From the Author

Behind the Scenes with THE DEAD SEASON

The Dead Season (The Dead Season: A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery (Volume 6)) was the book that almost wasn't written.  Very faithful readers will remember from 2008 that the next book in the Raine Stockton Dog Mystery series (after Gun Shy ) was supposed to be  a book called Cold Kill.  When the series was cancelled by the original publisher (NAL/Signet), Cold Kill  fell by the wayside while I experimented with lighter Raine Stockton adventures, Silent Night (Silent Night: A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery) and Bone Yard (Bone Yard (Raine Stockton Dog Mystery) ). 

Many readers were unhappy that Bone Yard, a novella, was only available in digital format because of its length. Because I didn't want anyone to miss an installment, I decided to add some pages to Bone Yard to make it long enough to release in print.  The simplest way to do that was to add a bonus short story at the end.  I remembered the old outline for Cold Kill  and thought it would be perfect to develop into bonus material for the print version of Bone Yard.

That's right. The Dead Season, arguably one of the most complex and intense of the Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries, started out as a short story.

I had just finished Silent Night, and thought the quiet weeks after the holiday season would be the perfect time to complete this short project.  I started it the first of January, and planned to give readers a mid-winter surprise with the short installment (and the print version of Bone Yard) in early February.

But by February the book was already 200 pages long with no end in sight.  And there it stayed.  And stayed.  And stayed.  Three quarters of the way through, I couldn't write another word.   I'm not entirely sure why.  The subject matter was challenging.  The logistics were complicated.   And it was cold on that mountain.

All I know is that when I reached the scene on the bridge (those of you who read the book will be surprised at how close to the end I was!) I could not spend another moment on that freezing mountainside.  I walked away, quite certain I would never finish the book.

I planted my garden, I painted my porch, I spruced up my house, I completly forgot about Raine and Cisco for over a month.  But maybe a little springtime was all the encouragement I needed, because during my "vacation" I suddenly knew what was missing from the book.  I went back and revised the entire thing, adding the device of the police interview to frame the story, and finished it all in ten days.

As for the ambiguity of the ending... that had been my plan all along. I just had to struggle to get there.

The Dead Season  is without a doubt one of the most difficult books I've ever written, but I hope that translates into a gripping and  memorable experience for my readers.  As for Bone Yard --- what do you know?  It turns out I had enough pages for print after all!