MORE THAN JUST A BOOK RELEASE

I remember with clarity the genesis of this work. It was April 2019. My wife was away for the weekend with her family. I sat in a now-defunct hot tub with a martini on a Friday night after a long week. There was a conscious effort to develop a new character, a new series, after completing the final volume of the Ark City Confidential Chronicles, my historical crime series that took place in a small Kansas town over a twenty-year period.

While I had become attached to the main character, Baron Witherspoon, and had come to understand his journey, I never felt as close to him as I would have preferred. It was my desire to infuse the next book with something closer to who I was, while staying within the parameters of historical crime fiction, Wichita, circa mid-1940’s.

This is where Harold Bergman was born, at least as a character. He was given a name similar to mine, a date of birth that differed only by the year, and a religion that I had come to, shall we say, re-embrace as I got older. This was to be more than stories of solving crimes. This was to be a search for one’s self while searching for others. There would be a path of self-discovery in between the procedural and legal aspects of police investigation and the enlightenment found solely through a religious following.

These were the aspects of humanity that Harold and I would share. By placing this spiritual journey within the confines of hard-boiled crime fiction with certain noir elements, my hope was to draw readers in for the story and leave them with something more to consider. Perhaps Harold Bergman would be someone that would be interesting to them.

So, now after over four years, Harold’s first story, “The Day of Calamity”, becomes available on Amazon. I hope you will join me on this new adventure.

Oh, and Sir PounceAlot and Lady Mittens appreciate you as well.