Authors are always asked where they get their story ideas and the answer isn’t always what you’d expect.

When people hear my background–working in some of the most brutal prisons in California, they expect me to write dark, noir prison stories. Tales of the worst humanity has to offer. Stories where redemption is rare as a vintage toilet wine in the cellblock.

I do drawn from that history. It would be impossible not to. It kind of sticks to you. But I don’t use a straight download of the actual events as I experienced them. Characters for sure. You meet some unique personalities behind the bars. It’s typically bits and pieces–an event may serve as a catalyst, or inspiration for a story. I’ve used a memory of a place or a specific crime as a springboard to get me in the place I need to be to start the story.

At What Cost, Dead Drop, and most recently, Face of Greed began with this memory of a moment I held onto for some psychic reason. Face of Greed was the one story that drew the most from a real-life event.

Face of Greed is the first novel in a new series featuring detective Emily Hunter. The book starts out (no spoilers here) with Emily and her partner responding to a home invasion gone horribly wrong. The attackers enter, kill the politically connected homeowner, and leave his wife battered after they didn’t get what they were looking for. Emily soon learns the dead man held secrets that were worth killing for.

The inspiration for this fictional crime was from one of the first murder cases I worked. In that true crime, three Aryan Brotherhood associates decided to rob a local real estate broker as they believed he kept piles of cash in a safe within his home. The forced their way in and held the family at gunpoint. When the homeowner couldn’t produce the cash the bandits expected, they shot him in front of his family.

As criminals often are, they were caught quickly. And as seasoned criminals do, they turned on one another to get the best plea deal. They all claimed the homeowner was a drug dealer who owed them money and they killed him in self-defense when he pulled a weapon from his floor safe. Like this exonerated them in their twisted minds.

Their far-fetched fabricated events fell apart quickly and no one believed them. The jury certainly didn’t. All three were found guilty and given long prison terms. The shooter was the ringleader and given the death penalty.

There was always something about the killers’ bold lies that stuck with me–years afterwards. When I began plotting (yes I’m a plotter) Face of Greed, that home invasion popped into my mind. I thought “what if” the dead man wasn’t who he pretended to be and “what if” there was something valuable to be found in the man’s home?

With that story question in mind, the underpinnings for the opening scenes fell into place where we find detective Emily Hunter picking up the pieces and finds a circle of friends, associates, and family who each have motive to keep the dead man’s secrets to themselves.

If you want to find out for yourself…here’s a link to Lefty Award nominated Face of Greed.

There are those who think I get my story ideas a different way—downloading from the great chatbot in the sky:

Thank for checking in…