Item: Off the Books: A Nick Forte Detective Thriller
Author: Gina

Guest Post from Dana King, Author of Off the Books: a Hard-boiled Private Investigator Mystery (Nick Forte Detective #6) | Gift Card Available | @GoddessFish @DanaKingAuthor

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Book Details

Guest Post from Dana King, Author of Off the Books, a Hard-boiled Private Investigator Mystery (Nick Forte Detective #6) | Gift Card Available | @GoddessFish @DanaKingAuthor

Off the Books: A Nick Forte Detective Thriller by Dana King
Series: Nick Forte Detective Novels Book 6
Published by Independent on March 15, 2024
Genres: Adult Fiction 18+, Mystery & Detective, Suspense, Detective/Sleuth, Mystery, Thriller
Pages: 240

Nick Forte has lost his detective agency and makes ends meet doing background checks and other paperwork. He pays for everything else through jobs he takes for cash and without any written contract.

What starts out as a simple investigation into a traffic accident exposes Forte to people who have truly lost everything and have no viable hope of reclaiming their lives. That doesn’t sit well with Forte, leading him and his friend Goose Satterwhite to take action that ends more violently than anyone expected.

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Excerpt from Off the Books

I first saw him standing under the “employees only” sign near the exit to the truck service bays. Early twenties, a little under average height, short blond hair. Caroline was unaware of him, focused as she was on a three-way text conversation with her friends Maria and Arielle.

The next time the kid caught my attention he was half as far away, standing where the food court opened into the convenience store. I only noticed him this time because I recognized him, and he was the only Love’s employee on the floor. His name was Jimmy, and he was definitely looking our direction.

I’m an old-school father with an only child. A daughter, no less. My primary purpose in life was to make sure no one messed with her. Everything else—work, food, clothing, mortgage payments, staying out of prison—comes after. Jimmy hadn’t done anything wrong, but the Dadar had activated.

All fathers think their daughters are beautiful; I had empirical evidence. If the steady stream of boys circling the periphery of her life looking for an in wasn’t enough, I once overheard another kid in the band describe her to a friend as the “archetype of virginal beauty.” (What can I say? Magnet school.)

The next time I caught sight of Jimmy he stood three feet behind Caroline, checking her out with rapt attention. I sidled over, using my best stealth technique. He never saw me coming until I leaned in close and spoke in my most quietly menacing voice. “She’s thirteen years old.”

Jimmy evaporated faster than a snowflake in a microwave..

I still got it.

Excerpt provided by the author/publisher for use in this post.

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Purchase Links for Off the Books

Off the Books: A Nick Forte Detective Thriller (Nick Forte Detective Novels Book 6)

Amazon Kindle Edition
King, Dana (Author)
English (Publication Language)
205 Pages - 03/15/2024 (Publication Date)

Off the Books: A Nick Forte Detective Thriller (Nick Forte Detective Novels)

King, Dana (Author)
English (Publication Language)
240 Pages - 03/15/2024 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)

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About Dana King

Off the Books is Dana King’s sixth Nick Forte private investigator novel. Two of the earlier books (A Small Sacrifice and The Man in the Window) received Shamus Award nominations from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Dana also writes the Penns River series of police procedurals set in a small Western Pennsylvania town and one standalone novel, Wild Bill, which is not a Western. His short fiction appears in numerous anthologies and websites.

He is a frequent panelist at conferences and reads at Noirs at Bars from New York to North Carolina.

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Guest Post by the Author of Off The Books, Dana King

Why Choosing Your Setting is Important

The composer Igor Stravinsky once said nothing was more intimidating than a blank sheet of music paper, because you can do anything. After that, every time a note is added, options are removed.

Writing is like that, except options become limited before one types a word, and choosing the setting is key limiting factor. Once you pick a setting –including the time of year – there are lot of things you can’t do. If you set the story in Florida, you can’t use a blizzard as a plot point unless it’s preventing someone from coming from or going to someplace where there might be a blizzard. Ain’t no hurricanes or similar storms in Arizona.

Those are mechanical considerations. How important is setting to the story? Depends on the writer and the book. It matters a lot to me, so I typically use places where I have lived. My Nick Forte detective series is set in Chicago because I was living there when I came up with the idea for him. It didn’t hurt that Chicago is a wonderful place to set a P.I. story, with its myriad of ethnic neighborhoods, unique foods, sports teams and their rabid followers, wealth disparities, organized crime, gangs, and rich history.

My Penns River police procedurals are set in a fictional town twenty miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, based almost entirely on three small cities I was born and raised in. I know the weather, the geography, and the people who live there. I can write Penns River without thinking too much about it; my knowledge is baked in.

We hear the phrase “the setting is a character in this book” so often it’s become a cliché. Of course it’s a character; the question is how important a character is it? Tony Hillerman set his mysteries on an Indian reservation, which says a great deal about the kinds of stories he tells and the characters who inhabit them. The rez might be more important to Hillerman’s stories than either Joe Leaphorn or Jim Chee.

The setting means Leaphorn and Chee – or, for that matter, Walt Longmire in Wyoming – might be hours away from back-up. The author has to take that into consideration before placing them into crisis situations where a miracle is required to rescue them, such as Vic driving 80 miles in five minutes to help Walt out of a jam. Craig Johnson’s too smart to let that happen, but it has to be a consideration.

I stayed with Forte and his Chicago setting because it allows me to draw from such a rich range of cases, clients, and miscreants. I chose Penns River for my procedurals not only because I knew the place so well, but because I didn’t want to get caught up in the forensics craze. Most cases are still solved the old-fashioned way – by talking to people – but readers are no less susceptible to the CSI effect than are jurors.

That stuff doesn’t interest me, but I can’t ignore it. I have the trace and DNA evidence collected, then sent to the state police crime lab, from which my cops might hear back in six months. Acknowledging the existence of such evidence allows me forget about it.

Setting doesn’t have to be critical. Lee Child doesn’t rely on it much. His locations are pretty generic, adaptable to what Reacher needs to do. Television really doesn’t care about location. The Beloved Spouse™ and I are bingeing Monk, which is supposedly set in San Francisco but there is nothing uniquely San Francisco about the show; the creators could have dropped Monk anywhere. The fact that the Law & Order and CSI franchises have multiple series in different cities shows they could have gone anywhere.

TV and movies can trick you into thinking they take place anywhere. Get some B-roll for an establishing shot and – boom! – viewers will swear a show filmed in LA was actually shot in New York (Castle) or one shot in Vancouver, Toronto, and LA took place in San Francisco (Monk). Books can’t do that. The author needs to make the reader feel as though he or she is seeing – or better yet, in – the place they’re describing. That requires weaving more of the setting into the vivid image the author tries to create in the reader’s mind.

So, yeah. It’s important.