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A lot is made of the romance of bookstores. The smell of paper! The joy of discovery! The ancient, cracking leather bindings of books with dated inscriptions! And it's true that bookstores are magical places to browse and linger — just maybe not in the two days before Christmas. Because in the swirling mad hum [...]

I am sure that there are some who still proclaim that psychology’s greatest achievement is buried somewhere in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic papers, whereas others will reject the focus on early childhood memories in favor of present day Skinnerian contingencies of prediction and control. Still others might vote for a self-actualizing, Maslowian humanistic psychology, which has been more recently branded as positive psychology. Having studied in all three of these areas in my lifetime, I have found these models to be hopelessly individualistic and ecologically incomplete.

Regretfully, piecemeal and person-centered approaches have dominated these psychological world views, particularly when it comes to treatment and rehabilitation. For example, our massive investments in prisons has done little to protect us, but rather has stigmatized and victimized a generation of our most vulnerable citizens. Just think, hundreds of thousands of people are locked up for petty, non-violent crimes, often involving drug usage. Being warehoused in total institutions only serves to unwittingly teach prisoners how to become seasoned criminals. When inmates exit these desensitizing settings, they are given one-way tickets back to the networks, associates, and ineffective programs that often further cement hopelessness and demoralization. Formerly incarcerated individuals need safe housing and decent jobs, but are only provided dehumanizing shelters and dead end job training programs. As a consequence, most psychological models perpetuate programs that are expensive, ineffective, and fail to address the social environments that provide so few constructive opportunities or resources.

Our efforts to curb violence have had similarly disappointing outcomes. We know that adolescent violent behavior, for instance, is positively related to factors outside of the adolescent, such as peer behavior, family conflict, and exposure to community violence. Our youth are exposed to media saturated with violence, where negative consequences for aggressive behavior are rarely depicted. The ready availability of guns further fuels an erosion in the social fabric of neighborhoods. A tipping point arrives when schools with the greatest needs are provided the fewest resources and where illegal gang activities provide the best job prospects. And yet our therapeutic models continue to ignore these contextual barriers and risks, and the failure to embrace more preventive frameworks dooms our efforts to control or eradicate crime and violence.

Psychological models that attempt to eliminate deficits and problems for individuals rarely address the causes that contribute to those problems. Such models often only produce cosmetic change that provides, at best, short-term solutions. These interventions are alluring because they promise to solve the most deeply-rooted problems with simple solutions, yet they fail at the most basic levels due to ignoring the “elephant in the room” of racism, neighborhood disintegration, and poverty. Such interventions can render people powerless to overcome their oppression or unable to break out of a cycle of crime or addiction.

Fifty years ago, the field of community psychology emerged out of a comparable crisis in the 1960s, a time of turmoil involving the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Although not well known among the public, community psychology’s vital ecological model provides a far richer framework for solving our nation’s problems than those involving psychoanalytic, behavioral, or positive psychology. This new field offers the powerful message of prevention as an effort to move beyond attempts to treat each affected individual. The field also promotes collaboration, actively involving citizens as true partners in efforts to design and implement community-based interventions. This discipline further rejects simplistic linear cause and effect ways of understanding social problems and instead adopts a more elegant, complex, systems approach that seeks to understand how individuals affect and are influenced by their social environments. In other words, community psychology provides a unique framework from which to examine contextual influences that have been absent from prior models dominated by thinking of problems as resting solely within individuals. As a field, community psychology is a contribution that stirs the imagination by charting a course that can provide structural, comprehensive, and effective solutions to our most pressing problems.

Heading image: Prison fence by jodylehigh. CC0 via Pixabay.

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The theme of the American Society of Criminology meeting this November is “Criminology at the Intersections of Oppression.” The burden of violence and victimization remains markedly unequal. The prevalence rates, risk factors, and consequences of violence are not equally distributed across society. Rather, there are many groups that carry an unequal burden, including groups disadvantaged due to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, place of residence, and other factors. Even more problematically, there is an abundance of evidence that there are marked disparities in service access and service quality across sociocultural and socioeconomic groups. Unfortunately, even today this still extends to instances of outright bias and maltreatment, as evidenced by ongoing problems with disproportionate minority contact, harsher sentencing, and barriers to services.

However, there is promising news, because advances in both research and practice are readily attainable. Regarding research, there are a number of steps that can be taken to improve our existing state of knowledge. To give just a few examples, we need much more research on hate crimes and bias motivations for violence. Hate crimes remain one of the most understudied forms of violence. We also need many more efforts to adapt violence prevention and intervention programs for diverse groups. The field has still made surprisingly few efforts to assess whether prevention and intervention programs are equally efficacious for different socioeconomic and sociocultural groups. Even after more than 3 decades of program evaluation, only a handful of such efforts exist. Program developers should pay more systematic attention to ensuring that materials that use diverse images and settings. However, it is also important to note that cultural adaptation means more than just superficial changes in name use or images.

Regarding practice, what is needed is more culturally appropriate approaches. In many cases, this means more flexible approaches and avoiding a “one size fits all” approach to services. Most providers, I believe, have good intentions and are trying to avoid biased interactions, but many of them lack the tools for more culturally appropriate services. One specific tool that can help is called the ‘VIGOR’, for Victim Inventory of Goals, Options, and Risks. It is a safety planning and risk management tool for victims of domestic violence. It is ideally suited for people from disadvantaged groups, because, unlike virtually all other existing safety plans, it has places for social and community issues, financial strain, institutional challenges, and other issues that affect people who experience multiple forms of disadvantage. The safety plan does not just focus on physical violence. The VIGOR has been tested with two highly diverse groups of low-income women, who rated it as better than all safety planning they had received.

The VIGOR also offers a model for how other interventions can be expanded and adapted to consider the intersections of oppression with victimization in an effort to be more responsive to all of the needs of those who have sustained violence. With greater attention to these issues, there is the potential to make a real impact and help reduce the burden of violence and victimization for all members of society.

Dr. Hamby attended an Author Meets Critics session at the ASC annual meeting yesterday morning. The session was chaired by Dr. Claire Renzetti, co-editor of the ‘Oxford Series of Interpersonal Violence’.

The post Violence, and diverse forms of oppression appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Today we look at the work of Kristoffer W. Mikkelsen, Cartoon Brew's Artist of the Day!

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) and its Codes of Practice entrench the legal basis for police powers in England and Wales. A thorough and practicable knowledge of PACE is essential to an understanding of policing – but how well do you know it?

Many have trouble bridging the distance between the often abstract terminology from PACE, its subsequent amendments, and legislative changes — including the Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, and the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 — and common, everyday scenarios facing police officers. Stop and search, detention and interviews, and other everyday procedures and requirements of policing may be lost. So let’s test your knowledge of PACE.

Headline image credit:Police in riot gear – Parliament Square, London, by BobBob. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

The post How well do you know the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Darkhouse Books seeks stories for an anthology of historical crime and mystery fiction. For the purpose of this anthology we are defining historical fiction as, those works set more than a few decades prior to the present and written by someone without direct experience in the setting and events of the story. But should a truly superb story happen to stray from the above strictures and cross our threshold, we would happily consider it.

The submission period is now open and will remain open through 11:59pm (PST), December 31st, 2014.

We are seeking stories in the 2500 to 7500 word range, though if it’s knockout material, we’ll consider any length.
 
The anthology will contain between twelve and twenty stories, depending on the overall length. Authors will share equally fifty percent of royalties received.
 
We accept MS Word .doc and .docx files. Submissions must be in standard manuscript format. Previously published work will be considered, provided the author has the power to grant us the right to publish in ebook, audio, and print versions, and that it has not been available elsewhere more recently than January 1st, 2014.

Submissions may be sent to:

submissionsATdarkhousebooksDOTcom Change AT to @ and DOT to . )

Please leave “Submission-“ in the subject line and add the name of your story.

Now available "The Anthology of Cozy-Noir"!

Like many Americans I walk an uneasy line between being appalled by the living conditions of the inner-city and being afraid of them. The educational and socio-economic disadvantages common in inner-city neighborhoods, along with the high rates of drug- and gang-related violent crime, are already hard problems to grasp and tackle. The fact that these [...]

By Mark Austin Walters

Hate crimes are offences that are motivated by hostility, or where some form of demonstration of hostility is made, against the victim’s identity. Such crimes can have devastating impacts, both on those directly victimised and on other community members who fear they too may be targeted. While much has been written about the impacts of hate crime victimisation, there has been little which has focused on how the criminal justice system can effectively address the consequences of hate — other than through criminalising and punishing offenders.

A relatively new theory and practice of criminal justice is that of “Restorative Justice” (RJ). RJ seeks to bring the “stakeholders” of an offence together via inclusive dialogue in order to explore what has happened, why it happened, and how best those involved in the offence can repair the harms caused. There is now a substantial body of research into the effectiveness of RJ for violent and non-violent offences. Yet there has been little attention paid to whether such a process can effectively address crimes motivated by identity-based prejudice.

The harms caused by prejudice-motivated crime can relate both to the individual traumas experienced by victims, and the structural harms faced by many marginalised communities. The individual and structural harms caused by hate crime are not easily remedied. The current approach to combating hate crime via criminalisation and enhanced penalties, while important symbolically to the combatting of hate crime, does little to directly repair harm or challenge the underlying causes of hate-motivated offending.

In order to understand more about the reparative qualities of Restorative Justice for hate crime an empirical study of RJ projects was conducted where practices were used to address the causes and consequences of hate crime offences. The 18 month project involved 60 qualitative interviews with victims, restorative practitioners, and police officers who had participated in a restorative practice. In addition, 18 RJ meetings were observed, many of which involved face-to-face dialogue between victim, offender, and their supporters. One such project, administered by the Hate Crimes Project at Southwark Mediation Centre, South London, used a central restorative practice called Community Mediation, which employs a victim-offender or family group conferencing model. The cases researched involved “low-level” offences (including crimes aggravated by racial, religious, sexual orientation, and disability hostility) such as causing harassment, violence, or common assault, as well as more serious forms of violence including several cases of actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm.

In the Southwark Hate Crimes Project, the majority of complainant victims (17/23) interviewed stated that the mediation process directly improved their emotional wellbeing. Further exploration of the process found that the levels of anger, anxiety, and fear that were experienced by almost all victims were reduced directly after the mediation process. Victims spoke at length about why the dialogical process used during mediation helped to improve their emotional wellbeing. First and foremost, participants felt they could play an active role in their own conflict resolution. This was especially important to most victims who felt that they had previously been ignored by state agencies when reporting their experiences of victimisation. Many noted that they were finally being listened to and their victimisation was now being taken seriously.

It was of utmost importance to victims that the perpetrator signed an agreement promising to desist from further hate incidents. In terms of desistance, 11 out of 19 separate cases of ongoing hate crime incidents researched in Southwark ceased directly after the mediation process had taken place (participants were interviewed at least six months after the mediation process ended). In a further six cases incidents stopped after the community mediator included other agencies within the mediation process, including schools, social services, and community police officers.

Unfortunately, the positive findings reported from Southwark were not repeated for the restorative policing measures used for low-level offences by Devon and Cornwall Police. Just half of the 14 interviewees stated that they were satisfied with the outcome of their case, where an alternative restorative practice, called Restorative Disposal was used. There were several reasons for lower levels of harm reparation at Devon and Cornwall, most of which were directly linked to the (lack of) restorativeness of the intervention. For example, several participants felt pressured by the police to agree to the intervention which had direct implications for the voluntariness of the process – a key tenet of restorative justice theory and practice.

Collectively, these results suggested that where restorative justice is implemented by experienced practitioners committed to the values of “encounter,” “repair,” and “transformation” it could reduce some of the harms caused by hate. However, where Restorative Justice was done “on the quick” by facilitators who were not equipped with either the time or resources to administer RJ properly, victims will be left without adequate reparation for the harms they have endured.

Another key factor supporting the reparative qualities of restorative practice, is reconceptualising the central notion of “community”. It is important to understand the complex dynamics of “community” by recognising that it may have certain invidious qualities (that are causal to hate-motivated offences) as well as more benevolent virtues. Equally, “community” may provide a crucial conduit through which moral learning about “difference” can be supported and offenders can be reintegrated into neighbourhoods less likely to reoffend.

Although the notion of community is an elusive concept, it is important for the future use of restorative practices for practitioners to view community organisations as important components of local neighbourhoods. These organisations (including neighbourhood policing teams, housing associations, schools, colleges, and social services) have an important role to play in conflict resolution, and must work together using a multi-agency approach to addressing hate crime. Such an approach, if led by a restorative practitioner, allows the various agencies involved in tackling hate victimisation to combine their efforts in order to better support victims and manage offenders. Hence, Restorative Justice may have scope to not only mitigate against the traumas of direct victimisation but also some of the structural harms that marginalised groups continue to experience.

Dr Mark Austin Walters is a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Sussex, and the Co-Director of the International Network of Hate Studies. He is the author of Hate Crime and Restorative Justice: Exploring Causes and Repairing Harms, which includes a full analysis of the impacts of hate crime, the use of restorative justice, multi-agency partnerships and the importance of re-conceptualising “community” in restorative discourse in cases involving “difference”. A full text of the book’s introduction ‘Readdressing Hate Crime’ can be accessed online.

The post Hate crime and community dynamics appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Giulio Fella and Giovanni Gallipoli

Crime is a hot issue on the policy agenda in the United States. Despite a significant fall in crime levels during the 1990s, the costs to taxpayers have soared together with the prison population. The US prison population has doubled since the early 1980s and currently stands at over 2 million inmates. According to the latest World Prison Population List (ICPS, 2013), the prison population rate in 2012 stood at 716 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants, against about 480 in the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation – the two OECD countries with the next highest rates – and against a European average of 154. The rise in the prison population is not just a phenomenon in the United States. Over the last twenty years, prison population rates have grown by over 20% in almost all countries in the European Union and by at least 40% in one half of them. The pattern appears remarkably similar in other regions, with a growth of 50% in Australia, 38% in New Zealand and about 6% worldwide.

In many countries – such as the United States and Canada – this fast-paced growth has occurred against a backdrop of stable or decreasing crime rates and is mostly due to mandatory and longer prison sentencing for non-violent offenders. But how much does prison actually cost? And who goes to jail?

The average annual cost per prison inmate in the United States was close to 30,000 dollars in 2008. Costs are even higher in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada. Punishment is an expensive business. These figures have prompted a shift of interest, among both academics and policymakers, from tougher sentencing to other forms of intervention. Prison populations overwhelmingly consist of individuals with poor education and even poorer job prospects. Over 70% of US inmates in 1997 did not have a high school degree. In an influential paper, Lochner and Moretti (2004) establish a sizable negative effect of education, in particular of high school graduation, on crime. There is also a growing body of evidence on the positive effect of education subsidies on school completion rates. In light of this evidence, and given the monetary and human costs of crime, it is crucial to quantify the relative benefits of policies promoting incarceration vis-à-vis alternatives such as boosting educational attainment, and in particular high school graduation.

When it comes to reducing crime, prevention may be more efficient than punishment. Resources devoted to running jails could profitably be employed in productive activities if the same crime reduction could be achieved through prevention.

Establishing which policies are more efficient requires a framework that accounts for individuals’ responses to alternative policies and can compare their costs and benefits. In other words, one needs a model of education and crime choices that allows for realistic heterogeneity in individuals’ labor market opportunities and propensity to engage in property crime. Crucially, this analysis must be empirically relevant and account for several features of the data, in particular for the crime response to changes in enrollment rates and the enrollment response to graduation subsidies.

The findings from this type of exercise are fairly clear and robust. For the same crime reduction, subsidizing high school graduation entails large output and efficiency gains that are absent in the case of tougher sentences. By improving the education composition of the labor force, education subsidies increase the differential between labor market and illegal returns for the average worker and reduce crime rates. The increase in average productivity is also reflected in higher aggregate output. The responses in crime rate and output are large. A subsidy equivalent to about 9% of average labor earnings during each of the last two years of high school induces almost a 10% drop in the property crime rate and a significant increase in aggregate output. The associated welfare gain for the average worker is even larger, as education subsidies weaken the link between family background and lifetime outcomes. In fact, one can show that the welfare gains are twice as large as the output gains. This compares to negligible output and welfare gains in the case of increased punishment. These results survive a variety of robustness checks and alternative assumptions about individual differences in crime propensity and labor market opportunities.

To sum up, the main message is that, although interventions which improve lifetime outcomes may take time to deliver results, given enough time they appear to be a superior way to reduce crime. We hope this research will advance the debate on the relative benefits of alternative policies.

Giulio Fella is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics and Finance at Queen Mary University, United Kingdom. Giovanni Gallipoli is an Associate Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics (University of British Columbia) in Canada. They are the co-authors of the paper ‘Education and Crime over the Life Cycle‘ in the Review of Economic Studies.

Review of Economic Studies aims to encourage research in theoretical and applied economics, especially by young economists. It is widely recognised as one of the core top-five economics journal, with a reputation for publishing path-breaking papers, and is essential reading for economists.

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Image credit: Prison, © rook76, via iStock Photo.

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Psst...PSSSSST!

You...yes, you...come here, I've got a confession to make. I've been a naughty girl, see. I've been thinking bad thoughts. I have been working out the best ways to break the law. And last weekend, I met up with a bunch of people who were doing exactly the same thing. I went to the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate.

First of all, can I say that there can be no finer place for contemplating murder than Harrogate. It's genteel and gorgeous and manicured to within an inch of its life. If you were to bump someone off, I feel the chief concern would be not getting blood on the geraniums. But we weren't there to admire the blooms or take in a cream tea in Bettys Tea Rooms (although naturally, I did) - we were there to consider dark deeds and twisted motives. We were there to bring on a crime-wave.

TOP Crime Festival is a great mixture of readers and writers. Because I don't write crime, I was technically there as a reader and I certainly picked up a lot of new books but I actually went as a writer, to see how other authors put their stories together. I'm a great believer in being inspired by fellow writers and I knew from the very first talk I intended that I'd made a good choice in coming to Harrogate. Not only did I flesh out my crime novel idea (well you knew that was coming, didn't you?) but I learned a lot too. Denise Mina taught me about Narrative Inevitability (the way the story arcs towards an inescapable conclusion), Natalie Haynes explained that Oedipus Rex was the first whodunnit? SJ Watson revealed the meaning of the Rubber Ducky moment, where an antagonist confesses that the reason he is a cold-blooded serial killer is because his mother took his rubber ducky away when he was six. And I know way more than I need to about the effects of rats on corpses and the inner workings of saunas.

One of my biggest light-bulb moments came during JK Rowling's interview as Robert Galbraith. In her discussion with Val McDermid, they touched upon why whichever book you are writing feels like your worst story ever, and why the book you want to write next is so enticing. And I was amazed to discover that JK Rowling herself suffers from the same insecurities and fears we do. I frequently tell my writing students that every writer I know fears they might never write another book again. At TOP Crime Festival, I discovered that it really is true: even the most successful among us struggle with self-doubt and the conviction that our WIP is a steaming pile of poo.

Now I'm back home and I'm still thinking about breaking the law. The difference is that I know exactly how I'm going to do it now. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

This is one of those great novels that blends up truth and imagination so well that the lines between fact and fiction are so blurred you don’t even know where to begin trying to unravel it. It also doubles the intrigue especially the way Jesse Ball structures the story to unfurl piece by piece, layer by layer in such a way you are taken by surprise after surprise.

The story concerns the “Narito Disappearances”. A crime that baffled local authorities in Osaka where eight people had gone missing seemingly without a trace until one day a signed confession is handed in to police. The man who has made the confession is quickly arrested and doesn’t say another word. But this is not a whodunit because as the story goes on we see there is a much bigger and more important question that who.

“I am looking for this mystery. Not the mystery of what happened but the mystery of how”

One one level this is an ingenious crime novel. By telling the story in a different order the facts and “truth” aren’t revealed to us until we get to the beginning of the story. Rather than telling the story in chronological order we follow the path Jesse Ball’s investigation follows like a trail of breadcrumbs. Ball recounts his investigation through interview transcripts and internal notes as well as letters and other documents he is given along the way.  Each interview shines a little more light onto the story and leads Jesse to another piece of the puzzle.

I was so engrossed in this book it wasn’t until finishing it that I truly digested what I had read. In many ways this is a modern parable about the moral fallacies we place on our systems of justice but the skill and subtlety in which Jesse Ball tells the story gives it not just power but also emotional resonance. And by doing so Jesse Ball gets to the absolute core of what a crime story is and what it should mean when we read one.

Buy the book here…

I had a dream!

Note my declaration is past tense meaning there is no similarity in weight or profundity to Dr. King’s Dream. No, I had a dream that scared me enough to rouse me from my deep slumber to ensure the security of my homestead. You know, that hazy stumble to check the locks on the doors, ignoring the fact that if someone wanted in badly enough, a locked door wouldn’t stop them.

Because I didn’t fully wake, I don’t recall the entire dream, mostly just the impact it had on me – then later, the impact it had on others. I am a very deep sleeper. For years I have said that comes from having a clean conscience. I’m not sure that is true, I just say it to make myself sound righteous.

This dream involved a thief. But he wasn’t just any thief, he was after one thing: our light bulbs. I have heard of houses being stripped of all their copper tubing, never their bulbs. We switched to compact fluorescent long before the government told us we had to. I wonder if I harbor a subconscious grudge about paying more for light bulbs now and my dream was anti-government.  Or maybe I’m against the technology that takes ten to fifteen seconds to brighten the room whenever I flip a switch.  I’m like everyone else, when I want light, I want it immediately. Who knows, but this thief had the old time black mask. I somehow saw him in my mind before I got up, which should have been my first clue that he didn’t exist.

Retrieving my trusty Louisville Slugger from behind the bed, I slowly walked out to the den and checked one door, club at the ready. (Yes, I am an Army certified expert marksman who doesn’t keep a weapon in the house – unless you are a bad guy, and then I have an arsenal.) Door one, secure. Stumble on to door two – secure. The kitchen is declared safe. Front door, fine. Back door, copacetic. Even in my foggy state, something told me not to try the stairs…I didn’t listen to myself.

I stormed downward, ‘Old Hickory’ at the ready, around the strategically positioned sectionals all facing the TV screen, all the way to the door which was tightly locked. Hmmm, nothing to worry about. A yawn. A scratch. I drag my old bat like the Mighty Casey trudging back to the dugout and went to sleep.

Little did I know that to the television watchers in the basement, I had become the entertainment for the evening. I never realized they were there.

Two things to preface the story:

1 Because I rise so early. I typically fall asleep long before the rest of my family. Often in a chair or on the floor where I pick myself up from a puddle of drool, then wearily migrate to bed…which is a problem because:

2. It’s kind of a nightly crapshoot as to whether I have the acumen to dress properly….

I don’t know who was in my basement, or what stage of dress I was in. I haven’t heard from the sheriff’s office, so I assume I was covered. Now that I think about it, I wonder if the bulb thief himself was down there eating my chips and drinking my Dr. Pepper!

If I had had one brain synapse firing, I could have just flipped a switch and known if my bulbs were gone.

But I would have had to wait those accursed 10 to 15 seconds!

An Anthology of Cozy-Noir Fiction

The submission period is now open and will remain open through June 30th.

For this anthology, we're seeking stories in the 2500 to 7500 word range, though if it's knockout material, we'll consider any length.

eBook versions for every major platform will be released with POD paperback copies available through a distributor.

Each author will receive royalty payments in an equal share between the other authors and the editor.

Submissions will be accepted through midnight (PDT) June 30th. Each story will be read by the editorial team, and all authors will receive a reply by August 15th. The anthology will contain between twelve and twenty stories, depending on the overall length.

We will only accept MS Word .doc and .docx files. Submissions must be in proper manuscript format.

Submissions may be sent to:

submissionsATdarkhousebooksDOTcom (Change AT to @ and DOT to . )

Please leave "Submission-" in your subject line and add the name of your story

This is one of the best crime books I have read in a while. Totally absorbing, emotionally gripping it is one of those books that sinks its teeth into you and doesn’t let go. Set in the South Australian town of Guilderton the book not only explores life in a small rural town but the bonds between fathers and sons.

The book begins with a nine-year-old boy being taken. There is only one witness but other than that nothing else to go on. No child has been reported missing. Was this an abduction? Is there a crime?

Detective Bart Moy, recently returned to Guilderton to look after his father, begins his investigation that quickly leads nowhere. Moy’s search takes him through the heart and the outskirts of the small town and its inhabitants as well as his own inner turmoil. Moy is haunted by the loss of his own son and is determined not to let the this case go. But at the same time wonders if he can make any difference.

Stephen Orr plots this novel brilliantly. He has your doubting and questioning events in tandem with Moy who is struggling at being a decent cop (and he knows it) yet needs to solve this case. You get glimpses of the man he was before he returned to Guilderton but at the same time knows it is impossible for that part of him to return.

Harrowing yet hopeful this is a reflective a crime novel where finding the case is as important as solving it.

Buy the book here…

Do you have a crime novel waiting to be discovered? The Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA's Alumni Association has your chance to be discovered! Turn in your synopsis by May 23rd, 2014 for consideration. Details below and at our website.
 
New York Times Bestseller Robert Dugoni will read and vet the finalists and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners, and agent Laurie McLean of Foreword Literary will review the winning entry for possible representation.

How to Enter
- Submit via Submittable

. . . (a) a synopsis of up to 500 words;
. . . (b) an extract of the FIRST 5,000 words (or fewer) of your completed CRIME
. . . . . . . FICTION manuscript; and
. . . (c) the non-refundable entry fee of $25.00.
Format Requirements
- The entire entry must be written in English, in 12-point Times New Roman
. . . . . . .or Times, and be double-spaced
- Must have 1” margins
- Your manuscript pages must be numbered
Your name must NOT appear anywhere on the synopsis or the manuscript. You will be disqualified if your name appears anywhere in the synopsis or manuscript.
Attach your synopsis as the last page(s) of your submission.
Synopsis
- Synopsis must not be longer than 500 words.

Manuscript
The novel must be crime fiction: thriller, suspense, mystery. No true crime. Maximum length is 5,000 words. The entry must be the first 5,000 (or fewer) words of your novel.
If you are selected as a finalist, you will be asked to provide an electronic copy of your completed manuscript (minimum 55,000 words, maximum 100,000 words). Failure to provide the completed manuscript within three days after the request will result in disqualification.

Dennis Tafoya is one the best kept secrets in crime fiction. Which is a shame because he deserves to be heralded in the same breath as George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane. And his new novel only confirms this, in spades.

Frannie Mullen is a US Marshall. After a bungled operation she takes full responsibility for any mistakes that were made and quits her job. As she tries to sort out her life and help her sister recover from another round of rehab, the father she thought was long out of her life returns. Her father, Patrick Mullen, was a thug and enforcer for a local trade union whose violent job was also part of a violent life at home. Now on the run from prison Patrick cuts a violent path toward his two daughters. Looking for revenge, but revenge for what and for whom is a very long list.

Tafoya’s action scenes are simply sublime, in particular the opening scene of the novel. But what really sets Tafoya apart from the pack is the heart he brings to his stories and his characters which he does once again here. Emotion is what drives people and that is what is at the core of this brilliant novel. The emotions that drive us and the damage they do along the way. Tafoya captures this brilliantly in a fast-moving, intense page-turner that will keep you totally gripped and double guessing right until the final pages.

Buy the book here…

I have been completely and utterly addicted to (and obsessed by) True Detective so when I found out the show’s creator and writer had written a crime novel I had to read it. And what a cracking book it is. Using some of the same elements as his television show Pizzolatto has constructed a highly atmospheric, slow burning thriller.

Roy Cady is a bagman who has just been diagnosed with cancer and sent on a job where he thinks his boss has tried to have him whacked. Now on the run he must navigate his way from New Orleans to East Texas with a young woman and her sister in tow. Roy is conflicted between his own short-term survival and that of the two girls now under his protection.

Just like True Detective Pizzolatto shifts time perception to perfection, drip feeding you bits of information, past and future, that leave you craving to know more.The raw emotion of Roy Cady is brutally and poignantly displayed and the way Pizzolatto describes the gulf coast landscape is an amazing blend of desolation and beauty.

We already know from True Detective that Nic Pizzolatto knows how to tell a story. Galveston proves that this talent was evident well before his HBO series.

Via Buzz Feed A list of dark, weird, and southern gothic books that every fan of HBO’s True Detective should read.

The author in repose.

BY J DAVID OSBORNE

I tried retail for a while, and that was fun, in the way that puking on yourself at a family gathering is fun: you have a story. After a time, though, it stops being a story you laugh at and starts being one that you cry over. Usually into a beer. Next came moving furniture. For a time, that was good, physical work. I genuinely enjoyed it. And the stories I heard there, man, the meat of my second novel is mostly that. My imagination’s not that good. But then here comes nature and that heavy time and all of a sudden my back is in ruins and I got sick of carrying marble armoires up three flights of stairs. Then came restaurant work. That was fun.

Through all of this, I wrote. My first novel dropped in that weird interim before I started the moving job, when I was living in my car. The second hit and I was getting these royalty checks, but aside from the first one (which paid my rent), it wasn’t paying my rent. It hit me: “I’ve gotta find a way to make a living off of words or I’m going to die.”

I’ve been a fan of crime fiction since before I can remember. It started with Ellroy. I read White Jazz and threw my hands up and hollered. You can say this much with so little? I was hooked. I got the classics in, then I got voracious with it: Mosely, Sallis, Willeford, Pelecanos, Westlake, Parker, on and on.

I loved the opportunity crime fiction presented to peer into the human condition, and the (usually) clipped, no-bullshit delivery. What I didn’t like were the formulas, the staunch sexism, the rampant racism. I really wanted to carve something out that could represent everything that makes crime fiction beautiful, minus the stuff that made me cringe. That, and I didn’t want to sell hot dogs anymore.

I gathered a nice group of brilliant writers, who for whatever reason decided to hook me up with some manuscripts. I started a Kickstarter (pause for groans) in which I detailed five books my new indie press would put out, and—wonder of wonders—people thought it looked cool. I got the money and I was off to the races.

Sort of.

The books were edited and designed and off to the printers. They dropped, and then there I was. Floating.

There were many times I’d go out to my porch and smoke a cigarette and my house would shake as the trains rolled by out across the road, and I’d wonder what I could do to actually get people to look at these titles, to pick them up. I’d gotten a massively talented artist (Matthew Revert

Still waiting to hear back from most of those places.

I got tired of sitting on my hands. I took the books and grabbed a friend and hit the road. We went from Oklahoma to Wichita to Denver to Salt Lake City to Boise to Seattle to Portland to Sacramento out to the Bay to Los Angeles to El Paso. We performed in punk squats and abandoned warehouses and bookstores and back alleys. At one performance we lit a mannequin head on fire while I paced the floor with paint on my feet, tracing a chalk outline of an eye, rambling about a cyclops. At another I read the audience the end of my first novel and ripped out each page and burned it as I went. Though I didn’t sell copies at every stop, I talked to as many people as I could about the books. And I noticed an uptick. We live in an age of social media noise and rampant void screaming. There’s only one way to get things going, especially if you live in Oklahoma: you have to get out there and talk to people.

You have to ask them to dance.

There are other things you have to remember, too. Running a small press, it’s important to utilize social media, despite my prior assertion that it’s a dying medium. You have to be a person online, first. I see folks every day, inviting me to their “book releases,” which are really just Amazon launches of e-books. That’s annoying. You’re more likely to see me posting pictures of my dog, or complaining about how I could really go for a cigarette (quitting is tough, but, hey! nine days) than you are to see me talking about the books or writing or editing. The first reason is that places like Facebook and my blog are my escapes. The second is that you just turn into a spambot and fade into the background, and good luck swimming out of that lagoon.

Another thing: finances. Be careful. Keep your receipts. Where I live, there are crazy tax breaks for small businesses. Make sure you know exactly what you owe your authors. If you don’t pay them right, everyone will know, and you will be ostracized. And rightly so.

On the topic of writers: they are, for the most part, a funny bunch. They care about this stuff. So they’ll have things to fix, last-minute requests, bizarre neuroses. You have to learn to bend, to understand that your voice is not the voice. And if they want changes, you make them. Mark Twain once said that a novel is never finished, only abandoned, and I think that’s true, but Broken River authors abandon their children with a packed lunch (complete with smiley face note written on napkin), surplus army jacket, mace, a Swiss Army knife, and one of those flashlights you put on your head. And a ‘mommy loves you’ and a peck on the cheek. God love them for that. They care. And you have to, as well. If you don’t, well … you know.

I’m not a father so I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, but I’m assuming there’s a feeling you get when you hold a baby for the first time. Does it get real? I figure it gets real, then. When you spend months and months eating tuna from a can and pecking at a keyboard and making sure the kerning and keeping and hyphens and headers look right in InDesign, and then you send it to a printer and they send you copies and they are physical, real objects, resting there, looking up at you, you can almost see these big blue cartoon eyes, these helpless things that need you. So, you start to feel an obligation.

When you start a small press, you lack resources, usually. And that should make you hungry. You need to provide for these babies. Your authors, they spent years writing these things, invested their lives into them. Now here they are. Your responsibility. You’ll want to quit, lord I know you will, because the whole thing is so big, like pressing your body up against the edge of everything. But you have to get out there, you have to keep your mind right, and you have to make people sit up and take notice. You didn’t pull a sword out of a stone; no one ordained you the Chosen One. You chose you. It’s your responsibility. So go do it. If you love something, take that big Christmas dinner in your heart and break it down into MREs and dish it out to every person you meet, in small, manageable doses. They’ll feel it. They’ll know you’re down.

And then, you ask them to dance.

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