Elliott
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Welcome!
I am pleased to announce that a new Shep Harrington SmallTown® Mystery, The Gene Police, will be published in late 2016 or early 2017. For those who aren't familiar with the Shep Harrington SmallTown Mystery Series, please browse the pages of this web site, read the first chapter of Chain Thinking, and, of course, purchase copies of both Chain Thinking and Loneseome Song using the provided links.
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The Shep Harrington SmallTown® Mystery series began with the publication of Lonesome Song in 2002. Before writing Lonesome Song, I was intent on writing action-spy stories. In 1990, I read The Last Poorhouse In Virginia; An Era's End at the Place Where No One Was Meant to Stay, a story article written by Jim Naughton and published in the Washington Post. The story chronicled the lives of the residents of what had been a poor farm, a place where the unemployed and unemployable were sent to trade work for food. As I chased dreams of writing the next Clancy thriller, the story of the last remaining residents of the Shenandoah County facility continued to haunt me.
I grew up visiting old plantations where my mother's relatives once lived. As a child, I didn't fully appreciate the history of these places or the people I met there. But the experiences were imprinted on my memory. The poor farm in Mr. Naughton's article fused with these memories. I was teased by questions about who might have lived on a poor farm, how they might have arrived there and what was going to happen to them. Ultimately, spies gave way to a story about a small town, a once famous country singer, a collection of old forgotten poor farm residents, and a murder. Shep Harrington, a young disbarred attorney, entered the mix and the story almost wrote itself.
While I work hard to reveal how bad people do bad things, the core cast of the SmallTown® Mystery series works equally hard to remind me of their good intentions and natural humor. I hope you will visit with them soon.
I grew up visiting old plantations where my mother's relatives once lived. As a child, I didn't fully appreciate the history of these places or the people I met there. But the experiences were imprinted on my memory. The poor farm in Mr. Naughton's article fused with these memories. I was teased by questions about who might have lived on a poor farm, how they might have arrived there and what was going to happen to them. Ultimately, spies gave way to a story about a small town, a once famous country singer, a collection of old forgotten poor farm residents, and a murder. Shep Harrington, a young disbarred attorney, entered the mix and the story almost wrote itself.
While I work hard to reveal how bad people do bad things, the core cast of the SmallTown® Mystery series works equally hard to remind me of their good intentions and natural humor. I hope you will visit with them soon.