Book Review: Deadly Intent

Deadly Intent by Laura Eno is a suspense/horror book. Bad things begin to happen in the town of Wood Park, but no one knows why. And they go from bad to really bad.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

Death stalks the small town of Wood Park after a violent thunderstorm wreaks havoc on the population and drops a stranger in its midst. Police Chief Jonathon Brier chases after clues, always a step behind, as citizens become more irrational with tragic consequences.

When the town is abandoned to its fate with no hope of any outside help, Jonathon must figure out how to combat the evil presence that taunts him before time runs out for everyone.

Deadly Intent has a core set of main characters, Brier being the main one. The town is not real small. They have schools and a police force and shops and a hospital. The population is big enough that there’s not a lot of panic when people begin to go crazy and kill others or get killed. They don’t even cancel Halloween trick-or-treating. Brier seems to take all the worrying onto his shoulders -- until soldiers block the town and allow no one to leave or enter. It’s up to Police Chief Brier and a doctor to somehow figure out what is causing people to go berserk.

People die in bizarre ways. Some are folks you’ve gotten to know in the book. Others are just townsfolk who, for no apparent reason, kill someone. Without a reason for why they would do such a thing, it’s hard for both the reader and the Police Chief to figure out who did the killing, let alone why. With no help from the outside, he’s on his own.

The killings are unexpected and horrible, and the cause of the epidemic is unknown.

I would have liked to get to know more of the people in the town so I felt some empathy for them before they kill or get killed. But that is difficult since, as the killings speed up, more and more people are dying.

I give Deadly Intent a rating of Hel-of-a-Writer because probably only a writer as adept as Laura Eno could have come up with such a creative plot.

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FTC Disclaimer: Deadly Intent was sent to me by the author. This did not influence my review. It did influence my paranoia. Now, when I’m watering the drought-stricken tree out back, I watch the ravine behind the house to try to spot neighbors who might be creeping up on me with a motive other than getting my autograph. If they had a knife, I’d spray them with the water hose. They’d probably melt like the Wicked Witch in Wizard of Oz. If they were looking for an autograph, I do hope some of you in Internet Land would come to my funeral since I’d keel over in shock.

Happy Valentine’s Day

In honor of Valentine’s Day, let’s talk … horror … and Stephen King.

You may or may not remember that Stephen King was the author who released the first ever mass market e-book. That was just 8 years ago in 2000. His book, Riding the Bullet, was downloaded by half a million readers in a couple of days. He followed that up by releasing, in installments, another book -- and letting his readers pay for each installment on the honor system.

Now he’s releasing a new horror novella exclusively for the new Kindle.

King definitely believes in e-books. And, according to The Guardian, he doesn’t believe they will bring about the downfall of the publishing world.

"People when they want music, they have a tendency to be selective, and they can be – take a song like Money for Nothing by Dire Straits – you can pull it out of the album, it's eight-and-a-half minutes long. [But] when you talk about a book you have to have the whole thing, so it seems to me there is a much more level playing field. Yes, mp3s and iTunes kind of destroyed the CD industry because nobody is going to buy the whole if you can just get a part that stands on its own, but you can't do that with books – you've got to have the whole thing."

Query Letter Credentials

One question that came up during the workshop I taught this past weekend concerned giving credentials in a query letter. If you have published books (big house, small press) that have sold well, you’ll want to list those, of course. But the question was really about giving credentials or showing experience in areas that relate to the plot.

The question was from Mark who writes horror. Since the book has an exorcism in it, he wondered if he should mention that he has witnessed an exorcism – or if that would turn off or scare an agent.

My answer was … mention it. First off, he’s going to be querying agents who rep horror, so they’ve probably seen or read it all. Second, not too many people have witnessed an exorcism, so it would be a plus in his credentials, in my opinion. Third, it would show that he can write about the real thing, not what he has seen in movies or on TV or read in other books.

Clearly, if there had not been an exorcism in his book, then he’d have no reason to mention that he has seen the real thing. But since there was and he has, then it lends him credibility. He doesn’t have to make a big deal about it or have it consume his whole paragraph about himself, but a sentence or even just a mention would be a good idea.