RichEisbrouch
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Everything posted by RichEisbrouch
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I really appreciate that. I just have no direct experience about police practices, and when you're basing fiction on fiction and research, reality and intelligent readers sometimes get lost. So I'm glad -- and relieved -- that you're enjoying the story.
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Thanks. Though you gotta remember it's a detective in fiction. Just trying to tell a story here. You know actual police work is different.
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Pete and I got to bed early – not long after ten – partly because of our early start and partly because of school the next morning. But I’d been spoiled by the unhurried days and late nights of summer, and maybe I still couldn’t accept that I had to be back in a classroom, teaching. Pete read for a while, and I held the Sunday crossword in front of me, probably adding another few words he’d missed. But I readily set the paper down when he asked if it was okay to turn off his light. Lyi
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Thanks.
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When I woke Sunday morning, Josh was tugging at the sheet near my face. He was standing next to the bed, tugging, drooling, and making his usual sounds, kind of talking to himself. “Cute,” I said. “Your father pay you to do this?” But when I turned over to Pete, he was still asleep. I sat up, very quickly. “Pete? Pete.” He mumbled at me. “Wake up. It’s important.” Meanwhile, I’d pulled Josh onto the bed. “Pete, damn it, wake up.” “What? What? What’s the ma
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Thanks.
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And thanks for reading along. You're moving through my work well faster than I can write.
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Thanks for seconding that. Mr. Hawkins. I think the lack of speed and carnage are more obvious when I'm writing close to genres -- mystery, law -- that usually have more action. That would be Tall Man Down, In the Plan, and The Pendleton Omens. And I hate misleading people -- initially letting them think this is going to be the kind of book they expect.
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Yeah, well... there are things Gil tells Pete and things he doesn't. And it works the other way, too.
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I believe Steve was a bit more active in that living room than just sitting stoned, barefoot, and without his jacket. I think they were steps on the way to the party.
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Yep, a member of the police force might look at it that way. But some people are trained to hunt out conspiracies, where the rest of us just shrug and say, "That's life." And that may be one of the nice differences between Don and Gil.
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Much as I understand that in the abstract, sometimes my husband is just a bit too uncurious. And two hours of an otherwise comfortable dinner in a restaurant would be even more pleasant if he'd occasionally respond to an observation or piece of reporting of mine with a comment of his own.
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Yep, often no hurry in a small town. Thanks for sticking around.
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The thing about police paperwork is it’s a pain in the neck. Don blamed his boss, Owen, but probably because he didn’t have a larger context. Nine years with New York’s Finest taught me there were so many ways to crawl into the tiniest crevice of my body that I couldn’t even begin to put numbers to them. So after dinner – which I prefaced with the good news that I could help – Don admitted that he had his laptop in his car and could rough out for me what needed double checked. Of course, Noah –
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One more thing: there's a version of this on Amazon, with four-dozen pictures. You don't have to buy the book, but if you go on the site, you can see pictures of Molly and Rocky.
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Thanks. It's my favorite and most personal story. But I'd trade it to have her back. Meanwhile, Rock has a new companion -- Bailey, a two-year-old Border Collie/Cattle Dog mix. We needed not to get another white Boxer to compete with the memory of Molly. So Bailey is a reminder of Fluff. And thanks for reading along.
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Thanks for your comment. Useful to know, and it seems your taste may have been formed by faster moving mystery and police chronicle novels. I never had the plotting skills to write one of those. Or the interest, either. Among other things, I hate killing characters. I prefer poking around in people's lives.
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And suddenly peace reigned in the forest. Well, kinda. What really happened was the usual politics, and it drifted out over the week. It seemed Larry didn’t really want to give up his authority. Not all of it anyway. Not just yet. But he absolutely didn’t want to bring any attention to himself, claiming he valued his family more than anything. Don said a man in that cramped position could probably give up sex for that – well, extra-marital sex. After all, Larry was only 43. And he could giv
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Yeah, Jake and Conor was designed to be read straight through. But then some of my shorter books -- like Mexico -- were, too. Moorpark Palms is another of my books that takes some getting used to: it's about the characters, not the plot, and it's completely episodic. As I've noted, that's the reason I created Jake and Conor -- to gives the anecdotes some structure. But it just made things more confusing. Again, thanks for reading along.
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The phone rang a bit after eight. If Josh was awake, he was playing quietly in his crib, in his room down the hall from ours. Pete and I had been sleeping. Phones didn't normally ring at that hour in our house, especially on a Saturday, and I was tempted to answer, “This better be a wrong number.” It was Larry. “Can you do me a favor?” he asked. It was unexpected, but “Sure thing,” I said, reflexively. I rarely refused friends. “Big or small?” “I don’t know, really. I’m thinking abou
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Leaving the theater that evening, after watching some of the auditions for the fall play, I ran into an unexpected road block because of a motorcycle accident. So I backed up, turned around, and detoured past the President’s House. At least, I started to, when I noticed its lights were on. At least, I thought they were. There was a blink as I passed the driveway, then it was all dark hedges. I thought about going back, then figured I was seeing things. Then I went back anyway. I parked
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After Don left, and my students and I had worked through the afternoon, mainly rehanging lights on the stage, I sat at my desk for maybe fifteen minutes. All afternoon, I’d been trying to figure out an engineering problem that was just on the edge of eluding me. So I thought if I sat down and let my brain focus on that one thing, the answer might come. And that’s what I was doing – staring both into space and at the dumb and dusty, underused phone on my desk – when the message light came on.
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But when the second message was ignored, the sender just moved on – though in a slightly different way. The third message was an electronically distorted voice mail on Rebecca and Greg’s office phones. Why doesn’t anyone care where Larry Marsden was when President Catlin died? “It came on their private lines,” Don told me in my office on Friday morning. “Not the ones that go through their assistants.” “I didn’t know there were private lines. I thought Greg was talking about his cell. B
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But just because you think something is nonsense, or want it to go away, doesn’t mean that will happen. Rebecca and Greg – and no doubt Larry – simply wanted to get on with the school year. They were busy enough trying to make a smooth transition from Catlin. At least, they weren’t also responsible for having to alert the people that mattered – like academic headhunters – that they’d be looking for a new president. The Board would do that, if the national obituaries hadn’t already managed.
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Amazing that you had so many. After your own schooling, that seems like you taught for about 30 years. If my math still works.
