He left the bar, stood in the parking lot, and inhaled air that filled him with the taint of corruption, present and long past. He had to somehow choke down the disgust that would hamper his objectivity. This town, this dreadful little town, vomiting up its dirty secrets. He should have expected that one of them would drag him back into the place he couldn’t go. He had to keep Annie in her file on his computer at Headquarters. He couldn’t let the nightmares trespass into the daylight. This case, this job, he told himself. This case, this job.
When I studied Linguistics at Rice University, one of my professors, Dr. Philip Davis, regaled students with stories of British Columbian native groups and their ancestral homes. Phil is a recognized authority on Salishan languages and spent time in an isolated village on the B.C. coast. While on a trip in the Pacific Northwest, my husband and I visited the village, and the writer in me saw the locale as the perfect setting for a mystery: a narrow river valley surrounded by looming peaks, home to whites and natives with a history of mutual hostility, a place where nature has the upper hand in all things. I used the real village and its valley as a model for the fictional town of Port McKay. The culture and language of the fictional tribe, the Kitamuk, are a patchwork of the related groups of the area.
RCMP Inspector Marcus Chen, my protagonist, lover of Vivaldi and Miles Davis, hobbyist cook, and short-tempered critic of incompetence and bad behavior arrives in Port McKay dragging a weighty bag of emotional turmoil. In the Absence of Light chronicles the most trying homicide case of his career. Gemma Tennyson, his ex-wife and the spokeswoman for my inner linguist, contributes her linguistic knowledge to the solution of the case.
After a lengthy period of study, research, writes and rewrites, and work with a professional editor, I have pronounced the book ready for submission to agents, a process involving more rejection than acceptance, but with confidence in my work I am optimistic and hope to report success in the future.