One Drink Book Club | Rumor of Evil by Gary Braver

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another edition of the One Drink Book Club. Today we'll be discussing Rumor of Evil, a brand new thriller by Gary Braver. In the book, a 16-year-old exchange student is accused of witchcraft, which leads to her brutal death. Twenty years later, another

[00:00:22] body is found, then detectives struggle to figure out how the two murders are connected. My guest tonight is the author, Gary Braver. Welcome, Gary. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, Jamey. Thanks for having me. My pleasure.

[00:00:33] Now one thing, and again this was not mandatory for you, but one of the things that we do with One Drink Book Club is that I usually try to introduce a cocktail that is inspired by

[00:00:44] the book. That's the element. And I have to say, this book I really enjoyed, but it was a challenge on the cocktail side because the characters drank a lot of beer, there wasn't a lot of things. And so I really came down to there's a character

[00:01:00] named Ted Rizzo who ends up in the Caribbean for a short period. So I kind of went to the Caribbean route and then since the whole thing is kind of clouded in mystery and dark

[00:01:13] things, so I decided to make a darkened storm, which I thought was appropriate for the book. Great. Well, like Toche, I've got a glass of sherry here. Perfect. Perfect. If I had one of those, I wouldn't get through the rest of the interview.

[00:01:29] Well, that's true. That's the nice thing about it. Well, darkened stormings are ginger beer and dark rum essentially and a little bit of lime juice, but they still feel a little less potent than maybe some of the other things you're going to get in the Caribbean.

[00:01:42] Well, I have a couple of questions. This is really interesting to talk to the author about this. Well, River of Evil is your 10th book. I'm wondering, does it get easier as you write more books? I mean, how have you owned your process over the years

[00:01:57] and do you approach it differently than you did your first book? That's an excellent question. And that's a very smart question because someone has been writing for 35, 40 years. You do become aware of changes. I used to start out outlining.

[00:02:11] I used to start out, in fact, one of my earlier books, I had 90 pages of single space outlines and Gary, three of those, you got a book man, what are you doing? And you discover about a third of the way in, you take a detour that looks really

[00:02:25] good and you never come back to the original outline. So I got off of that and it became easier because I wasn't locked onto a kind of meta structure that I'm having difficulty sticking with because these other detours made more sense.

[00:02:43] So that's been changed. My novels have gotten shorter. I think Elixir, early 2000s, was 560 pages. This is 330, something or other. I've gotten more succinct. I've gotten more into the psychological mystery and category. And Jamie, the world has changed. So one becomes aware of one's audience that is demanding

[00:03:08] not the traditional jokes, sexist things, body shaming kinds of stuff. I finished a book with Tess Garrison two years ago and I had a classroom scene. I wrote the male point of view characters and she did the female point of view

[00:03:22] characters. And I have an ethnically done professor's point of view, he walks into a room and he talks about this kid. He called Chubby. Chubby was scratched out. It was red line and make him big or robust. But Chubby would, you know, so you have to turn off,

[00:03:35] you have to really be aware and any kind of sexist jokes. And so 80% of the book buyers are female, really. And yeah, sometimes over 50, at least in the Tess and Gary book, choose me. So our demographic send was 50 years old, female and over 50.

[00:03:54] And 80% of the readership, if men read books, the wives bought them for him just like men's ties. The wife buys the ties. This would look great in you, Jamie. That kind of thing. So I became very much aware and it's something I taught for years.

[00:04:08] Be aware of your audience. But then I too became aware of my audience and not to be offensive. And we'll talk later on about the Romani people here because that was, that's an issue that, you know, I had to deal with. Sure. Well, did you get complaints?

[00:04:22] Did you get feedback from people in previous books where you said, oh, I kind of crossed the line there or that wasn't, that was taken with far more seriousness than I intended it to, etc. And not a lot, but even in two books back,

[00:04:37] I was brought to task on something that I had. So I can't remember the specifics right now. And in the last book that Tess and I wrote, there's a very needy female. And some people saw her as a psycho female.

[00:04:51] And therefore she was already kind of walking woundly and she made her own bed and lay in it and caused all her own grief. That was, that was, I think a very strong misreading, but I am very psyche sensitive to any kind of negative criticism.

[00:05:07] That suggests hurtfulness and, you know, insults. And so we can keep away from that. And that sometimes for other writers I discovered is a potent damnation. Other writers, you know, you're making sexist jokes, you're making fun of females, you blah, blah, blah. You have mansplaining things.

[00:05:26] And that really can turn off a lot of readers. They go on Amazon or a Kobo reads some of the reviews. And that could be very damning and per-decorier. Not worth it. Definitely. Yeah. No, no. So it's interesting.

[00:05:37] I was reading a little bit of your bio and your background and you majored in physics, which I thought was interesting. The only other person I know who majors in physics was my father, who then went to med school.

[00:05:50] And so then you made the switch to getting a master's in English or your graduate degrees in English. What brought on that switch? I mean, that's a real dramatic shift. That's a good question, Jamie. I had two uncles that were scientists. What was a chemist?

[00:06:03] And one was a metallurgist. And I read science fiction by the pound as a kid. So I wanted to grow up and make rockets to the stars. Tomic-driven rockets. I got into my sophomore year and realized I was doing much

[00:06:15] better with words than it was with subatomic articles. I understood words. I didn't understand atoms. And so I started a humor magazine. I was editor of a newspaper and I wrote all the copy in the yearbooks. And I was having a lot of fun writing.

[00:06:28] And I said, wait a minute. And I was also hired for three summers while I was in school as a physicist at Raytheon here in Massachusetts. You know, the people who make the Patriot Pissing on that.

[00:06:38] And it was a very exotic lab that looked like something out of a James Bond movie, a very exotic weaponry, something that is not even used today, but was all theoretical. And it was a kick. But my heart was not in it and I wanted to write.

[00:06:52] And I needed to get a degree fast because I wanted to make a smooth transition to master's, drug and a doctoral program. So I took courses down the road at Clark University in Worcester. I was going to Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

[00:07:05] And I went to and then with the Harvard and a couple of other schools. So by the time I graduated, I had to put them to an English degree so I could smoothly transition into a graduate program. I knew I wanted to write fiction.

[00:07:15] And the only way to learn how to write fiction is to learn how to read. And the best way to learn how to read is to have an English professor because you're teaching other people stuff. You're studying it.

[00:07:24] You're plumbing the death through someone's book and you know how it was put together and you want to pass it on to the kids. I also have to pass on to myself. I learned how to read when I became a college professor and I learned how to write.

[00:07:36] Fascinating. But I don't I don't regret the physics background because I taught what was one of the first science fiction courses in America. And I loved the science of the science fiction. It was it was interesting to talk about. And then when I started writing medical thrillers,

[00:07:52] I knew enough about my ignorance to ask an expert to get me from A to B and make me sound like I know what I'm talking about. So the technical stuff I was. It's interesting.

[00:08:01] I just finished Project Calmeria by Andy Weir, which has a lot of science in it. I don't know if you've read The Martian and those. And I'm so impressed with his ability to I don't know enough on the science side to know whether he's right or not.

[00:08:16] But it sounds good and it's really interesting. Yes. Asudo science is what really makes up most of science fiction. I mean when H.U. Wells wrote The Time Machine and that was there was no such thing as a time machine. But he did talk about the fourth dimension.

[00:08:31] And he managed to fake it and cover it up. Yeah, it gets on pseudo pseudo scientific. So when you started teaching and you were a professor and you started teaching writing, had you written any novels at that point or were you? Where did that come in the timeline?

[00:08:46] I had the great fortune of having as my office mate, Robert B. Parker, who became an international bestseller with the Spencer Novels and not the Sunday Randall novels. And he was like close to strand to his death in 2010.

[00:08:59] And in mid 70s, I think I'm going to write a book. And so we started writing The Spencer, the first Spencer novel, The Godwolf manuscript. I watched him demythologize the process. And then second and third book, I mean, he'd write five pages a day

[00:09:15] and he would send it off to an agent and eventually it got published. So he mythologized the process. I was chomping at the bit because I was teaching literature to my students. And I wanted to write something, but I didn't have a story.

[00:09:27] And then I took up scuba diving and went on an expedition to Mallorca, Spain with a group of scientists and we were diving for phonies in Roman Roman shipwrecks, second century to fifth century. Oh, wow. And we were attacked by pirates underwater.

[00:09:43] We were fanning away shards of amphora and other pottery. A 2000 year old boat is no there's no wood left. There's all those ballast stones with bowling balls and that is a giveaway. Then maybe oval shape.

[00:09:57] And so we were shading stuff away and a boat cut across our bubbles. We had a rubber zodiac and number one, it's an AOS rubber boat with a red and white fiber extracts was really clear people were. So once is an accident twice. You're getting kind of stupid.

[00:10:14] Three times it's on purpose. The tenth time our diagrams were flapping and we are burning out of air. So when he finally took off, we shot up and he went right into the sunset. It was blind to us.

[00:10:24] He had slashed our zodiac with a machete and long story short. We did not know this, but we were diving on the turf of a local godfather who was a lawyer during the week and he would steal, wrecks and sell the booty

[00:10:41] to collectors and museums all over the world. We had no idea. Oh, my gosh. And the only way we got our passports back is we had a state of the art underwater metal detector and he wanted to get us our pass because the

[00:10:55] coming down the devil police are in his pocket. You get us our passports back and let us get back diving. He'll let you borrow this for a day. So I said, if I got out of this alive, I've got a novel on it.

[00:11:04] And that was that I came back and wrote the first novel at Lantus Fire. I just moved it to Santorini, Greece and tied it up with Plato's Atlantis legend. It did well. Yeah. Well, that's a great way to kick it off. Yeah.

[00:11:18] So what gave you the what was the impetus for Rumor of Evil? What really motivated you or what kind of planted the seed of this story? OK, good question. When Tess Garrison and I finished, Choose Me and it was a cop procedural novel.

[00:11:31] I had cops in two other books. I never had a series. And she said, once you write a series, you handle this well. And I got a contract and the contract from an ocean view publisher said, we'd like to have a series from you. I said, sounds great.

[00:11:44] So I had written two other cop novels. So I had a sense of forensic and procedure and isn't that. And so I designed the two partner of two homicide detective partnership and the male and a female.

[00:11:57] And then I needed I knew there was going to be a cold case that's going to relate to a murder in the present scene. The opening paragraph. And I wanted that to be a cover of something that happened 20 years before.

[00:12:11] And like any crime writer, you probably talk to others yourself, Jamie, we keep a file of very real life crimes. So really disturbing, bizarre. He said, why did this happen? How do people do this kind of thing?

[00:12:24] And what stuck in my mind was a story out of Waukesha, Wisconsin. In 2014, when two 12 year old girls lured another 12 year old girl into the woods and they stabbed her 19 times. The reason they gave was they wanted to appease an internet cartoon character

[00:12:43] called Slender Man, this long elongated male without a face wearing a black suit and white shirt. And they believed that if they did not sacrifice their girlfriend, Slender Man would kill their families. Oh my gosh. That doesn't make sense.

[00:12:59] The victim survived and the two girls are still in psychiatric institutions. So I was fascinated with how kids do this. And I got into understanding and some of the research of bullying. And it's a real scourge of American adolescents, both physically and psychologically.

[00:13:19] So I studied studies, I researched the studies of bullying and found out that the bully always picks an outsider as a victim, someone who is either physically different, who speaks differently, who has an accent or a list

[00:13:36] or does odd things or dresses oddly unlike the adolescent norm or comes from a different demographic or they're foreign, they speak in an accent. So I needed to have an outsider as my victim. And so I dreamt up an exchange student, 16 year old exchange student

[00:13:57] from a rural pig farm in Slovakia. And I made her really rural and really uncool but beautiful. And she is of Romani extraction, sometimes called Roma extraction. So she's very attractive and the kids have a great time Americanizing her.

[00:14:13] You know, introducing her to hot dogs and backyard barbecue, Mexican food and rock concert. And they really enjoy this and they give her cool. Take it to the mall and get her cool clothes. But I needed something to turn dark.

[00:14:25] So at a pizza party with all these kids, I had her read palms and everything. It's kind of fun. They're having a lot of lapses reading palms and suddenly something turns very weird at the party and she bolts out of there.

[00:14:36] And then a few days later, bad things started happening to her friends, these kids and their friends family. And that's when the rumors start flying. And that's when the terrible myths. Wait a minute, Roma Romani aren't those gypsies and don't gypsies.

[00:14:53] I think thieves and and and they start in old days, a bubonic plague. And don't they drink the blood of Christian babies? And don't they worship Satan and aren't they witches in disguise? So as I was writing this all came together, how did the Middle Ages handle

[00:15:10] witches? They burned them. So the backstory is the Vadima, who they call Lulu, loves to sleep outside under the stars and this affluent home in Lexington, Massachusetts, where she's been hosted by this family. The father built a tree house in a backyard and she loves sleeping out there

[00:15:27] and in lovely weather and watch the stars. And on a Halloween night, she dies in a fire that takes her life. And that became the backstory. But she is the ultimate outsider and it tapped into adolescent as well as adult conspiracy theories, which are in, you know,

[00:15:45] we hear about these days, as well as scapegoating the immigrant. Yeah, we've had issues with immigrants. So she was she worked out to be a good bully victim. Yeah. And it's interesting. I thought one of the things I liked about it and I also recognized was tough

[00:16:03] is there's a lot of teenage girl dialogue in the book. And I know that that is hard to do without becoming a caricature of teenage girls. My daughter is 22, so it's not so long ago that she was a teenager.

[00:16:19] And I would find it very challenging to write in her voice, especially when it came to dialogue. So what did you draw on in order to make that sound realistic and not over the top, so to speak?

[00:16:33] Sure. Well, I raised two boys and my wife and I and they passed through the teenage stage and I remember their female friends and how they talked and the parties I would commit in here that very interested in dialogue. I always was as a writer.

[00:16:47] And I think it was that and also college kids, college freshmen only just to 18 years old. So I've had a lot of freshman classes in the past and I know how they talk. So it was that experience, the exposure that really, you know,

[00:17:02] to them for over 40 years that I learned the voices. Well, and I appreciated the couple instances of using wicked as an adjective as a Midwest guy didn't hear a lot of Wicked's, but I've lived on the East Coast long enough that I know where that comes from.

[00:17:20] The Boston influence. Right. Right. So one of the things I thought was interesting, you talk about the guys writing for men, writing for women. There were a lot of potential villains in this book. There were a lot of guys that were not great.

[00:17:36] Morgan's dad, Jordan was not a good guy. Ted was, you know, Rizzo was not a good guy. There were even some of the girls, you know, Morgan clearly was some of a sociopath. There were even the other girls in that kind of gaggle of girls.

[00:17:54] Nobody was particularly sympathetic. Now, are you just a cynical person or were you trying to create a host of characters that the reader could could easily say, well, if maybe it was that person, maybe it was that person. Exactly. Yeah. What you just said, Jamie, I actually

[00:18:11] know you're trying to create red herrings. You're trying to create legitimate sounding clues and fake clues. And you and the nature of a who done is to keep the reader guessing, but you have to parse these clues out and make them sound like real motives

[00:18:29] that someone would do this kind of thing because of blah, blah, blah. I had to give different different motives to each of the people that I was setting up as a potential suspect. That's kind of fun, because then you have to think about how could this otherwise

[00:18:42] nice kid be so mean and maybe even set this woman on fire. And so that is that is the trick of trying to keep people guessing. But never pull a rabbit out of the hat at the end. And never say is the butler did it.

[00:18:59] You can't get away with that. They'll burn the book. So it has to be, oh, my goodness, I didn't see that coming kind of thing. And I but still all these others get very close to to the fire and say they all did it.

[00:19:15] Or now I get sure. You know, so that it really means going back and lining up all the ducks. Once you make a decision who the villain really is, you have to just like a dropping a pebble in the palm. The ripples go up.

[00:19:28] You have to change and change and change every chapter so that it has that ha and it has a zen rightness to I was you know, it's going to ask that. Do you do you ever go back?

[00:19:40] I mean, do you have people that you trust to read it and say, did I make this too obvious or did I not make it obvious enough because I can imagine being the writer. You get so close to it that you think, oh, I've given super obvious clues.

[00:19:52] It's kind of like once you watch the sixth sense and you know the ending of it. If you go back and watch it again, you think, how did I not figure that out? There's all of these clues along the way.

[00:20:04] So how do you kind of figure out that line between sharing enough, like you said, you know, not doing a total fake out at the end, but then not giving so much that it's so obvious. Right. Right. Well, I do have I have two good readers.

[00:20:19] My wife who is isn't much more a racist reader than I am because I'm spending time writing and she taught English for a while too. So and she is a very good reader and reads very smart books.

[00:20:31] And she picked up on stuff that needed to be worked on. I also have a remarkable agent, a dream agent who is not only an agent and does all the ugly stuff, he is a good reader. He is brilliant.

[00:20:43] And he pointed out stuff that needed to be worked on. And it all made sense. And so those two readers were pretty much all I needed. And when I went back and rewrote the stuff according to their directions and they said, this is working. This is not working.

[00:20:59] It all fell into place and made sense. I mean, writing is really rewriting. I teach my students all the time. I mean, if you don't do any rewriting, you're either magically in and out or you're not going to make it.

[00:21:12] Parker never rewrote and he was the most verbal person I knew about Robert Parker. I mean, his desk was right near my and I watched him write and he get 300 pages and his publisher would say, could you give us another 50 more? I said no. And it is hummed.

[00:21:27] It was it was remarkable. But I have to rewrite and and even test Garrison, we got two thirds to choose me. And we had no idea the villain was. We had five suspects. Sure. And she said, what about this person? And so now that's not going to work.

[00:21:41] It's just, you know, that person is too good early on and I don't want to change that and make them bad. So we finally I suggest to someone and she liked that and we wrote that and so that it made sense.

[00:21:52] So two heads in that case worked well. We also had editor. We had an outside editor read it and make suggestions. So I don't know anyone who doesn't have alpha and beta readers or whatever they're called. And so I have my wife and I have a Esmond.

[00:22:06] Esmond Harmsworth, it's not a great. It is. It is. My. Now, have you read either reviews or heard people, fans discuss your books and add more meaning to things than you ever intended? Part of the reason I ask that is I do a lot of copywriting for ad.

[00:22:23] And I've done a lot of issue ads. You know, I live in Washington. That's kind of my trade. And some of those ads have ended up in college textbooks as examples of one thing or another. And what I'm always laughing about is they'll have these discussion questions

[00:22:42] that say, you know, oh, the creator of this ad, the designer chose the girl was looking to the left and she has got red hair. And you know, what did the designer mean when they did that? I kind of left.

[00:22:53] I think, well, the designer meant that that was the royalty free stock photo that was the cheapest and the best one in a pinch to use. You know, they've assigned a lot more meaning to some of the decisions than really existed.

[00:23:07] Have you ever found that where people are analyzing your work to the point where you're thinking, well, geez, no, I just like the color green. I wasn't that I. Yes, they people have found things in books that had more meaning to them than

[00:23:23] had to me. And sometimes I applaud them. Sometimes they find really dark stuff I never really intended or none on a conscious level, I didn't intend and I'm gratified to commit plus. But other times some of the characters I've created, people don't like.

[00:23:40] And I'm interested in audience readers reaction. I would not want to hang out with this person. I mean, I wouldn't want to hang out with Matt Beth either. He's a fascinating character. True. Not everybody's Ted Lasso. You know, you're not going to want to hang out with.

[00:23:56] And some of the most awful villains in the world are the most admired and an animal lector. Very true. I mean, amazing that because he's very, very smart and cultured, he happens to be a psychopathic cannibal. You kind of root for him.

[00:24:11] He wouldn't mind going out to dinner with him as long as he wasn't going to eat you. You'd be interesting. Exactly. Going back to the Roma descent of your character, the victim, how did you end up choosing that?

[00:24:24] Was that something you had had experience with or was that kind of, hey, I'm going to try to, you know, there was a list of things and I chose that one. Right. Right. A couple of those.

[00:24:34] My wife and I had been to Italy a few times and they're always always being warmed watch out the Roma kids are going to pick pocket. And I was there with friends and my friend got picked pocketed out of the subway after we warned him any case.

[00:24:48] I was interested in the kind of outsider prejudice against Roma, whether or not they did it or whether I was exaggerated. It was I needed to have an outsider. I wanted a foreign student. I didn't want to take a cliche somebody from some of the other countries

[00:25:03] that might have been billified and or prejudice against. So I wanted to take someone who's I'd haven't read of any Roma so called gypsy kids who were parts of novels. They may have been. I know there were been some Italian operas or a real royal character falls in

[00:25:20] love with a gypsy woman, any case. And I was fascinated with the awful myths that I mentioned earlier. Yeah, they worship Satan and they put hexes on people. And that worked out because the climax of that back story is Halloween.

[00:25:36] And if you've been to Halloween, your kids have been through Halloween. You know that there's probably the most celebrated holiday in America. People spend fortunes more on that than Christmas. So it is it really it begins early back at the end of August.

[00:25:51] All the pumpkins and things start coming out. And it's really go quite exotic in their in their costume parts. And there is always the kind of supernatural element to kind of mystical stuff you'll call that comes into. So I wanted to exploit that particularly

[00:26:09] tender and some but paranoid adolescent minds that here we have this strange woman from a pig farm in Slovakia and she's a Roma person. And don't they do all these awful things? And that is what I exploited. And, you know, it's so unfair because Roma people are outcasts

[00:26:29] throughout Asia and Europe. We've seen them in caravans and Greece and Italy. And they're always shunned, they're always ostracized, which is very painful. So in any case, I just thought that might be an interesting microcosm of that.

[00:26:41] You have had books before that were potentially going to be movies or option to be movies. Who do you see? Did you when you were writing this, you knew you were going to be doing a series? You've got Kirk and Mandy, our detective crew.

[00:26:55] Did you envision anybody in your head actor wise that would would potentially be the people who would play these characters? For I wanted somebody in their forties and I thought of Christian Bale, sure, who is, you know, he is. He can get angst.

[00:27:12] He can give he can look like he's tormented. If he were younger, Sean Penn might be. But Christian Bale is tall and lean. He's good looking and he looks he can he could act trouble. Kirk wants his wife back.

[00:27:27] They are separated a year before the book opens up. Their 15 year old daughter was killed in a hit and run. They never found the killer and that sent him into a great, great funk that ended up causing their marriage to break down.

[00:27:41] In any novel, there are two quests for a cop novel. The or any kind of detective novel. The public order quest is who left that body in chapter one. The personal quest is where you get the character is I want my wife back.

[00:27:57] His personal quest, everyone who is anything in a detective novel has to have some protagonist is has to have some baggage that endears the reader to that protagonist. So I had him wanting his wife back and she is a wonderful woman. She's a professor of this and that.

[00:28:15] And but she has never been with another man for all the years they dated and did marry. So I needed to make him empathetic for the reader. And that's why I came up with him.

[00:28:27] And I'm sorry, I was asking about actors would play me and he and Kirk if you had thought about Christian pale and I think that's a good definitely Christian. Yeah, I think so. And also Bradley Cooper too.

[00:28:41] He can act over a spectrum of emotions for for Mandy Wing. She is a woman married to a woman and they have a child and she is impulsive. She's very, very smart. She's being mentored by Kirk so she doesn't go off the rails because she

[00:28:59] sometimes leaps on this. He did it. He did it. Yeah. And she had joined the police force because she wanted to protect women against men who have abused women and her mother was badly abused. So she comes slightly charged. And I thought of Christian Stuart. Oh, yeah.

[00:29:16] Yeah. She sees about 30, 32 and she and she can very, very tough. I mean, I think of the Twilight series and other movies she was in. Someone lean and attractive, but the little edgy and someone who can show

[00:29:33] compassion because she has a child and strong enough to get over all the demons that have beset her character of Mandy. So those two. And if there's a God listening. Exactly. And one of the things I liked about Mandy is I liked that she was gay and that

[00:29:53] she had her wife, but that it wasn't it wasn't that big of a deal overall. Like there wasn't a lot of discussion about it. I thought it made it an interesting partnership, but it wasn't. It didn't become this.

[00:30:08] Oh, now Kirk as this chauvinistic male kind of comes to terms with that this woman could be a good partner. He started out thinking she's a young partner. I think she's smart. You know, we probably have to polish these edges, but it wasn't.

[00:30:24] It didn't turn into if I got all these preconceived notions about somebody who's gay and somebody in the police force or a woman in the police force, it was kind of given that she would be a professional and it was

[00:30:37] really treated like a rookie, which I thought was nice. And I actually thought my favorite characters in terms of niceness was Mandy and his wife, Olivia. You're right. They were the nicest people. Yeah. I model my females after my life. It's much nicer.

[00:30:54] And even if you didn't, that's a good thing to say. It's safe. Yes, right? Um, last my last question to you is what what where do these guys go next? What's what's then if this is a series where to do Kirk and Mandy end up?

[00:31:12] Oh yeah. The next book is already done. It's called Heat of the Moment. And and Mandy has a much bigger part in this because the particular it now at the end of things work out nicely for Kirk and Olivia.

[00:31:25] In the next book, their particular issue is she's 41 years old and he wants her to have another child and she is reticent about that. And and Mandy helps because she has a child and helps Olivia feel positive about the possibility of bringing another child into their life.

[00:31:44] And it's not a replacement for for Megan who was killed. It's just giving Megan keeping Megan's memory alive and giving her a brother or sister. So in a sense, it's and Mandy is fabulous that way. I really liked her. She really comes out in the second book.

[00:31:58] It is a murder mystery. It opens up and this is not spoiling anything. It opens up when a conservative English professor who's very, very good is found dead in a very liberal English English department in a pictures Boston school with an antique Fijian War Club in his home.

[00:32:18] Oh my God. So where did the BG War Club come from? Who who did this, of course? And there are six potential suspects who all have really sweet smelling motors for having gotten this. It was it was fun to write, getting back at some of my colleagues.

[00:32:37] Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. I look forward to that. Well, Gary, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it. I will admit now you are the first author that I've interviewed.

[00:32:49] Most of the time I'm I'm discussing it with another fan of a book and things like that. So I appreciate you jumping on and this has been exciting. Thank you. I'm thank you for making me number one.

[00:33:01] By the way, we just had good news today that the editors of Amazon picked the book as one of the top 10 mysteries of the month of October. So we got a nice little accolade. That's great.

[00:33:12] And I was just going to ask where where can people get rumor of evil? And tell me a little bit more of where they can find it. It's it's pre-orderable right now. Just going on Amazon or Kobo or Barnes and Noble.

[00:33:25] And it comes out officially next Tuesday, October 10. Hopefully bookstores everywhere will have it. And if they don't, you can ask the clerk at the cash register, please order this. But I think it is a discount right now for the hard cover as well as Kindle

[00:33:40] on Amazon and the other sites. Like I said, Kobo and Barnes and Noble and my own website, GaryBraber.com is a button you can click. Yeah, if you don't remember that Amazon. Well, great reminder to those listening, please subscribe to the podcast.

[00:33:57] It's the One Drink Book Club wherever you get your podcasts. And you can visit and review video as well as audio at OneDrinkBookClub.com. Thank you very much and have a good evening.