Suspense Magazine May/June/July 2018
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Suspense, Mystery, Horror and Thriller Fiction SUMMER 2018 What's So Bad About Good Notes? A Sizzlin’ DENNIS PALUMBO Are We Returning to the Moon? Summer of Suspense ALAN JACOBSON CYNTHIA SWANSON Get a Sneak Peek With LIS WIEHL KELLI CLARE LORI RADER-DAY E.C. FREY JOHN LANSING STEPHEN STROMP SARA SHEPARD JEFF STRAND JIM BUTCHER ANTHONY HOROWITZ JOYCE CAROL OATES & Meet Debut Authors DIANNE FREEMAN JOSEPH SOUZA TRACY CLARK The New York Times bestselling master of suspense takes you on a mind-bending, epic journey where everything you think you know is about to change. Discover more at teddekker.com. Available Wherever Books and eBooks Are Sold From the Editor Writing is an art form, just like painting or CREDITS sculpting. Details matter within every art John Raab form, because without the details you have President & Chairman chaos. Shannon Raab One thing that we see a great deal of are Creative Director writers not taking “words” seriously. Words are much more than just letters on a page Romaine Reeves CFO arranged in a certain order. Think about this sentence: “Jill took the bat and hit Bob Amy Lignor Editor in the head.” Now, you would automatically assume that Jill picked up a baseball bat; Jim Thomsen however, this could also be interpreted as the creepy mammal. Copy Editor Wouldn’t the scene be better if it was written like this? “Jill picked up the black, Contributors wooden baseball bat from the floor. Pulling the bat back with purpose, she swung it at Bob, Mark P. Sadler hitting him in the skull.” Now that it’s clear, you could continue from there explaining, Susan Santangelo Kaye George perhaps, the volume of the cracking sound as it struck bone. Then… How did Jill react to Weldon Burge it? What happened to Bob? You see, if you don’t give the readers the third dimension in Ashley Wintters D.P. Lyle M.D. your story—those details that eliminate chaos—you aren’t giving them the entire story. Kathleen Heady Many of the stories and manuscripts we read have sentences like the first one stated. Andrew MacRae Melissa Dalton I’ve told many writers: “Okay, I get the basics, but something is missing. Where is the Elliott Capon passion? Where is the emotion?” Great writers give the reader that. When you walk into J.M. LeDuc Holly Price a room, the great writers make you think you are actually in the room. You can almost Kari Wainwright smell the old furniture polish used inside the Victorian mansion; or, you can almost see David Ingram Jodi Hanson that deep red bloodstain on the floor. Susan May Words do matter. Words should mean something more than just letters on a page. Jenny Hilborne Anthony J. Franze So it’s your job to take your art form to the next level. When you go to a museum and Kristin Centorcelli look at the paintings, Jerry Zavada Leslie Borghini take a good, long look Mary Lignor at the details. Witness Julie Whiteley Sara Guisti the little things that Jeff Ayers make the painting a Elise Cooper Joseph Badal true masterpiece. Then Customer Service and take those details and Subscriptions: incorporate them into For 24/7 service, please use our website, www.suspensemagazine.com or write to: your writing. To be SUSPENSE MAGAZINE at great, to have your 26500 Agoura Road, #102-474 Calabasas, CA 91302 story stick in the minds Suspense Magazine does not share our of readers, make sure magazine subscriber list with third-party companies. you give it the details it deserves. Rates: $24.00 (Electronic Subscrip- John Raab tion) per year. All foreign subscrip- tions must be payable in U.S. funds. CEO/Publisher Suspense Magazine ■ “Reviews within this magazine are the opinions of the individual reviewers and are provided solely for the purpose of assisting readers in determining another's thoughts on the book under discussion and shall not be interpreted as professional advice or the opinion of any other than the individual reviewer. The following contributors who may appear in this magazine are also individual clients of Suspense Publishing, an imprint of Suspense Magazine: J.M. LeDuc, Leslie Borghini, Susan Santangelo, Jeff Ayers, Joseph Badal, and Amy Lignor.” SuspenseMagazine.com 1 CONTENT SUSPENSE MAGAZINE May / June / July 2018 / Vol. 082 Are We Returning to the Moon? By Alan Jacobson . 3 Excerpt: “Dark Side of the Moon” By Alan Jacobson . 5 Crime & Science: Judging Evidence By D .P . Lyle, MD & Jan Burke . 11 Excerpt: “Hidden” By Kelli Clare . .. 17 Inside the Pages: Suspense Magazine Book Reviews . 23 Movies with Jeff Ayers . 40 Featured Artist: Lora Vysotskaya Opening Doors . 43 Debut Author Dianne Freeman: Guides the Reader to Murder . 48 Debut Author Joseph Souza Asks: “Do You Know Your Neighbor?” . .51 Tracy Clark: Debuts “Broken Places” . 55 Cynthia Swanson: Designing Incredible Thrillers With an Architect’s Eye . .59 Family Treason: Lis Wiehl on “Hunting Charles Manson” . 61 Lori Rader-Day: Takes Readers “Under a Dark Sky” . 65 Meet the Fourth Gunman: Author John Lansing . 69 Excerpt: “Entangled Moon” By E .C . Frey . 71 The Author By Stephen Maitland-Lewis . 75 Excerpt: “Where the Cats Will Not Follow” By Stephen Stromp . 80 What’s So Bad About Good Notes? By Dennis Palumbo . 100 The Case of the Four Maltese Falcons By Andrew MacRae . 102 The Chickens By Hester Young . 105 ARE WE RETURNING TO THE MOON? Or has that (space)ship sailed? By Alan Jacobson Press Photo Credit: Provided by Author FORTY-SIX YEARS AGO, APOLLO 17 LIFTED OFF from the lunar surface along with a couple hundred pounds of rock and a knowledge base of information NASA had spent over a dozen years cultivating. It was an extraordinary achievement for humankind, and specifically the United States—which had been locked in a Cold War space race with the Soviet Union. At the time we were leaving our last footprints in the lunar soil, NASA’s planned Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions were in doubt. And as Earth-based needs surged, the prospect of spending six hundred million dollars ($3.5 trillion today) going back to a place we’d already visited six times was a hard sell to Congress— and the American people, who had grown bored with the Moon landings. With the cancellation of the remaining Apollo missions, the US space program imploded into itself: focus turned to low- Earth orbit endeavors like Skylab and development of the Space Shuttle, and robotic probes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the solar system. All were important—but none carried the allure of landing on another planetary-type body and exploring its hidden mysteries. While researching and writing “Dark Side of the Moon” (the fourth book in my covert ops OPSIG Team Black series), I had the opportunity to work closely with rocket scientists and engineers at NASA, SpaceX, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Lockheed-Martin, as well as planetary scientists, nuclear physicists, lunar geologists, Space Shuttle astronauts, and robotics professors at Carnegie Mellon. The plot of “Dark Side of the Moon” involves a special forces mission to the Moon necessitated by something that occurred during Apollo 17. My characters don’t live in a science fiction universe and I’m not a rocket scientist, so diving into this entirely new topic with two feet was necessary—and an education all its own. Part of what I learned was that in the wake of a retired space shuttle program, small-scale, targeted robotic missions to Mars, and involvement in the multi-country International Space Station, NASA spent years engineering a powerful new rocket and spacecraft to replace the ancient Saturn V and Apollo vehicles. Dubbed the Space Launch System, it’s a revamp of what started out as the Constellation program—which President Obama canceled because he believed our resources were better spent on Earth. Meanwhile, our space program shrunk and atrophied while China, Russia, and the EU began pumping theirs full of steroids. As a result, the US arguably lost its qualitative (and quantitative) edge. China sent research ships and “soft landers” to the Moon (hard landers are deliberately smashed into the surface after conducting orbit-based research) and Russia began plotting manned missions to the lunar surface—with designs on establishing a Moon base. But the very recent discovery of the building blocks of life on Mars brought to the forefront, once again, the question of whether or not the US should, or would, return to the lunar surface—or if those financial and engineering resources were SuspenseMagazine.com 3 better spent on journeying to the Red Planet. So what if the US misses out on this Sino-Russian wave of lunar exploration? To understand the impact this would have, it’s important to realize that its significance extends beyond curiosity and the innate human need to explore. While the Apollo program resulted in its space-related technology being applied to Earth-based life, the converse is happening relative to our present-day space program. The technologies developed on Earth have greatly simplified exploratory endeavors: autonomous robotic vehicles enable longer term daily (or even round-the-clock) missions to map, sample, and discover. More significantly, 3D printing allows us to use the raw materials found on the Moon to build structures necessary for living as we construct a base. This greatly lowers the cost of doing so from astronomical (i.e., impossible) to very affordable, even for smaller space programs—like India’s and Japan’s. Great, so we can build a less expensive Moon base. Even spending “only” a couple of billion dollars on this requires deep thought as to why would we do this.