RV trip day 17: Pocatello, Idaho

We're overnighting in Pocatello, Idaho, where we're told it's been raining for three weeks. We left Salt Lake City this morning under sunny skies, then drove into torrential rain. The skies cleared briefly while I took a walk and a few photos near our RV park. A gentleman kindly allowed me onto his property to take photos of his emu and other animals.

It's midnight. I've been putting together the web pages for the June Internet Review of Books this evening, then watching West Wing.

Tomorrow we head to Yellowstone.

RV trip day 16: Great Salt Lake

Great Salt Lake in the rain

We had planned to visit the Great Salt Lake in the afternoon, but on the highway we were stuck for 2-1/2 hours in accident traffic. The news report said that a driver cut off a pickup truck, which swerved across the median strip and head-on into a FedEx 18-wheeler, killing one and critically injuring another. Firefighters were unable to contain the blaze immediately because the FedEx cargo was said to include live ammunition. Just a godawful situation.

By the time we got to the lake it was raining and late, so we stayed only a few minutes.

On a more cheerful note, a Mormon greeter yesterday commented on all the rain they've had lately by telling me they'd been washing Salt Lake City all week for us. I passed the comment on to a fellow RVer today, and she just grunted.

RV trip day 15: Salt Lake City

Inside the Mormon Tabernacle

In Salt Lake City, it appears that all roads lead to Temple Square. We visited the Tabernacle and listened to a free organ concert with a couple hundred other people. You've no doubt seen photos of the organ—some of it—it has over 11,000 pipes, many of them hidden in this acoustic wonder of a building. In his introductory remarks, the organist turned off the microphone and said he would drop a pin. When he did, the sound was clear in the entire hall.

As the organist played, a man shouted "Yes!" from the audience on the other side of the hall from us. Later he shouted "Mozart!" and, a bit later, "Beethoven!" He shouted about six times until four young men in dark suits stood by him and escorted him out a side door. As far as I could see, no one touched the man, but they saw to it that he left. Perhaps the man has Tourette's Syndrome.

The Temple

The Mormons we saw and spoke to were unfailingly courteous*, friendly, and wholesome. Even coming from friendly Las Cruces, we found our trip to Temple Square a culture shock.

Flower bed in Temple Square

* Almost unfailingly courteous. We went to the Family History Library, the largest repository of genealogical records in the world. A retired professor was patiently trying to help me locate information about my family history, and I may have interrupted his explanation once too often—I can blab—and he told me to shut up. But then he smiled and said "I can be brusque sometimes." We both laughed. He was really helpful, and the access and assistance at the library are free.

RV trip, day 14: travel day

Canyon in the clouds, Canyonland National Park

Travel and laundry today. It's rained most of the time since we arrived in Salt Lake, and I took no pictures. Thursday, though, we'll go downtown and see the Mormon temples and such.

People sometimes express odd opinions on bumper stickers. This afternoon in the RV park I saw this one on a car from Nevada:

Caution: This woman has no hormones, and she carries a handgun.

Okey-doke.

RV trip day 13, Canyonlands National Park

Having a tough time with the unstable wireless Internet connection here in Moab, so I will post some pix and sign off. These are all from Canyonlands National Park. Will be wordier tomorrow, I hope.

Mesa arch

Blossom and trunk

Prickly pear cactus blossom

Canyon floor

RV trip, day 12: more arches

Double Arches

We went back to Arches today and ran out of time and energy to see Canyonlands. So we're extending our stay here in Moab for another day.

RV trip, day 11: Arches National Park

Delicate Arch

We liked Arches National Park so much that we're going back on Tuesday, probably skipping Canyonlands. We saw only a couple of arches, but we're told about 100 of the 2,000-plus arches in the park are accessible to the public.

Balanced Rock

The park was a busy place today, and many of the visitors were European and Asian—often one of them approached us and asked us to take group photos or offered to photograph Nancy and me.

Us, photographed by a Belgian tourist

RV trip, day 10: Moab, Utah

Sunset outside the OK RV park, Moab, Utah

Moab, Utah was only a two-hour ride from Grand Junction, and it sits in the middle of spectacular rocks evocative of Sedona, Arizona. We didn't do much this afternoon besides a bit of grocery shopping and a short spin in the direction of Dead Horse State Park before deciding it was too late in the day. Lately I've been reading Giles Keppel's Beyond Terrorism and Martyrdom and trying to finish it in time to write my review for The Internet Review of Books. I'm almost done.

In the next couple of days we'll visit Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, both within a few miles of Moab.

A pair of buttes nicknamed the Monitor and the Merrimac.

(Which is which? You decide.)

Incidentally, the other day iUniverse sent me cover copy for the Star edition of When Pigs Fly. Now that I've approved it, they plan to create a new cover. I'm curious to see what they come up with—I am partial to the existing one, but they say a new cover is standard procedure with their Star editions.

RV trip, day 9: Black Canyon of Gunnison River National Park

At the canyon rim

The Gunnison River at the bottom of Black Canyon

The man at the entrance to the park said we were welcome to drive down into the canyon, but warned us that the grade is 16 percent. That conjured up images of burning out our brakes going downhill and never making it back up. We laughed and took the South Rim Road, an easy trip with dizzying views of the 2,700-foot deep gorge below. Apparently it's called Black Canyon because it's so narrow and deep that much of it stays in the shadows. Literature at the visitor's center said that some hikers have disappeared and have never been found. That's too rugged for me.

For the last two mornings we've heard a woman singing the National Anthem, apparently to begin the calf-roping festivities going on adjacent to our RV park. I ambled over there without my camera this afternoon and saw a few dozen people sitting in a small grandstand watching pairs of cowboys chase and rope calves. I assume it was a timed competition, because the same activity was repeated every couple of minutes. It was a tame family event with no evidence of drinkin', cussin', or spittin' Red Man, but much visual and olfactory evidence of horse manure. Tomorrow I understand will be the children's competition.

Colorado may have gone for Obama, but I see anecdotal signs that western Colorado might have resisted the rest of the state. There are billboards warning that the Federal Reserve is going to take over our lives—didn't we hear something like that from Governor Pailin? I've seen nothing pro-O, but smatterings against him, the most interesting being a bumper sticker that said:

I'll keep my guns, freedom and money. You can keep "the change."

We had lunch at The Red Barn Restaurant in Montrose, something called a "Monte Cristo" sandwich with ham, turkey, and cheese on French toast. Sounds good? Well, it was, but it could have been called Monte Crisco or the Heart Attack Special, because the whole concoction looked deep-fried. And I won't even mention the onion rings that came with it. We didn't clean our plates and still won't be able to eat again until tomorrow. What were we thinking?

The Egyptian Theater in Delta, Colorado

RV trip, day 8: Colorado National Monument

This morning we drove just a few miles out of town to the Colorado National Monument and each snapped five or six dozen photos. I haven't had time to go through them all yet, but here are a few that convey some of the flavor of the place. The road around the park has plenty of places to pull the car off the road and gawk, some with fences and some without. In most cases, the road is within a few feet of a sheer cliff that drops down hundreds of feet. At one stop we pulled over behind an empty car, and there was no fence at the cliff's edge. I looked around and saw no one but Nancy and thought uh-oh. I called out—no reply. I noted the mileage and thought I'd mention it at the visitor's center at the other side of the park, but a couple of miles down the road we passed a runner who was keeping up a brisk pace. He must have been the car's owner, because nothing else was around for miles. 

There were a lot of cyclists powering their way up and down the hills—all half my age, I'll bet, though I never had that kind of strength and stamina at any age.

The park has a lot of trees like the one below, with gnarled trunks twisting over pieces of shale and looking as though they've already lived forever. I don't know what they are, but I'll call them junipers until someone corrects me.

RV trip, day 7: Descending the Rockies

Blue River, downtown Breckenridge

Tulips in June, downtown Breckenridge

Crossing the Rockies certainly has its ups and downs. We moved at speeds as slow as 25 mph at times. I focused on getting up, over, and down the mountain passes more than on photography today. The landscape settles down to around 4,000 feet above sea level, which is much the same as Las Cruces. The terrain even began to look like New Mexico—drier, with sparser vegetation and an abundance of mesas and buttes.

Now we're in Grand Junction for a couple of days and will start exploring the area tomorrow. GJ is a typical-looking small city of about 48,000. The only distinctive feature I've seen so far is the odd street-naming system. There are 29 (not 29th) Road, 30 Road, B 1/2 Street, D 5/8 Street, 26 1/4 Road, and many more like them. Sounds like the city fathers had a few too many beers.

RV trip, day 6: Breckenridge

The view across Route 24 from  Snowy Peaks RV Park,

Buena Vista, Colorado

Last night the rain pounded our RV for hours; as much as we love the sound, we eventually thought enough already. It stopped around midnight, and Wednesday morning we were treated to bright sunshine. Outside our RV park and across Route 24 lies the Collegiate Range, with peaks named Princeton, Harvard, and the like. None named Boston University or Georgia Tech that I know of.

We drove our Saturn through Fairplay and on to Breckenridge and Frisco before heading back across a couple of 10,000-foot passes and through brief snow showers. Clouds had moved back in and made some of the mountain photography difficult—not that the clouds were all that low, but the contrast between the clouds and the snow was minimal.

Tomorrow we leave the Rockies. There are several ways out, but some look dicey. Our best bet is probably the Interstate.

Story Time by Rosalind Cook, Breckenridge Art Gallery

Breckenridge, Colorado

Coffee shop, Fairplay, Colorado

Boy and chipmunk near Breckenridge

RV trip, day 5: Rainy Rockies

Back in Las Cruces I dreamed about days like this: Low, thick clouds obscuring the mountains and soaking the region with rain showers. We're so dry in the desert, a rainy day is a treat.

Rain is what we have today in the Rockies. It played havoc with our picture-taking but not with our enjoyment as we drove through tiny Leadville and up to Vail, marveling at how much snow (and snowmelt) we could see in June. In some of the photos it's hard to tell where the mountains end and the sky begins. But that just means we'll have to come back another time.

Rockies outside Leadville

Abandoned school building, Leadville

Arkansas River

RV trip, day 4: Buena no Vista

Vendors at Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe

Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, Santa Fe

Today we skipped the Interstate and drove north on US 285, paralleling the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and then the Rockies. During the day, clouds thickened and showers followed. By the time we arrived at Buena Vista, Colorado, we found the vista not all that buena. That's fine, though, as we'll be here three nights—oh, wait, it's supposed to rain until Thursday. We are close to Breckenridge, Vail, and such, and will take a couple of day trips in the little Saturn we towed behind us. If the clouds break up long enough, I'll catch a few snapshots of those snow-covered 14,000-foot rocks.

News flash: at 8,000 feet above sea level, the air is thin. I tried to take a walk and found the breathing difficult. Well, that's a good excuse to avoid doing much!

Before taking leave of our friends yesterday, we were all chuckling over our visit to one of the art galleries on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. The place has a room full of paintings with risqué captions. The paintings are in a style similar to that of Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson. One shows a dorky, middle-aged woman with a smug expression on her face. The caption says, "The way Eunice saw it, if he didn't want to see his name in print, he shouldn't have fucked a writer."

There. I knew I could make this post writing-related.

RV trip day 3: Canyon Road

On Sunday morning we all drove over to Canyon Road, not far from downtown Santa Fe. Nothing in Santa Fe is far from downtown, come to think of it. Canyon Road is full of artsy boutiques where everything is beautiful and nothing is affordable unless you have, say, $25,000 to shell out for a sculpture of a burro. (I am fairly sure the real thing is a lot cheaper.) Shopkeepers were uniformly friendly and always permitted photography.


Two of our friends went home today, and we say goodbye to the others tonight. Tomorrow's destination: Buena Vista, Colorado.

RV trip day 2: The Miracle Staircase

Santa Fe is one of the prettiest cities I've seen. We're here through Sunday with some of our Las Cruces friends, and on Monday we'll go our separate ways. Though I don't expect to be actively selling my books on this trip, I will leave business cards on bulletin boards at all the RV sites—a low-key approach to be sure.

Today we visited Loretto Chapel, which is now a private museum. It's well worth paying the small admission to see the spectacular "Miracle Staircase." According to the story, the nuns who owned the chapel needed a staircase to get to the upper level, but there wasn't enough room for a conventional set of stairs. So they prayed, and along came an anonymous carpenter who built essentially what you see in the picture and then disappeared without accepting payment. It seems to have no supports except for a small brace added later. Originally it had no railing and banister, which it's said made for scary ascents and descents.

Here's a wonderful statue in front of a shop downtown. 

RV trip day 1: Santa Fe

Too tired to blog. We and the two cats are whipped. Here is a flower from the courtyard of the New Mexico  Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Much more when I'm rested.

RV trip, Day 0: Are we there yet?

We're excited! Our month-long 3,000-mile RV trip begins in the morning as we head north to Santa Fe. We'll explore the city with two other couples for a while, then head north into Rocky Mountain country in Colorado, west to Salt Lake City, north to Yellowstone, and east to South Dakota.

Please check in regularly for trip updates and photos, as I'll try to post on most days.

Gary Presley’s Seven Wheelchairs

My friend Gary Presley wrote a nice blog entry about When Pigs Fly yesterday. The gentleman has taste!

Gary is an accomplished writer who authored Seven Wheelchairs, his autobiography. I've read it and highly recommend it.

R-i-i-i-i-p!

Oh, do you wonder what that ripping sound is? Well, I had a book signing at the Coas Bookstore in Las Cruces today. A nice elderly lady named Sandra sat down to chat with me and said she'd buy my book. She hailed a clerk and asked exactly how much my book was with the tax—$16.05, she was told. My, you're going to bankrupt me, she said as she peeled off three twenties. We stopped her from paying $60.05, but by golly, she was about to do it.

Anyway, I signed a copy for her. Then Sandra and I chatted about the Christian missionary work she and her family have done in Yunnan, China; and then she talked about her reading tastes. She likes clean, old-fashioned romance novels, not the modern kind with dirty parts in them. When she gets to a place in a book that has a dirty part, she said, she rips the page out. That didn't seem like the time to go into detail about the book I'd just inscribed to her, which while not exactly dirty, does have a plot that revolves around a porn shop. And there are parts where, um...

She left the store with a small stack of books and assured me she would read mine first. So if you hear the sound of ripping pages, that's Sandra with my book.

The photo shows the sign I displayed using a quote from an Amazon review by Jack Shakely.

Add links to your blog comments

When you post a comment on someone's blog, maybe you'd like to put a live link in your signature line to make it easy for people to visit  your own blog. Here's how to do it:

Say you want the text Internet Review of Books to be your linked text. You need to add the following HTML code:

<a href="http://internetreviewofbooks.com"> Internet Review of Books</a>

The result:

Internet Review of Books

Review of Silver City’s Bear Mountain Lodge

This is my May column for Southwest Senior, which arrived in today's mail:

Local authors, local books: Silver City’s Bear Mountain Lodge

By Bob Sanchez

Was she an heiress?

That’s what historian and writer Donna Eichstaedt wanted to know as she read the sign saying that Mrs. Myra McCormick was ill and the Bear Mountain Lodge near Silver City was closing. Perhaps the woman was related to the family of Cyrus McCormick of mechanical reaper fame. “We are always looking for interesting stories,” Eichstaedt told me, and she saw possibilities—New Mexico had often been a destination for heirs and heiresses back when such people were more common.

Had the answer been yes, the story would have developed differently. But Mrs. McCormick was no heiress, although she turned out to be an interesting woman in her own right. So Eichstaedt decided to write an article about the lodge anyway, and the article developed into a short book, Silver City’s Bear Mountain Lodge: The Untold Story. Seeing photos of Mrs. McCormick and the lodge “really got (Eichstaedt’s) adrenaline going” and inspired Eichstaedt to start writing.

Apparently, Myra McCormick was a “peculiar and caustic” character whose personality was forged in the Depression. During her research, Eichstaedt heard stories of McCormick doling out a single washcloth and a single towel per person for a guest’s entire stay at the lodge, and of a guest catching her pouring water from a dog’s dish into a pitcher meant for iced tea.

As it turned out, the original owners became the book’s primary focus. In the 1920s Juanita Franks and Walter Langer married and settled in New Mexico to run a home for disturbed boys, but their backgrounds were too different for them to stay married. After a stint back east, Juanita returned home to New Mexico, while Walter’s heart was on the east coast and in Europe. In time he became a renowned psychiatrist and a disciple of Sigmund Freud. As his contribution to the Allies in World War II, he wrote a secret report for the U.S. Government that analyzed Hitler’s psyche with remarkable accuracy. Once declassified in the early 1970s, the report became a best-selling book entitled The Mind of Adolf Hitler, which incidentally I remember reading. The divorce of Franks and Langer, Eichstaedt says, is a “classic example of how the power of history separates people.”

Juanita Franks tended the lodge for many years before selling it to Myra McCormick. Juanita lived to be 103, and a photo of her and the author grace the back cover. McCormick in turn left the lodge to the Nature Conservancy.

Eichstaedt has a real curiosity about New Mexico, which she conveys through her clear and entertaining writing. An assistant professor of history at Dona Ana Community College and a director of the Doña Ana County Historical Society, she earned her Ph.D. in history from Illinois State University.  She had been dean of Lincoln College in Illinois before moving with her husband to Las Cruces since 1992.

Donna credits the Nature Conservancy for their support in her researching and writing the book. Her next project will be an article about the psychoanalyst Eduard Hitschmann, whom she describes as having been Sigmund Freud’s best friend.

Published in 2008 by Southwest Senior Books, Silver City’s Bear Mountain Lodge is out of print, but copies are available through Coas, Southwest Senior, or from the author. It’s well researched and well written, and a good addition to the library of any lover of New Mexican lore.

If you are a published local writer and would like me to review your book, mail a copy to:
Southwest Senior
P.O. Box 1053
Las Cruces, NM 88004
Attention: Bob Sanchez

Be sure to include your contact information.

Bob Sanchez is the author of Getting Lucky, available from Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/gettinglucky, and he blogs at http://bobsanchez1.blogspot.com.

 

A trip to wildflower country

Bluebonnet

Indian Blanket

Winecup

We just returned from an RV trip into central Texas, where the April wildflowers are beautiful, and the politics—well, they are what they are. The hateful political sign is in an empty storefront in downtown McGregor, not far from W's old stomping ground of Crawford. Note the "FBO" at the top. Any guesses as to what that stands for?

A television ad for a place called Guns Are Us billed its store as "Three thousand square feet of Second Amendment heaven."

In one town where we stayed, we saw a house with the following large sign prominently displayed in its fenced-in front yard: Danger: Sex Offender/Child Molester Lives Here. In the driveway were a couple of cars and a gray-haired old woman who was swatting a goat with her hand.

 

Getting Lucky review

The April 2009 issue of The Internet Review of Books ran this glowing review of Getting Lucky:

http://internetreviewofbooks.com/apr09/getting_lucky.html

Please check it out.

Chester Campbell: Make the Setting Come Alive

Today I have the honor and privilege of hosting Chester Campbell on this stop of his blog tour for his mystery The Surest Poison. He will give away several copies of his books during the tour, which runs through May 1. Leave a comment here and you may be a winner in the contest. For more details got to his Mystery Mania blog.

Make the Setting Come Alive

Some authors strive to make setting a character in their novels. I can’t say that I had that in mind with The Surest Poison, but I did endeavor to make the setting come alive so you would feel that you were there in person. The three main settings in the book are Nashville, which covers all of Davidson County in our metropolitan form of government; Ashland City, the small county seat just to the west; and Lewisville, a fictional small town about 50 miles to the southwest.

I like to keep the action moving by limiting descriptions of locations to the minimum that will give a graphic sense of place, enough to trigger the reader’s imagination. My first editor always said don’t underestimate your readers. They know a lot more than you think they do. I prefer to let them give their imaginations free reign.
Another thing about setting is that it can provide information that gives more depth to your characters. As an example, here is PI Sid Chance’s exercise routine:

Up early the next day, decked out in gray sweat pants and a faded Yellowstone tee shirt, Sid got back to his regular morning run through the neighborhood. He covered four miles at a brisk pace, honing his powers of observation as he went. He noted the black van in the gravel driveway, the ornamental birdbath beside an oak tree, the red bicycle leaning against a fieldstone house, the large white mailbox with a bashed-in side. Last night’s blustery wind had been replaced by a less turbulent breeze that rustled the trees, tingeing the chilled air with the scent of damp leaves. He watched the sunlight filter through baring limbs and paint slanted yellow stripes on the pavement. This was a special time of day that resonated with his love of the outdoors. He filled his lungs with air and sweated like a boxer in the ring and adored every minute of it.

Sid is my protagonist. He lives and works in Madison, a suburb on Nashville’s northeast side. Here’s how his office location looks as he arrives one morning before daylight:

Sid took the cutoff north to Gallatin Pike, Madison’s Main Street. His office, a grudging requirement of his new life, occupied a corner in a glass and stone building near RiverGate Mall, anchor for the community’s primary shopping area. One strip center after another lined both sides of the street, deserted mini-cities at this time of day.

For a different view of Nashville, here is what Sid sees from his lawyer-client’s office downtown:

Sid looked out a broad window at the dwarf-like lunchtime figures scurrying along the sidewalk below. After several years as a small town police chief, followed by three years of isolation at his cabin in the woods, he found it difficult to adjust to Nashville’s booming growth, both downtown and in the suburban counties. New skyscrapers had changed the skyline, and the planned 70-story Signature Tower would usher in a whole new wave of changes. Developments like Nissan North America’s new international headquarters in Brentwood reshaped the suburbs. It was hardly the quaint Southern town he remembered from his youth.

The Surest Poison’s plot involves Sid’s attempt to track down the man responsible for dumping a massive amount of a toxic chemical behind a small plant near Ashland City. Sid and Jaz LeMieux, his part-time associate, are directed to the rural community that suffered health effects from the pollution.

They found the creek and followed the road beside it, soon reaching a spot where the land sloped away from a high wooded hill that appeared to be the one behind the HarrCo plant. Along the bottom of the hill, a hodgepodge of small frame or asbestos siding houses were sandwiched among a few single or doublewides. They saw one typical old two-story farmhouse. Most had battered pickups parked in front. A hayfield spread off to the other side of the road. Large, round bales lined a rickety fence.

Sid Chance grew up in Nashville but spent 18 years as a National Park ranger and 10 years as a small town police chief before shifting to private investigator. I invented the town of Lewisville, where he worked as top cop. The name came from its location near where Meriwether Lewis, organizer of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, died along the Natchez Trace, a historic trail in the 1800s that ran from Nashville to Natchez, Mississippi. When Sid takes Jaz down to question a couple of people in Lewisville, here’s what they see:

Beyond the grounds of a new high school, older houses lined the highway. That soon gave way to commercial buildings, the usual dotting of fast food restaurants and service stations, and, at the center of town, a typical square housing the old red brick courthouse. A statue of the famed explorer, Meriwether Lewis, stood on a pedestal in front of the building.

To give a better feel for what they faced when calling on the man who caused Sid the most trouble during his law enforcement career, I painted a little more detailed picture of the man’s business.

The Long Branch Saloon had a rustic wooden front that fit the name like cowboys fit saddles. Inside were black walls, round tables and booths, and a long bar made of dark wood that could have come right out of some Old West ghost town. Lamps made to look like oil lanterns cast a pale glow over the room. Two men sat at the bar, workmen dressed in jeans and ball caps, beers shedding trickles of foam on the counter. A woman with streaks of gray in her hair and a man in a tweed sports jacket leaned toward each other at a table just beyond the bar. The man’s shirt collar gapped open to bare a gold medallion on a heavy necklace and the hint of a hairy chest.

The scene becomes more bleak as they head for Hank Keglar’s office.

He followed the bartender’s directions and entered a narrow passageway. It had been years since he was in this place, and he’d forgotten how desolate it looked. With one small bulb in the ceiling, the area gave the dusky appearance of a cave entrance. Dark brown walls emphasized the perception. Even the floor had a rough feel, covered by a frayed carpet of indistinct color. Sid and Jaz walked along in silence, stopping at the last door. Sid knocked.

Several scenes take place around Jaz LeMieux’ mansion near the county line on the south side of Nashville. This is how Sid views it on his first visit:

When John Wallace opened the barrier, he drove until the mansion came into view. The house sat on a small knoll that likely would have provided picturesque views from the upper story windows except for all the towering oak and elm trees that surrounded it. The mansion looked like an import from the Louisiana countryside with its four gables highlighting the second floor roof and a wood-floored veranda that crossed the front and ran halfway back on both sides.

A wealthy businesswoman who inherited controlling interest in a lucrative chain of truck stops when her father died, Jaz works mostly in her home office. It’s described this way:

Jaz’s office occupied a bookshelf-lined room her mother had called the library and her father ma cachette, French for ‘my hiding place.’ A framed photo of Jaques LeMieux sat on one side of the cluttered desk, a similar picture of his wife, Gwendolyn, on the other.

It looks this way to Sid:

Crowded bookshelves stretched around the room. A large metal globe mounted in rich, dark wood sat in one corner. A wheeled ladder on a track stood beside a wall of books, reminding Sid that she had spoken of her dad as a short man. He would have needed the ladder to reach the upper shelves.

Setting is a vital part of any story and can serve many purposes besides describing a location. It should be dynamic and pique the reader’s interest in learning more about what is going on. In some mysteries, the setting proves such a compelling feature that it leads to the solution of the crime. Can you think of one that fits this description?

---

About Mystery Writer Chester D. Campbell

Chester Campbell is the author of two mystery series featuring private investigators. The Surest Poison, first book in the Sid Chance series dealing with a chemical pollution case, is just out. He has written four Greg McKenzie novels featuring a retired Air Force investigator and his wife. Prior to turning to fiction writing, Campbell worked as a newspaper reporter, freelance writer, magazine editor, political speechwriter, advertising copywriter, public relations professional and association executive. An Air Force intelligence officer in the Korean War, he retired from the Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel. Currently secretary of the Southeast Chapter of Mystery Writers of America and president of the Middle Tennessee Chapter of Sisters in Crime, he lives in Madison, Tennessee with his wife, Sarah, and an 11-year-old grandson.


Synopsis of The Surest Poison

Three seemingly unrelated murders crop up during the investigation of a decade-old chemical dump that plagues a rural community west of Nashville. PI Sid Chance, a former National Parks ranger whose career as a small town police chief was cut short by malicious accusations of bribery, pursues the case after being coaxed out of self-imposed exile by Jaz LeMieux, a wealthy ex-cop. Is the man responsible for the pollution dead or alive? Who is having Sid tailed and threatened? When Jaz helps with the investigation, she is awakened by an explosion behind her mansion. Is it related to the abduction of her housekeeper’s grandson, or Sid’s case? As they unravel a hidden conspiracy that used murder to silence witnesses, Sid finds himself confronting the unsavory people responsible for his past troubles.