day dealing with boring numbers, right? Except numbers aren’t nearly as boring as one might think. On the contrary, numbers are, in fact, nasty little snitches.…
