All We Buried: A Sheriff Bet Rivers Mystery
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books (April 7, 2020)
Hardcover: 304 pages
Synopsis
For fans of Julia Keller and Sheena Kamal, All We Buried disturbs the long-sleeping secrets of a small Washington State mountain town.
Interim sheriff Elizabeth “Bet” Rivers has always had one repeat nightmare: a shadowy figure throwing a suspicious object into her hometown lake in Collier, Washington. For the longest time, she chalked it up to an overactive imagination as a kid. Then the report arrives. In the woods of the Cascade mountain range, right in her jurisdiction, a body floats to the surface of Lake Collier. When the body is extricated and revealed, no one can identify Jane Doe. But someone must know the woman, so why aren’t they coming forward?
Bet has been sitting as the interim sheriff of this tiny town in the ill-fitting shoes of her late father and predecessor. With the nightmare on her heels, Bet decided to build a life for herself in Los Angeles, but now it’s time to confront the tragic history of Collier. The more she learns, the more Bet realizes she doesn’t know the townspeople of Collier as well as she thought, and nothing can prepare her for what she is about to discover.
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Guest Post
Small Towns Murders and Real Places in Fiction by Elena Taylor
As a mystery writer, I have a certain sensitivity to killing characters off. Murder mysteries, even ones without graphic violence, still need a victim. If you’re dealing with a murder in a small town, the considerations for killing those characters off are a little different than if you set your story in a place like Los Angeles or Chicago.
Two aspects to think about are where the murders take place and how often characters are killed through acts of violence during any given year.
In 2019, Chicago had 490 homicides and over 2,000 shootings. Compare that to the town of North Bend, Washington, where I live, which had a total of . . . well . . . zero.
If I locate my novels in Washington D.C.—160 homicides in 2019—and I have a victim of a violent crime, no one will find that “unusual.”
If I kill someone in Bellingham, Washington, however, where my first series takes place, that’s the average number of homicides in an entire year.
The “Jessica Fletcher Effect” is a term coined from the long-running TV series, Murder She Wrote, set in the tiny town of Cabot Cove, Maine.
An estimated 300 homicides occurred in Cabot Cove during the years of Jessica Fletcher’s amateur sleuthing, making it the murder capital of the United States. Yet not one of the residents of Cabot Cove appeared bothered enough to lock their doors at night.
Even with that remarkable suspension of disbelief, Hollywood finally sent Jessica off to New York City and other locations to continue to investigate homicides in other places rather than wipe out the entire community of Cabot Cove for the sake of her shenanigans.
Sending characters out of town is only one choice an author like me writing about small towns can make. We can also choose to have books in a series spread out over time. So rather than occurring just months apart, which a busy police detective in Los Angeles could certainly pull off without raising an eyebrow, the events in the books can be separated by years.
Cold cases also work well, as a sleuth can uncover crimes committed in the past.
The location of a crime is another issue for a writer to keep in mind.
If I describe a street corner in Houston, Texas, unless I give the names of the streets, no one is likely to recognize the intersection.
Not so in a small town.
If I describe a single building in Bellingham, Washington, someone is likely to know exactly where I’m talking about, even without specific street names.
When I’ve located my books in real places, I don’t have my characters commit crimes in a location that exists in the real world. I either modify a location, such as an intersection that doesn’t exist because the two roads are actually parallel, or I change the details, such as names or addresses or descriptions.
I do this such that someone familiar with the area may recognize something about where I set a murder, but they can also tell it’s not a place that exists in the real world.
While clues and character interactions are located in places a reader could visit, the crime scenes are less easy to identify.
For my latest book, All We Buried, my town is fictional. There are some advantages to that, as I don’t have to worry about putting something violent at a location that might bother a reader who knows the area. There’s a freedom to creating whatever kind of town I want.
Because the stores, restaurants, and every building in my fictional valley are made up, I can choose to have crimes take place in as public a location as I want.
That leads me back to how many homicides I want to have in my town of Collier, population roughly 1000 hardy souls.
One a year is plausible. Two or three in a year is possible, especially if they are related homicides. A spree killing, for example. Or a situation of a murder/suicide.
More than that, however, and I’m likely to run afoul of the Jessica Fletcher Effect.
So, as I work on the next novel in the series, I’m taking that into consideration.
One of my favorite authors, Louise Penny, sets her mysteries in the tiny town of Three Pines, Ontario, Canada.
The sixteenth book of her Detective Gamache series launches in September, and I recently saw a picture of the Eiffel Tower on the cover.
A line on her website states, “You can probably tell by the cover where it’s set.”
I’m wondering if Louise Penny has started to wonder about the Jessica Fletcher Effect too.
If she is, I’m in terrific company.
About the Author
Elena Taylor spent several years working in theater as a playwright, director, designer, and educator before turning her storytelling skills to fiction. Her first series, the Eddie Shoes Mysteries, written under the name Elena Hartwell, introduced a quirky mother/daughter crime-fighting duo. With All We Buried, Elena returns to her dramatic roots and brings readers a much more serious and atmospheric novel. Located in her beloved Washington State, Elena uses her connection to the environment to produce a forbidding story of small-town secrets and things that won’t stay buried. Elena is also a senior editor with Allegory Editing, a developmental editing house, where she works one-on-one with writers to shape and polish manuscripts, short stories, and plays. If you’d like to work with Elena, visit www.allegoryediting.com.When she’s not writing or coaching writing, her favorite place to be is at the farm with her horses, Jasper and Radar, or at her home, on the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River in North Bend, Washington, with her husband, their dog, Polar, and their cats, Coal Train and Cocoa. Elena holds a B.A. from the University of San Diego, a M.Ed. from the University of Washington, Tacoma, and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia.
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