Flares (The Grimwood Trilogy Book 1) by Mike Attebery

Author:Mike Attebery [Attebery, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cryptic Bindings
Published: 2021-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

5.

“I think this is good,” Braden said as he held up one of the story outlines he and Loren had exchanged over the course of the week.

They were once again holed up in their customary booth at Brownie’s, working on their book on a Friday night. They’d settled on their characters – James and Sara Tripp – husband and wife detectives, not unlike Dashiell Hammett’s famous married couple from The Thin Man, only brought up to modern times and without the money or the dog. Whereas Nick and Nora tippled martinis and staggered through mysteries for amusement, the Tripps drank because they were tired, and they took on cases because they needed the cash.

“Dead Men Don’t?” Loren asked when she saw the outline he was holding.

“Yeah, it’s modern, but it has the feel of a classic cocktail class mystery. I’m not sure about the title though.”

“Me either. I was thinking Dead Men Don’t Drink Gin, since the victim dies from a poisoned martini. Then I thought I remembered something about certain parts of Juniper plants being poisonous, so I was thinking we might call it Dead Men Don’t Drink Juniper, sort of play off the gin, maybe name the main suspect Juniper. Of course, then I started to wonder if I had my facts straight, so I dropped the last two words all together. We’d definitely want to research that part.”

“That’s what the library is for, right?”

“You don’t want to consider any of the ideas you came up with?” Loren asked.

“If you want to be polite, we can, but yours is clearly the best.”

“What about the one with the Rube Goldberg boobytrap? That was pretty clever.”

Braden looked skeptical. “Let’s save it for the follow up. It will be perfect for our sophomore slump.”

Loren studied Braden’s expression. “Are you sure you don’t want to explore one of your ideas?”

“Positive.”

“OK, then where do we go from here?”

“Well, we know who gets murdered and how, so the next thing is to figure out who did it and who else might be suspects, then we can hammer out the story scene by scene.”

“Sounds good to me,” Loren replied as she opened her notebook and took out a pen. “Who narrates the first chapter?”

“Lady’s first?”

Loren set to work on the outline.

Before they knew it, the Friday night dinner rush had come and gone, and they’d worked out a fairly nice story framework.

“There you guys are!” Hank called over to them.

Braden looked up to see his roommate and Hannah walking to the table with their trays of food.

“I might have known the two of you would be down her working on your baby again,” Hank said.

Loren crinkled her nose. “It’s a book, not a baby.”

“Careful,” Braden told Loren. “Now that he knows you don’t like it, that’s all he’ll call it.”

Hank set his tray on the table. “You guys mind if we join you, or are you still working?”

Loren exchanged looks will Braden and put down the pen. “I guess we’re at a good stopping point.

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