I always swore I’d only write standalones. I wanted to craft wholly original stories that would end, dammit, and after I finished that story I’d do something entirely different. To my mind, a series, or continually employing the same characters, was something of a cheat.
Which is a short way of saying that the second novel in my series, The Devine Trilogy, will be published in November by Level Best Books.
The book is titled SPECIAL VICTIM and it explores a legal case that propelled the career of Michael Devine, a prosecutor and the brother of Sheila Devine, the true-crime filmmaker at the center of the series.
I had not intended to use Sheila and Michael after completing PUBLIC MORALS, which I originally wrote as a one-off but is now the first part of the trilogy. But for a number of years, I had wanted to write a novel based on the Central Park Jogger case. (To shorten a really long story, in 1989 five young men of color were convicted of committing a brutal sexual assault in Central Park; turns out they didn’t do it.) I could never get a handle on the project until I realized, after putting the final touches on PUBLIC MORALS, that I could use characters I’d already created to explore this story. Also, as I wrote PUBLIC MORALS, I really grew to like the character of Sheila Devine. I’ve read about writers who wound up hating their creations (Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes; Agatha Christie with Hercule Poirot), but I’ve enjoyed the journey that Sheila has taken me on — and there’s something to be said for really knowing a character when you embark on a story, because you know exactly what she’s thinking, and how she’s going to react, and that knowledges saves the writer a lot of time.
I’d tell you more about the third and final novel in the series, STOP AND FRISK, but I’m still writing it. Although I will reveal that, at least to my mind, it completes Sheila’s journey.
