Whatever Happened to STAC #12?

 

It’s a question I’m often asked, and as usual the answer is about as complex as one of Joe’s cases.

Of those of you who read Death in Distribution, you’re aware of the ending and you’re biting your fingernail down to your elbows wondering what happens next. For those you who haven’t read Death in Distribution, may I suggest you get a move on before the release of A Family Killing.

Not that the release is imminent. I’m unwilling to speculate on a publication date. Right now, I’m unwilling to speculate on a completion date, but it is progressing. It should have been with editor, Maureen Vincent-Northam, last month, but it didn’t happen for a number of reasons, many of them down to poor health. In addition, I had the release of the first Spookies Mystery, The Haunting of Melmerby Manor. The subsequent success of Spookies meant that much of my effort has been concentrated on raising the visibility and publicity for that title, and the STAC Mysteries have taken a back seat.

Aside from a painful bout of tennis elbow (I knew I should have stuck to dominoes) which is plaguing me right now, all of that is behind me. The plot problems have been sorted, and I’m on with it again, and it should be with you very soon… this side of the next millennium, for sure.

Just keep you quiet, here’s a sample from the text of A Family Killing. Bear in mind, this is an early draft and there is work to do on it, yet.

After an attack on his father, Toby Ballantyne is with Joe at the hospital. When Joe suggests that Katya may have tried to blackmail the old man, Toby says it’s not possible and Joe wants to know why.

***

Toby sighed and ran tired hands over his face. “Do you remember your grandfather?”

“Barely,” Joe said, while privately wondering where the young Ballantyne was going. “I was only a kid when he died. He was a Yorkshire miner. Dirty words thirty years ago. All I really remember is this big man who always spoke his mind. He was afraid of nothing and no one. I suppose there’s a lot of him in me.” Joe laughed at the memories springing into his head.

“A different man to my grandfather,” Toby said. “Or maybe not that much different. He wasn’t a miner, of course, but a wealthy businessman. High church. Pious as hell. I swear if he hadn’t been who he was, he would have become a preacher. I was in my early teens when he passed away, and there’s only one memory which sticks in my mind. I got caught out throwing stones at the old summer house. Smashed a couple of windows. I tried to lie my way out of it by blaming Serena, but granddad knew. Before he gave me a good hiding, he warned me, ‘never tell lies. If you’ve done wrong, and you’re caught out, own up’.”

“Sound advice,” Joe said. “The world would be a much better place if everyone lived by that code.”

Toby nodded. “Dad thought so, too. And that’s why Katya, if she learned of anything, would have failed to get a penny out of him. You can’t blackmail him, you see. Sure, he likes to control the release of news. You know that after what happened over Easter. Most large corporations and wealthy people are the same. They control the news as far as they can. It helps to mitigate the outcry. Be that as it may, if Katya brought out any dirty linen, he would have refused to pay her, and admitted it himself.”

“Even if it was criminal?”

“Where dad is concerned, it would never be criminal. If she found something earlier in the family, and that was criminal, well… even then, dad would have broken the news, not her. He is impossible to blackmail. So if she tried and failed, maybe that was why she attacked him.”

Joe shook his head. “Doesn’t quite hang together, does it?”

***Why doesn’t it hang together? If it wasn’t Katya, who was it? All will be revealed in A Family Killing, STAC Mystery #12, coming soon to a Kindle near you.