A Small Sacrifice by Dana King

Dana King’s first detective Nick Forte novel, A Small Sacrifice, was nominated for a Shamus Award, and boy did it deserve the recognition and praise. It is a ripping good tale.

Former Chicago cop, Nick Forte, takes on the job of clearing the name of a man everyone believes guilty of murdering a child.

State and local police bungled the investigation and could not prove the man strangled his own six-year-old son.

The killing made headlines the previous year when the man found the child’s body in the basement of the family’s huge suburban home.

Now, his mother, a wealthy, obstinate, battle axe, wants to restore the good name of the family. She hires Nick for the task.

Nick hates the case, but money is money.

He tells the mother he cannot promise he will get any further than the police. The woman says she does not want Nick to solve the case, just do enough to change public opinion about her son.

Nick barely begins snooping when someone he wants to interview winds up dead in the trunk of a car. Before he can dwell on the odd possible connection to the case, a hired killer attempts to assassinate Nick on the streets of Chicago. The hitman has mob connections.

Once Nick Forte steps into mob territory, the level of tension in the story goes up tenfold. Mobsters get annoyed when outsiders stick their noses into their carefully concealed illegal businesses.

But what is the connection between the mob and his client's arrogant son, Nick wonders?

Dana King spins a complex tale of crime and corruption in a fast paced story with a just the right amount of humor – usually provided by Nick’s first person comments.

At one point, Nick Forte has to talk face to face with a powerful mob boss. Nick says, “I forced myself to make eye contact. It was like looking down the staircase to hell.”

There are four more novels in King’s Nick Forte series.

For a glimpse at Dana King’s other series, the Penns River police novels, look here and here.

Three Questions for Dana King author of Leaving the Scene

This month, Dana King published Leaving the Scene, the sixth book in his terrific Penns River series of police procedurals. I recently asked him three questions:

EB: Congratulations on the new book. Would you tell us about it and what the police in your fictional Pennsylvania town are facing? 

DK: Leaving the Scene has two meanings in this book. Long-time Penns River police chief Stush Napierkowski has retired, so changes are afoot in the department. The new chief has to hit the ground running when a hit-and-run driver kills a woman. While the homicide takes up more of the story than anything else, mostly the book deals with the conflicting demands on the cops’ time, some humorous, others not. 

EB: You’ve lived with your recurring characters for a while now. Does that make the writing easier? Or is coming up with a new story always a challenge? 

DK: For me it’s easier; others’ mileage may vary. I like having a set cast I can draw from, as I know many of their strengths and weaknesses already. I’ll often get an idea for a story, or a side anecdote, and my first thought will be, “Sisler needs to answer this call,” or, “this can show the differing styles and personalities of Trettle and Burrows.” It opens things up for me. I also don’t have to use every continuing character in every book. It’s a little like the old Mission Impossible TV show, where Peter Graves would shuffle through the photos of his team to choose who he wanted to use this week. As for ideas, Penns River is based on a real place. I just have to read the paper for ideas. 

EB: During the writing of any of your Penns River novels, or your Nick Forte P.I. series, have you ever painted yourself into a corner and had to figure a way out of it? 

DK: Oh, yeah. Two times come to mind. In each I had to throw away tens of thousands of words and go back to a place where things were still on the rails and work from there. I once wrote over 30,000 words of a Nick Forte story, fighting it all the way, when I realized this wasn’t a Forte story; it belonged in Penns River. I threw away everything but one sentence and started over. (It wasn’t the opening sentence, either.) Not coincidentally, these are the only books I tried to write without outlines. Never again. The outline often changes as the book progresses, but I always have some kind of map working. Scrivener is great for that, especially if you need to re-arrange the order of chapters. 

EB: Thanks, Dana. 

For more information about Dana King’s novels, check out his website, and keep up with him on Facebook or his blog.

Q&A with author Dana King

 

Dana King’s latest book is Pushing Water. It is the fifth book in his Penns River series of police procedurals.

Penns River is King’s fictional setting, a small Pennsylvania city. It was once a prosperous place, now it is down-at-the-heels. The local police department is up to its neck in work as crime is on the rise.

The main character of the series is police Detective “Doc” Dougherty – pronounced “Dock-erty.”

A couple of days ago, I asked Dana King a few questions.

ELGIN BLEECKER: Dana, what is going on in Penns River in your new novel?

DANA KING: An active shooter at a local discount department store leaves several people dead. No one is quite sure who the shooter is, as the man arrested at the scene definitely shot someone but claims to be a Good Guy with a Gun.

As if the cops aren’t busy enough, a Canadian fugitive passing through pulls a job to tide him over until his brother can get some cash across the border. The fugitive picks up a local partner and seizes an opportunity, robbing everything in sight while the police focus on clearing the mass shooting. The police turn out to be the least of the robbers’ problems, as they eventually hit a joint owned by what’s left of the mob.

ELGIN BLEECKER: What does the title, Pushing Water, mean?

DANA KING: There’s a scene where the Mountie who’s after the fugitive asks Doc how everyone on the force gets along so well under circumstances that are difficult at best. Doc tells him it’s out of loyalty for the long-time and beloved chief of police. 

 "Everyone knows we’re pushing water uphill every day and we keep doing it for him. I don’t want to think about what happens here when he finally retires."

ELGIN BLEECKER: Has this weird time we are living through had an effect on your writing, or your reading?

DANA KING: Not as much as for a lot of people. I’ve worked the day job from home for ten years now, so my schedule didn’t change much.

There are unusual external stresses—what The Beloved Spouse™ calls “buzzes”—but the time I spend writing and reading are my escapes, which provokes me to make time for them.

I also had some pretty serious vision problems that started about a year ago and affected my reading and writing. We started to get them under control about the time social distancing kicked in, so reading and writing became easier for me around then. I’ve been very lucky.

ELGIN BLEECKER: Glad to hear it, Dana. And thanks for doing this Q&A.

Reviews of Dana King’s previous Penns River novels can be found on this site. Worst Enemies is here. Grind Joint is here. And Resurrection Mall is here.

Resurrection Mall by Dana King

Since March, I have barely traveled more than a dozen miles from my front door. But during the lockdown, I was happy to visit Penns River.

That small, western Pennsylvania city, not far from Pittsburgh, is the fictional setting for Dana’s King’s terrific series of police procedurals.

The third book in the series, Resurrection Mall, picks up about year after the violent shootout at the end of the previous book, Grind Joint.

Detective “Doc” Dougherty is on a new case. Five, small-time drug dealers meet their bloody demise in the food court of a rundown shopping mall. Two men with shotguns did the job.

The place of the attack, renamed Resurrection Mall, is the city’s hope to revive a poor area. A pastor, with the adopted name Christian Love, is rebuilding it as a church and center for his ministry.

The pastor has two assistants with criminal records. He also has some shady contractors with possible connections to the drug dealers.

Suspects are everywhere and Doc keeps running into more every time he turns around. Complicating matters, there is a witness who saw the killers’ faces. It is a teenager whose mother is a junkie and who Doc helped in a previous story. The kid is older and tougher now, and scared to death of the hitmen.

Resurrection Mall is fast paced and suspenseful. Two foot-chases involving Doc are vivid. Dana King also has a way of making a reader “see” and “feel” Penns River in winter.

It is always a pleasure to ride along with Doc and his partner, tough, grumpy Grabek. Also back in this book are Neuschwander, “Eye Chart” Zywiciel, and their boss “Stush” Napierkowski, the chief of police.

A few weeks ago, Dana King published his latest Penns River novel, Pushing Water, the fifth in the series.

Grind Joint by Dana King

Dana King’s first novel in his Penns River crime series, Worst Enemies, was one of the best books I read last year (reviewed here).

It would be hard to top a start like that, but King does it with his second book in the series, Grind Joint.

Detective Benjamin “Doc” Dougherty and the cops of the Penns River Police Department are back, along with a visitor from another state – and another crime series by Dana King – private investigator Nick Forte.

Forte, who is Doc’s cousin, comes to Penns River to visit his mother and gets involved in Doc’s latest case.

A new casino is about to open in an abandoned shopping mall in the seen-better-days fictional city of Penns River. Doc knows it will be a grind joint, but the powers that be welcome it as a source of income and jobs.

Before the grand opening of the gambling joint, a body is dumped at the front door. The murdered man was a known drug dealer and former associate of local mob boss, Michael “Mike the Hook” Mannarino. Suspicion falls on Mannarino who lives quietly in Penns River while committing crimes in other towns.

The casino is not an innocent victim. A sleazy real estate developer is backing it along with a silent partner, a wealthy Russian gangster. The Russian’s violent and loony son, Yuri, also has an interest in the casino and in expanding his own drug business in the region.

All these major-league criminals are more than the small municipal police force can handle. Doc recruits his visiting cousin, Nick Forte, to assist in his investigations. Soon, both of them are targets of the out of control Yuri and his mob.

Grind Joint moves at a pulse-pounding pace with Doc and Nick in serious danger all the way.

Not only is King’s plot involving, but I also enjoy his writing style. He has a way of making a reader worry and laugh at the same time. He also has a subtle way of describing characters and their actions.

When Doc is joshing with an old timer, he writes, “West did a thing with his lips and eyes that passed for laughter.” That could be interpreted in many ways by many readers. But a recollection of someone I knew who did something like that flashed across my mind and the book’s character became a real person.

There are now four novels in the Penns River series: Worst Enemies, Grind Joint, Resurrection Mall, and Ten-Seven.

(And while you are in the book-buying mood, please also check out my crime novel, Lyme Depot. Thanks.)

(For more posts on books, head over to Todd Mason’s blog.)

An interview with author Dana King

Dana King is the author of 10 books and several short stories. His novels A Small Sacrifice and The Man in the Window were nominated for Shamus Awards. He’s written five novels in his Nick Forte series, and his fourth novel in the Penns River series came out January 21.

ELGIN BLEECKER: Dana, welcome to The Dark Time. Your new novel, Ten-Seven, just came out. Would you tell us about Penns River, your fictional small city in Pennsylvania, and about its police department, and what its detectives face in your new story?

DANA KING: Pittsburgh’s recovery after the collapse of the steel industry is remarkable, but it never really made it north up the Allegheny River. Penns River still has an economy that runs about as well as it did in the 70s and no real hope of things getting materially better. The new low-roller casino was supposed to bring untold riches; instead it brought a new way to siphon money out of the town, along with increased crime. The persistent poverty whipsaws the police between having more crime and less money for the resources to fight it. In Ten-Seven, an apparently random act of violence has repercussions out of proportion to its initial effect because there’s too much going on for the beleaguered cops to concentrate on anything.

EB: I am curious to know how the series began – the conception that lead to the first novel, Worst Enemies. Was it the location? Was it Detective “Doc” Dougherty? Or did you start with the killer and his crime?

DK: Worst Enemies began as an idea to put a twist on Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train. I’d not read the book, nor had I seen the movie; I just knew the premise. All my previous stories were set in and around Chicago but I hadn’t lived there in a while and wanted a location I knew but where I could also make the stories about more than the featured crime. I grew up in the three small towns that make up Penns River and went back often to visit my parents, so I took a page from the “Write What You Know” school and placed the story there. Ben Dougherty (pronounced “DOCK-erty”) was my anchor, the one person who saw the town the most like I did, as he’s been away for quite a while (in his case, in the Army) and was able to place his love for the place in perspective. I chose the name deliberately to anchor myself there: my father’s first name was Benjamin and my mother’s maiden name is Dougherty.

EB: I have a clear mental picture of Penns River, its neighborhoods and people. But you never wrote any long descriptions. It was all subtle suggestions, brief impressions. When describing a person or place, how much is too much, how much is too little, and how do you know when you’ve got it just right?

DK: Everything is subordinate to the needs of the story, so all descriptions have to be proportionate to how important they are in relation to the story. If something matters for the story—say a character needs to have brilliant blue eyes—then I’ll describe them. That’s not to imply I never make digressions from the main thread. Not at all. But when I do digress to set a mood or to build a character in the reader’s mind, then whatever I choose to describe is critical to that story, even though it’s smaller. I rarely worry if the description is too little, as I only want to give enough for people to form some image for the movie that’s playing in their heads. I know it’s too much when I’m editing and start to feel antsy for things to move again. When in doubt, too little is almost always better than too much.

EB: Your Penns River cops sound like real people. I think I can even detect a regional accent. Do you recall specific people when composing dialogue for your characters? And once you hear it, how do you get it down on paper?

DK: It’s a writers’ joke, but I listen to the voices in my head. Most of my dialog comes from me putting myself in a situation and transcribing how I think that conversation would go, making adjustments for character differences along the way. The first draft is very close to a transcription of what goes on in my head, so much so that I sometimes have pages with no tags or attributions as my fingers try to keep up with what I’m hearing; delineating each character’s method of speaking takes place in edits. I still have a fairly pronounced Western Pennsylvania accent and I can call up voices from my past pretty easily. I think it also helps that I was a classically trained musician so I have an ear for tone and rhythm that is helpful here.

EB: Thanks, Dana, for taking the time to discuss your new book and your writing.

Dana King’s Ten-Seven is available here.

His web site is here.

And his blog is here.

Worst Enemies by Dana King

Worst Enemies, the last book I read before the close of the year, is on my short list of best reads of 2018.

It is the first book in Dana King’s Penns River series and introduces Detective Benjamin “Doc” Dougherty and the other cops in this fictional city in western Pennsylvania.

Doc and his partner, Willie Grabek, a slightly burned-out detective close to retirement, are called to the scene of a brutal homicide. A woman was killed in her home during a burglary gone wrong. Or, so the cops think.

The identity of the killer is revealed in the first chapter as Tom Widmer, a knucklehead who, while boozing in a strip joint, meets Marty Cropcho. The two share their problems and Marty comes up with a great plan to solve them. He tells Tom they should each kill the other’s wife in a Strangers on a Train type plan, and no one will ever connect them because no one knows they are acquaintances. Evidently these two never read the Patricia Highsmith novel or saw the Alfred Hitchcock movie.

With complete instructions on how to get into the house and just what to steal to make it look good, Tom Widmer goes first. But Widmer quickly learns it is not easy to kill a person. Marty Cropcho’s wife puts up one hell of a fight for her life, but loses in a brutally graphic scene.

The detectives soon have Widmer in custody when author Dana King pulls the rug out from under everyone. The case goes off in an unexpected direction. His story zigs and zags and speeds along following Doc as he tries to untangle a mystery that seemed so clear cut in the beginning.

King also provides a look into Doc’s personal life – his love life, his folks whom he visits every Sunday to watch the Steelers play football on TV, and his somewhat empty home life.

At times, the book feels like non-fiction thanks to King’s natural, realistic-sounding dialogue and the unusual surnames of many of his characters, including one police officer nicknamed Eye Chart.

The small city of Penns River comes to life as clearly on the page as any real place, complete with its wealthy suburb, a crumbling poor neighborhood, local taverns, chicken wing joints, and a veterans’ hall where old timers shoot pool and drink tap beer.

There are two more novels in the Penns River series, Grind Joint and Resurrection Mall, and Dana King just announced a fourth book, Ten-Seven, due out this month.