Elliott
​         Light
​I am pleased to announce that a new Shep Harrington SmallTown® Mystery, ​The Gene Police, will be published in January of 2018.  Please visit the ​The Gene Police ​page to sign up for more information about the book release date.​
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.  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.