Category Archives: crime novels

Forensic Genetic Genealogy: A Crime Writer’s Field Guide

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Marcia King’s mother kept the same telephone number for thirty-seven years.

She kept the same house in Arkansas. She didn’t move. She didn’t disconnect. Marcia had hitchhiked out of town in 1980 and stopped calling, and her mother — like every mother in this position has done since the invention of the telephone — left the line open in case her daughter ever picked up on the other end.

In April of 2018, the call finally came.

It wasn’t Marcia.

It was the Miami County Sheriff’s Office in Troy, Ohio, telling a woman who had waited almost four decades that the unidentified body found beside Greenlee Road on April 28, 1981 — the young woman the press had nicknamed Buckskin Girl for the fringed leather poncho she had been wearing — was her daughter. Twenty-one years old. Strangled and beaten. Buried under a headstone that simply said Jane Doe.

The case had not been solved. Her killer was, and remains, unknown. But her name had come back.

Marcia King’s identification was the first cold case ever solved by forensic genetic genealogy. A blood sample preserved in an unrefrigerated tube since 1981 was processed, uploaded to the public genealogy database GEDmatch, and matched within four hours of computer searching to a first cousin once removed. A team of volunteer genealogists at the newly founded DNA Doe Project built the tree out from there. Two weeks later, a mother in Arkansas got the call.

Three weeks after that, on April 24, 2018, a 72-year-old former police officer named Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in his front yard in Citrus Heights, California. The Golden State Killer. Caught the same way: GEDmatch, family tree, candidate identified, confirmation DNA pulled from his trash. I remember standing with my cohorts from the Los Angeles Forensic Science Academy and talking about this case and the validity of using discarded DNA and familial DNA databases to find criminals. It was walking a fine legal line at the time.

This case began a change in the way cold case investigations worked in the U.S.

Eventually, it seeped its way into crime fiction. I tackled the topic a few years ago when writing What Darkness Does.

If you write the genre, you can no longer write around forensic genetic genealogy. And if you’re going to write it, you have to write it right.

Why This Matters for Crime Writers

Cold case fiction used to live in a forgiving place. The case had gone cold because the science of the era couldn’t read the evidence. Your investigator’s job was to be present-day-clever about a past-tense problem.

Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy (FIGG) moves the goalposts. Evidence that was useless for forty years is suddenly usable and trackable. Crimes from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s are now solvable in ways the original detectives couldn’t have imagined. Hundreds of cases have been resolved this way since 2018. The U.S. Department of Justice issued formal policy on its use in 2019. CRC Press is releasing the first comprehensive practitioner’s guide to FIGG this month.

That’s not a problem for fiction. It’s a gift. Forensic genetic genealogy gives you a mechanism that finally works the way readers want a cold case to work — the past speaking, after years of silence — without the cheap rescue of a deathbed confession or a buried diary in the attic.

It only works on the page if you understand what FIGG actually does, what it doesn’t do, and where the writer’s instinct toward speed and tidiness is going to trip you up.

What Forensic Genetic Genealogy Actually Is

Plain English: FIGG combines DNA recovered from a crime scene with consumer genetic genealogy databases — places like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA — to find relatives of an unknown suspect or an unknown victim. A forensic genealogist uses those matches to build a family tree backward and outward until the tree narrows to one viable candidate.

That candidate is a lead. Not a defendant. Not a confirmed suspect. Just a lead.

For a suspect-identification match, investigators then need to collect what is called a surreptitious sample. This is typcially an abandoned or discarded source of DNA sample — for instance a coffee cup, a water bottle, a tissue from a public trash can. This is legal if the sample is taken from public domain. That sample is then tested and compared against the original DNA profile from the case at hand.

For a victim-identification case like Marcia King’s, a relative agrees to give a confirmation DNA sample, and the unknown person becomes a known person again.

Two distinctions matter for fiction.

FIGG is not CODIS. The Combined DNA Index System is the federal database of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, arrestees, and unsolved crime scenes. CODIS hits when your suspect is already in the system. Forensic genetic genealogy works when they aren’t. That distinction is the whole point of the technique. A writer who collapses the two will lose any reader who has paid attention to the last six years of true crime.

FIGG isn’t fast. The lab work to generate a sequenceable profile from old, often degraded evidence takes weeks to months. The genealogy work that follows takes even more time. Difficult cases take months. The famously hard ones take a year or longer. The science moves quickly. The genealogy is patient, careful, and slow.

Where Crime Writers Are Getting It Wrong

After watching the field for the last several years, here are the misnomers that show up most often regarding FIGG.

The instant match. A writer’s investigator submits DNA on Tuesday and gets a name on Wednesday. In the real world, even Marcia King’s case — which made a hit in only four hours of searching — had been preceded by weeks of lab work to extract usable DNA from a 1981 blood sample most labs had already given up on. We have to compress the timeline some, but compress the timeline that much and you lose the texture that makes cold case fiction interesting in the first place.

Skipping the confirmation step. A FIGG match is a candidate. It’s not legal proof. The story doesn’t move from genealogy hit to courtroom. It moves from genealogy hit to a separate, traditional confirmation DNA sample, almost always from something the suspect discarded in public domain. A writer who skips this step is writing a case that wouldn’t survive the first defense motion.

Using the wrong databases. Since the 2019 DOJ policy, U.S. law enforcement is restricted to genealogy databases where users have explicitly opted in to law enforcement matching. That means GEDmatch (with the right setting) and FamilyTreeDNA. It does not mean Ancestry. It does not mean 23andMe. Those companies have refused law enforcement access. A writer who has investigators pulling matches from Ancestry is writing a scene that gets the case thrown out.

Treating the genealogist as scenery. Forensic genetic genealogy is not done by detectives. It’s done by trained genealogists. Not sworn officers of the law. Many of them are civilians. Some of them are former hobbyists who turned professional after the Golden State Killer breakthrough. They are the people who actually build the tree. If your manuscript is about a cold case solved by FIGG and there is no genealogist in the story, you need to go back and add them.

Ignoring the ethical layer. Real investigators, real prosecutors, and real defense attorneys are arguing about FIGG every day. About consent. About whose DNA gets used. About what happens when one family member’s spit kit puts their cousin in prison. That tension belongs in your fiction. It’s exactly the kind of moral territory crime writers were made for.

How I Used FIGG In What Darkness Does

In What Darkness Does, a fourteen-year-old named Flora finds a bone in the woods.

Flora is sharp, stubborn, and exactly the kind of kid who doesn’t let go of a question once it’s in her teeth. The bone goes to a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Samantha Eckhardt, at the University of Michigan. Dr. Eckhardt invites Flora to a two-day workshop where she’ll learn how to use forensic genetic genealogy to try to give the bone a name.

I wrote the workshop scenes carefully. I gave Dr. Eckhardt a line I want every crime writer to internalize before they write a single FIGG scene of their own:

I want you to have realistic expectations. You may not leave here today with a candidate lead.

That’s the whole field guide in one sentence. Realistic expectations. Maybe not today.

One scene I love in that storyline isn’t the moment Flora gets a DNA hit. It’s the scene where her aunt, Emily Hartford, comes back to the lab after a break and finds Flora hunched over the keyboard, fingers moving fast, eyes locked on the screen, refusing to come up for air. Emily asks if she wants a snack. Flora doesn’t hear her. Emily asks again.

Without looking up, Flora answers: What if this were your child or sibling or best friend who had gone missing, never to be heard from again? Wouldn’t you want to know as soon as possible?

That’s the heartbeat of FIGG.

The drama isn’t the technology. The drama is the moral urgency the technology gives a fourteen-year-old at a keyboard, condensed into a single sentence by a kid who has only just learned what the work costs.

Flora’s storyline didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a real program at Ramapo College in New Jersey, the same one I credit in the back of the book — Ramapo runs an investigative genetic genealogy boot camp, and the youngest person ever to help resolve a case using IGG was a high school student who took part in it. The classrooms are real. The cases are real. The kids are real.

What I needed Flora to model — and what I want every crime writer to take with them — is that FIGG is not glamorous. It’s tedious, careful, full of stretches where the only thing happening on the page is a person staring at a screen.

The drama lives in the patience. But the reward is worth the wait. And to illustrate this I stretched Flora’s FIGG storyline into book 6, Walking On White, releasing October 20, 2026. Flora will get her answers!

The Field Guide: FIGG Best Writing Practices

Practical things to do when forensic genetic genealogy enters your story.

  • Write the timeline honestly. Give the lab time. Give the family tree time. Let your investigator be frustrated by the wait. The slowness is the realism.
  • Write the genealogist as a character. Let them have a personality, a method, a doubt. Let your reader watch them work.
  • Show the confirmation DNA moment. The discarded coffee cup, the swab from a hospital, the cigarette in a parking lot. That’s the beat where the candidate becomes the suspect. Don’t skip it.
  • Use the right databases by name. FamilyTreeDNA. Mention the opt-in setting. Get this right and the readers who care will trust you on everything else.
  • Build the family tree onto the page. A scene where your detective sees a name three generations away from a killer and starts to feel the case shift — that’s a scene that didn’t exist in the genre until 2018. It’s yours to invent.
  • Let the candidate be a real person before they’re proven guilty. FIGG often surfaces ordinary people — fathers, neighbors, retired church deacons — whose DNA matched because their nephew did a Christmas-gift spit kit. Sit with that for a paragraph. The moral weight of the technique lives in that pause.
  • Don’t forget victim identification. Most crime fiction uses FIGG to catch killers. Marcia King’s case is a reminder that it also gives names back to the dead. A novel that works the missing person’s side of the technique has a clear field in front of it.

The Ethics Seam Writers Should Rip Into

When a great-aunt sends her DNA to a consumer genealogy site to find out where her ancestors came from, she is not consenting to a future case being made against her grandnephew. The chain of relationship is invisible, intimate, and one-way. She doesn’t know who she is implicating. She can’t know.

That’s the moral seam every crime writer working in this space should put pressure on. Not to take a side, necessarily — only to acknowledge that the technique that brings closure to one family creates exposure for another. A character who has thoughts about that is more interesting than one who doesn’t. A scene where a relative is told your DNA is the reason we found him is one of the rawest moments fiction can offer right now, and almost no one has written it well yet.

That could be you.

Why This Tool Earns Its Place in the Genre

The cases forensic genetic genealogy has solved are the cases that broke families for decades. Children waited their whole adult lives to learn who killed their mothers. Parents died not knowing what had happened to their daughters. The technique can’t undo any of that. It doesn’t give back the years.

What it does is end the unknowing. And the unknowing, as I have written before, is the part of grief no one survives well.

In April of 2018, a mother in Arkansas finally got an answer about a daughter she had never stopped waiting for. The headstone in Riverside Cemetery in Troy, Ohio, that had said Jane Doe for thirty-seven years got a name carved into it: Marcia Lenore Sossoman King. The murder is still open. The killer hasn’t been caught. But Marcia is no longer Buckskin Girl. She is herself again, in death, the way she was in life.

Every crime writer who writes in cold case territory is, in some sense, writing toward that exact moment — the unknowing that finally breaks. FIGG deserves a place in crime fiction. It deserves to be written without shortcuts. It deserves to be written by people who understand that the truth at the end of the family tree belongs first to the family of the victim.

Get the science and technique right. Get the genealogy right. Get the long process right.

The story takes care of itself from there.

Want more on writing forensics that actually holds up? My Crime Writer’s Toolkit and the Master Crime Writing Course at forensicspeak.com walk through the procedures, evidence types, and craft principles that separate the novels readers trust from the ones they put down on page forty.

Jennifer Dornbush is an author, screenwriter, and forensic specialist who brings crime stories to life with authenticity and heart. With a background rooted in real-world forensics and a passion for crafting unforgettable mysteries, Jennifer offers readers and viewers a front-row seat to the intersection of science, justice, and human nature. Jennifer’s crime expertise has made her a sought-after speaker, consultant, and educator. Through her webinars and master courses, Jennifer guides writers in melding suspenseful storytelling with forensic realism to the screen and page. Meet her at www.jenniferdornbush.com

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Four Lessons Learned When My Pants Fell Down

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by Debbie Burke

 

After college, I swore off writing outlines. No more nonsense with Roman numeral I, capital A, Arabic numeral 2, lower-case b, etc.

For years, I’ve been a proud, unapologetic pantser. My system is flawed and not terribly efficient, but it’s worked for nine books.

Well, I must confess, on my novel in process, my pants fell down.

Proof of Life (working title) is the 10th book in the Tawny Lindholm Thriller series. I know the characters well but not so well that they can’t still surprise me when they get into trouble.

The leads are investigator Tawny Lindholm and defense attorney Tillman Rosenbaum, a recently married couple in their 50s who work together in Montana. Both have adult children from previous marriages.

The inciting incident: Arielle, Tillman’s 22-year-old daughter, has been living in Israel for two years researching family history. She unexpectedly arrives back home in Montana, bedraggled and exhausted with a newborn baby girl. She’s clearly been on the run but refuses to answer questions. Even Tawny, whose superpower is to convince anyone to spill their secrets, can’t persuade Arielle to open up.

Because my books are thrillers, I also write scenes from the villain’s point of view. He’s a high-ranking Israeli cop who’s married, but not to Arielle. The baby is his, and he wants her back. His investigative methods are brutal but effective. If he finds Arielle, she’s in dire peril.

When starting a new book, generally I begin with Jim Bell’s minimal signposts then take E.L Doctorow’s route:

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Even before I started writing, I worried that the research needed about international laws was too complicated. But I pushed forward with the story, figuring I could fill in the blanks on rewrite.

Tawny and Tillman suspect Arielle has broken laws. They want to help her but she’s holding back critical information. They don’t yet know about the villain who’s hunting her.

Pretty soon, for the plot to make sense, I had to dig into the Hague Convention treaty regarding international child abduction. Who has jurisdiction? Who takes the lead during an arrest? FBI, State Department, Israeli consulate?

Laws on the books rarely translate into how they’re applied in real life (or realistic fiction). How could I find insights into actual practices? How are suspects treated? Do they go to jail pending hearings? What happens to the abducted child? Who takes care of her until custody is determined?.

For almost 200 pages, I wrote scenes out of chronological order as ideas occurred to me. The draft was full of notes saying, “needs further explanation”, “do more research”, “maybe cut?”, and “move this section?”.

No surprise that I started getting confused.

The excerpts I submitted to my critique group were discrete, self-contained scenes that they generally liked. But over several months, one member kept raising valid questions. I gave excuses  but couldn’t come up with definitive answers.

More confusion.

In the past, I’ve used calendars to keep track of story timelines. That was especially important for Dead Man’s Bluff which was set against the backdrop of an actual hurricane. The calendar matched real day by day events like flooding, when roads were reopened, the staggered restoration of power over five days, etc. since those events impacted the plot.

Using a calendar also charts the cause and effect of each scene in relation to those before and after it. For this current manuscript, I didn’t use a calendar.

Bad choice.

Inside my head, arguments raged.

Wait a second, for the timeline to make sense, that scene can’t happen until much later. Oh no, that revelation is too soon because Tawny doesn’t know about XYZ yet. Oops, that confrontation between Tillman and the officials needs more build up. Should there even be a confrontation?  

When I tried to cobble scenes together, they resembled Franken-novel.

photo credit: Andrew Fare

Pretty soon, I was in deeper trouble than poor Arielle.

For several weeks, I let my normally trusty subconscious work on the problems. But this time, even she was stumped.

So much for pantsing.

I admitted defeat and placed a 9-1-1 call to my brilliant brainstorming buddy Phyllis Quatman. She’s an attorney, author, and fantastic sounding board. Sitting at her dining table, we tore the plot apart.

Finally, Phyllis said, “Deb, you’re making this much too complicated. Why don’t you simply…” and she distilled the story down to its most basic elements. Get rid of this. Move that. Don’t go off on this tangent. Give the villain-cop a secret past that prevents him from using his official channels to find Arielle and the baby. Force him to go to ground and stay under the radar as she had to do.

Turns out my subconscious had already planted a breadcrumb about the villain’s secret past. That past simply needed to grow bigger and more sinister.

Three hours later, with brain buzzing and full of gratitude for Phyllis’s help, I drove home and started writing an outline.

Gasp! Me? The confirmed, unrepentant pantser?

This outline contains no Roman numerals, no capital and lower-case letters. It’s not scene by scene, chapter by chapter. Maybe it’s not even technically an outline.

However, it contains the complicated backstory of the events leading up to Arielle’s surprise arrival in Montana with the baby. Arielle’s secrets. Other characters’ secrets.

Most important are the villain’s secrets—there are humiliations and past crimes he never wants to come to light. Those are his motivations. What is his deep desire? He genuinely loves the baby and wants her back. What must he do to accomplish that goal? Find and kill Arielle.

Backstory isn’t simply backstory. It causes the present story.

One by one, secrets will be revealed. Each changes the course of the plot and builds toward the climax.

I pounded a signpost in the ground for the climactic showdown. Not many details yet but it’s a destination to head toward.

The outline clocked in at 1300 words.

Can any scenes from the original 200 pages be salvaged? Some, yes. Others may undergo severe rewriting.

Others go in the trash. Actually, it’s more like putting them in purgatory. When I cut scenes, I store them at the end of the Word doc as “outtakes” in case there are a few useable sentences or paragraphs. In practice, though, when manuscripts have been finalized, those scenes were not needed.

I’d already successfully pantsed my way through nine previous novels. I thought the same method would work for the tenth. It didn’t.

I had to change, adapt, and rethink the process.

Did I waste months drafting a story that couldn’t work? Would I have been more efficient and productive if I’d planned the plot in advance instead of pantsing it? Probably.

Will my quasi-outline solve the problem? I don’t know yet.

A whole lot of new scenes have to be written. This time around, I’ll write in chronological order with a calendar.

Lessons learned:

  1. Just because a method worked in the past, it may not work now.

  2. Doctorow’s headlights didn’t show the cliff soon enough to avoid this story dropping over it.

  3. Listen to warning bells from my critique group.

  4. Get over my childish prejudice against outlines.

One lesson I learned long ago was to ask for help from a good friend who’s objective, rational, and logical. Phyllis came through in a big way, as she’s done many times in the past. I’m filled with gratitude and appreciation for her.

Will I remain a pantser? Probably, but I’m no longer as confirmed and unrepentant. Maybe now my pants will stay up.

~~~

TKZers: Are you a plotter, pantser, or a combination of both (plantser)? Have you run into trouble with your system? How did you solve the problem? Or are you still working on it?

 

Cover by Brian Hoffman

 

Please check out Dead Man’s Bluff to see how using a calendar helped fiction mesh with real-life events.

Full Circle – From First Page Critique to Publication

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by Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Let’s flashback to September 2020 when an anonymous Brave Author submitted a first page entitled The Recruiter for critique. I was fortunate to be the critiquer. The page demonstrated excellent craft skills. The first-person voice was both funny and grim, reminding me of Raymond Chandler, my all-time favorite author.

It was also a difficult page to critique because there was almost nothing wrong with it. Comments from other readers were overwhelmingly positive.

I’m always glad when a Brave Author steps forward and responds to feedback. This BA shed his cloak of anonymity and introduced himself as Gregg Podolski.

Gregg Podolski

A subject we often discuss here at TKZ is the right place to begin a novel. Gregg recognized this scene, although action-packed, was not the best beginning.

Another frequent TKZ subject is “Killing your darlings.” This is always a difficult decision for authors to make. Fortunately, Gregg realized that, as much fun as he had writing the scene, and, despite favorable feedback comments, this page had to go.

Other readers and I asked Gregg to let us know when the book was published.

But…from first page critique to publication is often a loooooong journey. I wasn’t holding my breath because many good novels unfortunately don’t see the light of publication.

Then, in 2022, Gregg emailed me to say Blackstone Publishing would release The Recruiter in July 2024.

Wow! Wonderful news!

He also mentioned I was the first person outside his family to read and offer feedback on the story. That made me feel good because it’s especially rewarding to see a piece I’d admired come to fruition.

Several weeks ago, Blackstone sent me an ARC (advanced review copy) which I’d requested.

I’m pleased to say the book far exceeded the potential shown back in 2020 in that original first page.

The Recruiter is a tense, gritty, contemporary noir thriller with hard-boiled echoes of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. It’s in the first-person point of view (POV) of Rick Carter, a world-weary alcoholic who deserted his wife and children. He earns a living by recruiting assassins, gun runners, and assorted unsavory thugs to do dirty work for wealthy, powerful clients concerned with preserving their upstanding reputations.

Yeah, I know. Rick Carter sounds more like a villain. Yet Gregg managed to infuse enough humor and humanity into this anti-hero to keep me reading and fascinated.

I invited Gregg to discuss his journey from first page critique to publication in today’s interview.

Debbie Burke: Gregg, welcome back to TKZ and big congratulations on the upcoming release of The Recruiter! Where did the idea of an executive recruiter for criminals come from?

Gregg Podolski: Thanks so much for having me, Debbie! As far as the idea, I’ve been a professional recruiter for the last 17 years, and it dawned on me that there really wasn’t a lot of books about my profession in the fiction world. I didn’t just want to do a John Grisham book but with recruiters instead of lawyers, though. Instead of writing about a recruiter who was a good guy caught in a bad situation, I thought it would be more unique—and more fun—to write about a guy who recruits bad people to help other bad people do bad things. See if I could turn a character who would be a secondary villain in a typical thriller into the protagonist of an entire novel.

DB: How long have you been writing? Have you attended classes, workshops, or conferences? Any previous publications?

GP: My first short story, “The Horse Raised by Wolves,” was published in Highlights Magazine when I was 7 years old. Six years later, in 8th grade, I wrote my first thriller novella, “Poison 101,” which my dad submitted to Reader’s Digest, but was rejected with a very nice letter from their editor who encouraged me to keep writing. Both stories are available to read on my website, greggpodolski.com, for anyone who’s interested. I’ve been writing ever since, with no specific training or extra classes. I wrote two full novels, half of another one, and a collection of humorous essays before writing The Recruiter during the early days of the pandemic in 2020. None of those earlier works were published, though a few got some mild interest from agents.

DB: Your lead character Rick Carter starts off as a big jerk. When you originally envisioned the story, did you have his entire character arc/transformation in mind? Or did he evolve during the writing process?

GP: I always knew this book was going to be about Rick reconciling the man he used to be with the man he’s become, but how he accomplished that definitely evolved as I wrote. The biggest change is evident if you compare the first page you critiqued with the character he is in the finished novel. The guy you met in that since-discarded first page was a little tougher than the guy he turned into. I just really liked the idea of writing a book in which the action hero is kind of bad at the action stuff.

DB: The plot of The Recruiter has many reversals, course changes, and surprise twists. I gotta ask—are you a plotter, a pantser, or a combination?

GP: Definitely a combo. I always know how a book will begin and end before I start, and then the connecting story beats come to me as I go. My phone is filled with notes ranging from a single line of dialogue to an outline for an entire scene. I type them up as they come to me and then try to work them in wherever they make sense. So, in a way, I sort of plot as I pants.

DB: Can you share the process you went through to get The Recruiter accepted for publication?

GP: I always knew I wanted to go the traditional publishing route, as I am far too lazy to self-publish. The Cliff’s Notes version is that I wrote the first draft from March-June of 2020, revised it twice, then started querying agents in September. By June of 2021, I had racked up around 50 rejections/no responses and two offers. I picked the one who I felt best connected with both me and my manuscript, then we revised it again over the summer. We went out on sub right before Thanksgiving and I received the offer from Blackstone Publishing in March of 2022.

DB: In the epilogue, you left the door open for more adventures with Rick Carter. Is another Recruiter book in the works?

GP: Not only in the works but written and submitted to Blackstone, waiting for their approval! I would love nothing more than to turn this into a book-per-year series, for as long as readers are interested in seeing what Rick gets up to next.

DB: Anything else you’d like to add?

GP: Just to say how appreciative I am of you and the entire TKZ community. I’m more of a lurker than a commenter, but I check the site every day as part of my morning routine, and recommend it regularly to anyone looking for writing advice. The feedback you provided on my first page critique and the wealth of knowledge and encouragement in the comments section was exactly the boost of confidence I needed as I dove into the query trenches, even if that first page remains in my Deleted Material file. That’s why this interview is so special to me, and is without a doubt one of the most meaningful I have done or will do. Thank you all!

~~~

TKZers: I coaxed Gregg out of lurking in the shadows. Feel free to ask him questions in the comments and he’s happy to answer.

Show Me The Body

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This question came up on one of my writer loops: how long do you wait for the body to appear in a mystery? Assume we’re talking about a traditional whodunit. Does it make a difference to you as a reader when the murder occurs? How about when plotting your own books?

Based on my experience, if you’re a new author, it’s best to get the body up front and center. Once you’re established, you have a bit more leeway with the characters. But even if your setting is quaint and the story is more of a crime novel than a whodunit, action engages the reader.

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I’ve had several rejections over the years to mystery proposals wherein the criticism essentially said to move up the dead body. In my latest project, the initial first chapter had the heroine enter the scene, play mah jong with her friends, go to lunch, and then the person dies. I’ve changed it so that she meets her friends for lunch first, and in the midst of their meal, the murder occurs. Later, they gather to talk about it and automatically play out the motions of their mah jong game. As this is the first book in a proposed new series, I have to get the action moving as quickly as possible.
I should have seen this when writing the first draft, but often we need some distance from our work before we can see it clearly. Or we need someone else to point out what is blind to us in our closeness to the material. Also keep in mind that readers can download the beginning of your book nowadays and so you want it to be an attention grabber.

Yes, there are books I read where the characters and setting are so appealing that I just read on for pleasure, and it may be 100 pages or so before someone is killed. But I do find myself saying, “All right, where’s the dead body already? This is supposed to be a mystery.” So genre conventions come into play as well.
What’s your take on the subject: murder them now, or introduce your characters gradually and slide into the crime after the story is in motion?
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY to The Kill Zone Blog! I am proud to be part of this illustrious group!