The Thinking Process
When I finished writing my first draft of Dark Water , I was gung-ho and eager to write more. I had a few ideas of where I wanted to see Mickey Calloway and Erin Hayes go and I couldn't wait to start. But putting together another Calloway and Hayes mystery was going to be a different process than I had with Dark Water . With the first story, I didn't begin with the detectives: I started with the murder victim and the location where the body would be found. As I came up with more details, I didn't know if I was going to have a solitary detective or if that person would have a partner. But still, before I had that figured out, I moved to the murderer and the motive, and that took a couple of weeks to sort out. As soon as I had those elements, I had to think of how the murderer actually was able to commit the act and flesh out details that let to that moment. It was while I was toying with various ideas that the secondary arc of a plane crash came into my head (this is not a s...
