Guest Post and Book Giveaway from Indy Perro — Debbi Mack
This guest post and book giveaway comes from crime writer Indy Perro who’ll be featured on the program soon. Be sure to check out his incredibly cool website!
He’s giving away free Audible codes for his novel, Central City, to the first five listeners who sign up for his newsletter.
As his guest post, Indy’s provided an excerpt from the book. Check it out!
An Excerpt from Central City
by Indy Perro
Chapter One
“A Case of the Jitters”
8:12AM Tuesday, September 1, 1992
Nothing Detective Bayonne had seen during his twenty-three years on the force prepared him for this homicide.
A lot of things can throw a detective. A guy walks into a crime scene unprepared for the brutality pounded into the corpse, the fear spread across the floor, the hatred sprayed across a mirror, or the passion sliced off and tossed in the corner. After a while, though, a detective gets used to it. He learns to turn the volume down on his emotions and listen, hear what he needs to hear. Bayonne had taken this to the extreme. In his mind, most cases busted at the seams with something to say. They wanted to talk. A good detective, and Bayonne considered himself one, knew, within five minutes, why a murder was committed.
That doesn’t get the job done.
That only gets it started.
It might’ve been the butler or Miss Scarlet in the library with the candlestick, but a good detective stands in the library, examines the blood on the paperbacks, and knows from experience what it looks like and what it means when somebody uses a candlestick to collapse a cranium. Bayonne’s job, as he understood it, was to find out where the butler was and what Miss Scarlet thought of the victim.
Murder leaps on a soap box and preaches desire, anger, perversion, or any combination of the three. Even professional jobs look like they were done by dispassionate professionals. On occasion, and this is rare, some mastermind who thinks he knows how clever he is tries to disguise what he did. These rocket surgeons watch television like everybody else, so they know their business. Well, Dr. Moriarty must’ve gotten his degree out of a Cracker Jack box, because the physical evidence never lies. The cuts don’t fall at the right angle. The blow occurred after death. The blood splatter tells a different story, a story of a heart past pumping. The television gets it all wrong. Supermodels doing DNA tests rarely solve crimes. Cases close because experienced detectives read a scene, read the evidence, and understand forensics.
What threw Bayonne in this case, what kept this one just out of reach, was that it didn’t preach. It didn’t explain anything at all. He stood over the body and felt alone. Silence. He felt no murderer at all.
*****
Indy Perro is a novelist, an independent thinker, and a recovering academic. After more than a decade teaching philosophy, religious studies, writing, and literature, Indy turned to fiction as the best way to develop and share his sense of humor, meaning, and contemporary mythology.
When not at his desk, hiking, running, reading, or studying languages, Indy can be found at indyperro.com, on Facebook (@authorindyperro), on twitter (@IndyPerro), or at centralcitybooks.com, where readers can explore the characters and setting of Central City.
Originally published at https://www.debbimack.com on September 9, 2022.
