>Riverbaby, my mystery, is based on three real crimes. In the coming days, I’ll share the real stories that have haunted my imagination for years.
The real crimes remain unsolved, the victims remain unknown, the perpetrators not brought to justice.
The novel imagines the story far beyond the headlines and the small collection of facts about the real crimes. The town where the story takes place is completely made up, but may seem familiar to some of you who grew up where I did. The people may seem very real. Some of you may think that I’ve based a character on you. Well maybe I have borrowed a few recognizable quirks — the way one person walks, the way another stammers, the way a third is always losing things — and combined them into a single character in the novel. What would be ideal is that the whole story seems very real and possibly even true. That’s what one hopes when one writes fiction.
For the record, the characters are completely fictional; “any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental” will undoubtedly be stated in bold print somewhere in the first few pages of the novel, some day, when the book becomes widely available in bookstores and by download everywhere. Of course by then I will be very famous but I will still take the time to thank all the little people, my readers, who got me there.
Or that won’t happen and it will be just you, my dear blog readers, who I will be thanking. I’ll just thank you all now, to be on the safe side, and tell you that I’ll be back again soon with more tidbits.
Susan Koefod 