No one wore grief well, but for some it was a costume. It was Trina's job to figure out who was sincere, and who was playing dress-up.
Chapter Two is all about the police procedural side of the story, with a healthy dose of our detectives trying to figure out what's bothering one another in their personal lives. They're both "fine," of course.
Y'all know I'm a detail person, and I also really love police procedurals. Mystery/thriller is my most read genre. I love the process, the chase, more than learning whodunnit, so it should come as no surprise that I revel in the little details of fact-finding, interviewing, and interrogation. I'm not a fan of "pulling one over on the audience." A little shock here and there is okay, but I don't ever like to sucker-punch the audience in a way that leaves them reeling. As the clues begin to form a picture for the detectives, so too should they inform the audience. That's my approach, anyway.
"[K]inda posh, and not in a good, rich guy way. Like, a mama's boy or something, you know?"
Badly as I'd like to, I won't jump ahead and address the identity of this mama's boy, even though I want to. For now, he's simply "the killer," and Trina and Lanny are trying to figure out why their vic has zero lividity, and yet there's not a drop of blood at the crime scene.
From a character-building standpoint, my goal with this chapter was to establish a rapport and intimacy between Trina and Lanny. Trina's been to his family Thanksgiving, and she's adopted his mother's habit of calling him by his full name, Roland, when he's being an ass - which is often. Lanny is my favorite sort of male character to write: kind of an ass. Confident, comfy in his own skin, irreverent. He stands in bold contrast to the other men in this series, who are either tortured Heathcliffs, like Nik and Fulk, princes of varying levels of aggression, or absolute rays of sunshine, like Sasha, and, to a lesser degree, Rob. Lanny is a dude. If I had to airlift him into another of my series, he'd make a pretty good Lean Dog.
When the novel begins, though, we quickly realize, through Trina's eyes, that's something's amiss with him. We'll learn what that is in Chapter Three.
Trina's still struggling with her nightmares in this chapter, and the resultant sleep deprivation. Lanny is the very soul of practicality, but Trina's family (which we'll learn more about later, and actually get to meet in book four) has always led her to believe that the inexplicable and mythical has a basis in reality. The oddness of this case is bugging her much more than it's bugging Lanny.
I had a Facebook question after the Chapter One post as to whose eyes Trina was psychically seeing Sasha, and the answer is Nikita's. Next chapter, we'll see them have a little Vulcan Mind Meld moment before we take a full and deep dive into the past.
Up next: Lanny's secret, and a healthy dose of that vague kind of magic I mentioned in Chapter One. Stay tuned!
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