Do you remember your "first"? Angie Thibodeaux does - the tousled hair, the
disheveled clothes. The blood splatter.
Monday, March 17, 2009
Angie thinks she's ready for anything. She has spent years training her
search and rescue dog Shalako. She has pounded the woods in her fair share
of wilderness searches - lost children, wandering Alzheimer patients,
missing hunters whose confidence outweighs their competence. But on a
routine training, when she stumbles upon a dead body and catches a glimpse
of the killer, she's thrown into the hunt of her life. Tension and gun
sales skyrocket in The Music City as another young woman is taken, and it
becomes clear that while Angie may be on the fringes of the official
investigation, she's in the eye of the storm for both the media and a serial
killer.
But she battles a faceless evil greater than any one man. A constant
barrage of technology feeds the public appetite for gore, and the Nashville
politicos circle the wagons as the body count rises. So Angie must choose to
fight - her buried fears as past assault victim, perilously invasive
paparazzi, the complicated politics of an investigation unfolding in real
time on every media outlet in the nation. And ultimately against a killer
able to watch every move she makes. It is not as simple as the hunter
becoming the hunted. It's all about access, in a day and age when everything
about your life is just a click away.
Coming in at 95,500 words, the technical side of Others May Die is based on
my experience as a search & rescue canine handler throughout Tennessee and
Kentucky. The mechanics come from a M.Ed., coupled with years of creating
training and promotional material at companies as divergent as Saturn and
the Nashville Humane Association. The backdrop is pure Nashville, where I
spent years in the music industry and gained a lifetime of great cocktail
party stories. The action, however, is courtesy of the darkest depths of my
imagination, as I can not claim 'serial killer' on my resume.