Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Of course, for most people that other solution would be something like getting a second job to make ends meet or going back to school to pursue a more viable area of study. Not so for friends and recent college grads Pender, Marie, Sawyer, and Mouse.

Fueled by frustration and righteous indignation they instead turn to kidnapping wealthy businessmen, and what starts out as a lark – “Let’s try it. Just to see if we can.” – turns into a lucrative career.

The secret to their success is careful research to vet the targets, detailed planning, no violence, and not getting greedy; they never ask for more than $100k, an amount their targets can easily afford and are more than willing to pay.

Select a target, kidnap, collect a modest ransom, move to a different city, repeat. For two years things run like clockwork, until the day they unknowingly select a target whose wife has connections to the mob. The wife refuses to pay and calls in the hitters, the group’s attempt to return the target goes spectacularly off the rails, and all their efforts to stay low key are blown to hell as both state and federal authorities enter the fray. (more…)

I’ve never been much for outlining. Respect to those who can do it, but writing from a treatment has always seemed a little too much like work to me. Anyway, I like being surprised. Usually it’s my characters doing the surprising. Sometimes, though, writing off-the-cuff can lead to some spectacularly unintended consequences for me, the writer, as well.

I sat down to write The Professionals, my debut thriller, with a basic idea. A group of kidnappers set loose on America, kidnapping rich businessmen at high volume, for low ransoms, from sea to shining sea. I didn’t know who my kidnappers were, or where they came from, or even how many they numbered. I knew their MO, and I figured they’d tell me the rest.

I set the first scene, somewhat arbitrarily, north of Chicago. A kidnapping at a commuter train station, seen from the point of view of the victim. By the second chapter, my kidnappers appeared. Arthur Pender and three friends, disenfranchised college grads from Seattle who’d turned to crime in the face of a shrinking American job market.

Pender and his gang were nomadic by nature. They’d crossed the country pulling kidnapping scores for nearly two years. They needed somewhere to go after Chicago, and I closed my eyes and pointed at a map and—voila—sent them north to Minnesota. It seemed like an innocuous decision at the time, but two and a half years down the road, it’s turned out to have a pretty big influence on my writing career. (more…)

Dan in 1977…

This guest blogging gig is weird. I’ve been writing for a living one way or another all of my adult life, but I always had a topic. Granted, a lot of the topics sucked – topics like, say, give us 3,000 words on the ramifications of pending international tax treaties on transfer pricing for US-based multinationals. That topic sucked. But I knew where to start. Besides, what do you think drove me to write about killing people in the first place?

But this guest blog thing? Ms. White dropped me a line saying she’d like to review my online novel experiment, The Gravity of Mammon, and, as part of that exercise, could I send her a guest blog post. Of course, I said, sure. I mean, I’m as narcissistic as the next guy. Somebody wants to talk about me, but wants me to talk about myself first? Hell yeah, I’m all over that. It’s like a threesome – me, myself, and somebody else talking about me and myself.

But then I ask her what she wants me to cover, and she says whatever I want. That she likes to let writers off their leashes. Which tells me that Ms. White must like the smell of writer urine everywhere, because, as a group, we’re really not housebroken and we do like to piss all over everything. But that still doesn’t give me a topic. (more…)