When you open my books, you won’t find perfect, sinless characters. You’ll find those who are living amidst harsh circumstances or who face the temptation to walk an easier and perhaps more pleasurable path than what they have vowed to travel. I’ve grafted some of the deemed “seven deadly sins” in my work (Shocker, I know!) because we all face things in our life like greed and lust.
In the words of the Bible, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” Christian or faithless, we all have huge life issues to traverse. I write those issues into my books, hoping to help encourage someone who may have gone or is going through similar hardships or scenarios.
Some characters in my books act rather Godless, because, in fact, they don’t know Him or don’t know Him yet. Often they are the “bad guy”, the antagonist, but sometimes that line is blurred. As in the novel I’m currently writing—By Broken Birch Bay, a mystery, in which even I won’t know who the killer will be until the end.
Before I started my current work in progress, I asked myself the question: “Would anyone be able to kill someone—despite their moral beliefs or not—when presented with a situation that left them little alternative. I surmise someone has actually lived through this, because the more I live the more I realize that the old saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” is correct.
Here’s my opening to my mystery novel:
August 10th, 1925
For posterity, I pen my story here of how it happened—who killed who and why.
Let me tell you something from one who has been there: you’re capable of killing. Everyone is. I can hear your thoughts—“I would never. No! Not me”. But you’re wrong. You don’t know what lengths you’ll go to until you must. Never think yourself too good, too righteous for such a sin. Wasn’t it Jesus who said that if you so much as hate a person, you commit murder in your heart?
Then I’ve done it—murdered someone. More than once. In my heart. But did I in reality? I recall nothing but the stillness of the air and the ringing in my ears—buzzing as if my head were a live hive of bees. Then those two pale faces, witnesses to my crime and that unmoving form, just lying there, splayed out like a bird who’s crashed into the window.
I saw a little sparrow, the day before, die that way. One second he flitted and dove. The next he lay on his side, on the concrete step, wings extended slightly, feet curled under, and his beady eye closed. And when do birds ever have their eyes closed?
But those eyes, surprised, spent, drained of that unexplainable light that’s present when the spirit still dwells in the body. Only emptiness stared back at me. That image will haunt me till my dying day.
Do you enjoy reading clean or cozy mysteries? If so, what kind?