After I posted last month, which was my first post ever for The Kill Zone, I realized that many of you may not know much about me. But since I had already scheduled the post, and it was my last post of the year as well as my first, I made an executive decision to wait until my first post in January to properly introduce myself (Oh, and Happy 2026!). So here goes.

I’m Patricia Bradley, and I write Inspirational romantic suspense for Revell. Since 2013, I’ve written five novellas, 18 novels, and I’m currently working on the 19th. Since I’m not a fast writer, that means I’ve spent the last 12 years mostly sitting at my computer, living my dream. I also teach workshops on writing. In 2012, I met James Scott Bell in a line dance in St. Louis…or Cincinnati, I forget which. He was dancing…I was not. And I doubt he remembers it.

I have a website where you can learn more about me, and a Tuesday blog where I feature a Mystery Question, usually about dumb criminals. I feature four scenarios three of which are true and one that I made up. Readers guess which one I made up. You can find the blog at https://ptbradley.com/blog/.

Enough about me. Now on to my post about Winston Churchill’s favorite paraprosdokians. (We all know how accurate AI is, so they may or may not be his favorites.) Also, according to AI, Paraprosdokians are figures of speech where the latter part of a sentence provides an unexpected twist or surprise, forcing the listener/reader to reinterpret the first part, often for humorous or dramatic effect, like, “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving definitely isn’t for you” or “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it“.

Winston Churchill was known for loving paraprosdokians. Here are a few AI says he loved:

1. Where there’s a will, I want to be in it.
2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it’s still on my list.
3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
4. If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.
5. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
6. They begin the evening news with “Good Evening”, then proceed to tell you why it isn’t.
7. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.
8. I thought I wanted a career. Turns out I just wanted paychecks.
9. In filling out an application, where it says, ‘Emergency contact’, I put ‘doctor’.
10. You do not need a parachute to skydive unless you want to do it again.
11. Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live with.
12. You’re never too old to learn something stupid.
13. Where there’s a will, there are relatives.
14. During WWII Sir Winston Churchill’s address to Congress began with:
    “It has often been said that Britain and America are two nations divided only by a common language”.

Do you have any favorite paraprosdokians to start this New Year with?

By John Gilstrap

Okay, folks, SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD FOR “A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE”

Kathryn Bigelow’s celebrated new thriller, “House of Dynamite” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, something of a master class in how not to write a thriller. To be sure, the premise is gripping: A nuclear missile is detected en route to an as-yet unknown target in the United States, launched by an unknown enemy. This happens at a time when the U.S. is at Defcon 4 (peacetime) and during shift change in the White House Situation Room. Time to impact:18 minutes.

The first minute or so is wasted on what resonated as truth to me: “Wait, that can’t be right, can it? Is it a computer glitch?” Then, Captain Olivia Walker, the duty officer in the Situation Room calms everybody down. There are procedures to be followed, people to be notified, and actions to take. America fires two interceptor missiles (only two) to take out the incoming warheads, but they both miss, and the National Command Authority (NCA) accepts the inevitability of a nuclear strike in Chicago. (I’m not going to address the ridiculous plot holes, except for the one where Captain Walker, who lives in Virginia and clearly loves her husband, surreptitiously call him and tells him to get in the car and drive west–toward the incoming nuclear blast.)

The intense 18 minute period from launch to impact is presented more or less in real time, but just before impact, the film shifts to show the same events from the points of view of the various people we know that Captain Walker has been interacting with–saving the president, of course, for last. Call it 20 minutes of screen time. Out of a 90-minute movie.

The rest of the film shows the same actions, same results, from different points of view.

Twenty minutes in, I was breathless. I thought, Wow, what an exciting yet flawed, implausible movie! Then came the reality that they were going to quadruple-down on the same flaws and implausibilities, just from a different angle. WTF?

But I don’t want to talk plot. I want to talk structure and character, and that’s where this film truly fails.

The filmmaker was making a point rather than a piece of entertainment.

Eighteen minutes ain’t a lot of time to make 100% correct decisions under stress. Got it. (And from submarine based platforms off the East Coast, the flight times are more like eight minutes.) Presidents, played in this case by Idris Elba, whose talents are woefully squandered, don’t spend a lot of their spare time scouring the target packages contained in the infamous “football”, which itself is cared for in the film by a twenty-something junior officer. Got it again. Awesome decisions must be made on the fly. Finally, horror of horrors, government officials give their families a heads up to get out of town before the roads become impassible. (Between you and me, I would 100% do that. RHIP, baby.)

The flaw in the film is that everybody simply follows the book–literally and figuratively. No one dares to fire an unauthorized third interceptor missile in attempt to save millions of lives even if it scorches their career. (Okay, I can’t resist a plot comment here. They limit the interceptor package to two missiles because they might need more if there’s a second attack. Better to char the Windy City. That made sense to a Hollywood writer. Someone needs a good old-fashioned Three Stooges slap, hair-pull and eye-poke.)

Reading procedures, discussing the efficacy of procedures, and then ultimately following them is . . . what’s the word? Oh, yeah. Boring.

A thriller is about characters taking chances and succeeding or failing as a result.

I don’t care about anyone in this film.

This reflects back on the intellectual origins of the film. Every character is merely a game piece to be manipulated to bring the larger points home. Once NCA wrote off the millions of innocents in the greater Chicagoland area, why would I give a rat’s patootie whether or not SecDef gets a last chance to tell his daughter he loves her? We all love our kids, buddy, and you just shrugged at toasting millions of them.

Stakes and tension are different things.

Within the first ten minutes of this turkey, we know the the Miracle Mile will soon be baked to glass because the screenwriter says it must be so. In storytelling parlance, I believe that’s called a Big Reveal. Normally, those are saved for the third reel, not the first. All that remains is the question of how the president should respond. The military cliche, of course, pushes for a global, kill-everybody response, and President Elba seems confused and disturbed by the plastic-sheeted four-color Denny’s-like menu sheets that details the pre-targets smorgasbord of retaliatory options. (Had I been sought out for my technical guidance, I might have asked, what’s the hurry to retaliate? As absurdly unlikely it is that an ICBM could be launched from an untraceable location, once detonated, the forensic evidence left behind would tell us everything we need to know for a surgical strike.)

The ending sucks.

That’s it on the ending. Hard stop. Sucks.

Never forget what a thriller is all about.

Pacing, tension, and ever increasing stakes for the characters are the elements that separate a thriller from the other suspense genres. That’s the job of the writer. If it’s a film, add screenwriter and director to that list.

If you ever allow an agenda to take the front seat, your project is doomed.

By PJ Parrish

My new year got off to a rocky start. Short story: suddenly huge water bill. Plumber says there’s a leak…somewhere. Enter Mike from Gulf Coast Leak Detection. Leak is under the lawn, not the house, he says. Bill: $500 vs $10,000 to repipe house. On New Year’s Eve, I splurged on a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

So, in honor of good starts, here is some tasty brain lint about books and writers that I found for all us who are hoping for positive outcomes in 2026.

Actual photo of famous book critic Toby,

Sick Puppy

Decades ago, when I was writing my first romance, The Dancer, my cat Hilary walked across the keyboard of my Commodore and wiped out a quarter of my work. Noooo, I didn’t make a copy. But…John Steinbeck’s dog, Toby, ate half of the first manuscript of Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck didn’t make copies either and it took him two months to write it all over again.Steinbeck wrote to his agent: “I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.”

Hunka Hunka Burning Gov

Once, while doing some routine research on arcane FBI procedures, I got a screen message that said ERROR 451.  This is, I found out, is HTTP code for “Unavailable For Legal Reasons,” meaning the government doesn’t want you to see it. The code comes from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where books are infamously burned. It’s reassuring to know someone in Washington read novels.

My Golden Eye Will Be Watching You

Apropo of nothing in my life other than the fact I once got to interview Sting — The Police frontsman wrote the song “Every Breath You Take” at the same desk that Ian Fleming used to write his James Bond novels. Sting was renting the Fleming Villa in Goldeneye on the island of Jamaica while composing the famous track.

Which Might Explain Why the Coffee Tastes Like Bilge Water

Would you go to a coffee shop called Pequod’s? Whelp, that was what Gordon Bowker originally wanted to call his little coffee company because he was a Moby Dick fan and thought using the ship’s name was a nifty idea. His partner Terry Heckler thought naming a business after a doomed whaler was a bad marketing move. So now you can overpay for your Cinnamon Dolce Latte at Starbucks, named after the Pequod’s first mate.

The Allmanns, Jeff Spicoli and The Bard

Was listening to one of my fave boogie-down-the-road songs the other day — “Jessica.” Found out recently that the name — now among most popular for babies and dogs — made its first appearance in Shakespeare’s 1598 play The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare is also credited with making up over 1,000 words and phrases including “bookworm,” “bibliophile,” “critic,” “vanish into thin air,” and “gloomy.”  He also gave us “gnarly” and “pukey.” Aloha, Mr. Hand.

Let Them Eat Madeleines

I don’t remember why, but many years ago I decided I needed to read Proust. Naively, I cracked open In Search of Lost Time. It became my Everest. I had to conquer it. It took me two years. If you’re into torture, give it a go. At 1.2 million words, it is one of the longest novels ever written. Second longest is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which only feels like 1.2 million words.

“A Feeling Of Sadness That Only Bus Stations Have.”

Jack Kerouac never learned to drive. He moved to New York City as a teenager on a scholarship to boarding school and then entered Columbia, so as any smart New Yorker would say, who needs wheels in the city? Through every subsequent adventure, across the country and back, down to Mexico, up from New Orleans, Kerouac always let his buddy Neal Cassady drive. Or he took Greyhound buses.

Paperback Rider

True story: When visiting DC years ago, I went to the Library of Congress on a lark just to see if my book The Dancer was there. Sure enough, it was! Then the other day, I read that In 2003, 2.5 million unsold books from the UK romance publisher Mills & Boon were used in the reconstruction of the M6 motorway. This is the company that bought the rights to my book The Dancer. My book never sold much — in US or UK — but it gives me some sick satisfaction to think that my little paperback might be helping some poor git find his way from Catthorpe, England to Gretna, Scotland.  Such is the stuff of immortality.

Happy belated new year, crime dogs.