I have started on my next mystery novel, as yet untitled. It involves a deceased friend, an abandoned apartment, a search for a safety deposit box, and the shame of long forgotten actions. I will post successive segments as my novel progresses.

“Musings After the Fact

Detective Franklin Neeson was leaning back in his chair behind his desk in the Truscott Police Department pretending to smoke a cigarette. After years of surviving the appeals, if not the demands of most of the people he knew, including most particularly his wife, Neeson had finally surrendered to the inevitability of giving up smoking, his only comfort now was the faint illusion provided by holding a cigarette and remembering the experience that he had had so much difficulty forsaking. Like the four other officers in the Truscott Police Department, Detective Neeson was a seemingly gruff, obviously overweight man in his forties. Unlike his colleagues, however, he was unusually contemplative for a bored peace officer protecting the citizens of a relatively small rural community. Much to the consternation of his fellow officers, Detective Neeson was in the habit of approaching every infraction committed in the borough as a major crime, employing the kind of analysis usually reserved for homicides in television crime dramas. In fact, Police Chief Casper was often forced to order Neeson to give up his pursuit of small time robberies, petty vandalism, and domestic commotions. He was always looking to solve the big case, even though Truscott hardly ever offered any detective such opportunity. The historical evidence of significant law-breaking was scant — the murder of a local man back in the 1970s, a couple of suicides, automotive accidents, repeated robberies of the two banks in the town, suspicious fires, drug arrests and, of course, dozens of domestic disputes and disturbances.

So when evidence of the wrongful murder conviction of a man named Williams Boggs, a man who killed himself decades ago rather than face life in prison, rose out of the investigation by an amateur gumshoe named Mark Purchell, Franklin Neeson could barely contain himself. Everyone understood but that did not make Neeson’s behavior any more palatable. All agreed, however, that the case of Billy Boggs was definitely strange. All also agreed that Detective Neeson would be the only officer to pursue it any further. Predictably, Detective Franklin Neeson was tormented by the case, the explanation for that one murder mystery for which he had been preparing for most of this life having supposedly already been solved and by an amateur yet.”