The Mall Cop and the Wounded Warrior

Hi, Elaine Viets here. I never blurb novels unless I like them. I loved "Die  Buying, "  the first book in Laura DiSilverio's new mall cop series. It's a good mystery for a good cause. Laura is donating the proceeds to the Wounded Warrior Project.

Laura was a warrior herself. She served 20 years as an Air Force intelligence officer before retiring in 2004 to write and parent full-time. She's discovered that "parenting" a teen and a tween mostly consists of chauffeuring them from band practice to volleyball to drama class and using the drive time to solve school/friend/boy/self-image crises.

By Laura DiSilverio

In my first mall cop mystery, "Die Buying," Emma-Joy "EJ" Ferris, a security officer with the Fernglen Galleria, likes her job, although it's usually more humdrum than the military policing she did until an IED left her with a bum knee and a medical retirement at 30. 

 As a mall cop, she apprehends shoplifters, discourages teens from skateboarding on the escalators, and tries to catch the taggers spray-painting Bible verses on cars. She also copes with her 83-year-old Grandpa Atherton, a long-retired CIA operative who likes to "keep his hand in" by purchasing all the latest techno-gadgets and spying on mall customers and shopkeepers.

EJ's boredom vanishes when someone "liberates" all the reptiles from the Herpetology Hut, known to the mall denizens as the Herpes Hut. The renegade reptiles include a 15-ft python. Then a body turns up posed as a mannequin in the window of an upscale boutique. EJ must quickly catch the killer since fear of another murder is emptying the mall faster than you can say "All sales final."

When the idea for a mall cop mystery series first popped into my head, I didn't know why my protagonist, EJ Ferris, was a mall security officer. As I got to know her, I realized that being a mall cop was not the fulfillment of her life's dream. Not too surprising, I guess. She was stuck as a mall cop, I decided, because of an injury. From there it was a short step to discovering she'd been an Air Force cop and had had her life shattered by an IED, as so many of our military men and women have.

 WWP exists to foster the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded warriors in our nation's history. Its purpose is to raise awareness and to enlist the public's aid for the needs of injured service members; to help injured servicemen and women aid and assist each other; and to provide unique, direct programs and services to meet their needs. The organization has helped tens of thousands of wounded warriors since 2003. You can read more at

http://woundedwarriorproject.org. 

  Let me hasten to point out that there's nothing remotely military or political about the series, but I'm donating the profits from the first book to the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP), a non-profit organization that helps wounded vets get their lives back on track. My husband and I are both military veterans (he's still a Reservist and I'm retired) and he's done several tours in Iraq. WWP is an organization we've supported for some time.

In "Die Buying," EJ struggles, as many injured vets do, to come to terms with the limitations that her injured knee puts on her. She has applied to 18 police departments in Virginia and been turned down by all of them. Despite that, she continues to think of her mall cop job as "temporary" and sends out resumes looking for "real" police jobs. She hopes that finding the murderer before the condescending Detective Anders Helland does will convince the police that her detecting skills are not impeded by her knee. She also learns to accept her leg's appearance a bit more as she helps an overweight co-worker, Joel, start an exercise program to give him enough confidence to ask out a girl he finds attractive.

I hope you'll enjoy EJ and her mall family, including her co-worker, Joel; her roller-derbying best friend, Kyra; the mysterious (and attractive) new owner of the cookie franchise, Jay Callahan; and the always worried mall manager, Curtis Quigley. 

NOTE: Read more about the series at www.lauradisilverio.com