The Winding Road

Read more about the books mentioned in this post here

Writing The Saga of the Hunter trilogy was an adventure unlike any I’ve experienced before as an author. Not only was it my first time crafting a story arc that spanned three full-length novels, but I also decided to bring together characters from three of my previous mystery series: DEAD MAN'S TRAIL(The Raine Stockton Dog Mystery Series), UNDEFEATABLE (The Blood River Series), and A FLASH OF SHADOW (The Dogleg Island Mystery Series). This creative challenge pushed me as a writer and taught me invaluable lessons about character development, plot weaving, and the power of a connected universe.

Each of my mystery series features protagonists with distinct backgrounds, motives, and emotional journeys. Readers often ask me: "Will Cisco and Flash ever meet?"  or "Do you think Ryan Grady and Buck Lawson could work a case together?” My initial thought has always been, “That would just be weird.”   But along came Patrick Henry Jessup, the Hunter, who had made a 50-year career of traversing the nation’s parks and national forests, leaving a trail of corpses behind. It was logical that we should first meet him in Raine Stockton’s world, the wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  However, it stands to reason that a killer who had successfully evaded detection for half a century was unlikely to captured by a dog trainer and her golden retriever, so I knew DEAD MAN’S TRAIL would have an ambiguous ending (not the first time I’ve done that!) But then Raine reflected at the end:

There are master predators in this world. There are those to whom killing is a pastime and survival is a credo. They are smarter than us, more determined than us, and they have nothing to lose. They are virtually undefeatable.

An idea was born in the form of UNDEFEATABLE: A BUCK LAWSON MYSTERY, Book #3 in the Blood River series. And thus began the long and winding road that led Patrick Henry Jessup, one of the most interesting villains I've ever met, through three states and three separate mystery series. 

Linking the three mystery series came with logistical and creative challenges. I knew that Jessup, injured and desperate, would be traveling south from Tennessee toward warmer climes for the winter. Fortunately, Mercy, Georgia was on his way, and with its existing reputation as a magnet for the darkest of crimes and criminals, it made perfect sense that he would stop there.  What I did not know until I was well into UNDEFEATABLE was that Jessup had been there many times before, and that he had a very personal reason for setting his sights on Mercy. Additionally, it was important to show his physical and mental decline, as this was, at its root, the story of the demise of a serial killer.  And, to make my task even more difficult, Jessup had to survive long enough to make it to Dogleg Island, the third book of the trilogy.  It wasn’t until I had almost finished Undefeatable that I realized Jessup’s ultimate Florida destination was not one chosen at random.  He was going home.

Some readers objected to the violence in DEAD MAN’S TRAIL, which was unusual for a Raine Stockton Dog Mystery, but the tone set by Patrick Henry Jessup was perfect for the Blood River series.  Dogleg Island, however, was a different matter altogether.  While books in the Dogleg Island series have sometimes dealt with very dark themes, the innocence of Flash, our moral and spiritual guide in each book, made the narrative tone established in UNDEFEATABLE completely inappropriate.  The first thing I knew about A FLASH OF SHADOW was that Patrick Henry Jessup would not get very far on Dogleg Island.  Secondly, I knew I’d have to keep Flash—and by extension, Aggie—from interacting with Jessup as much as possible. So while Jessup’s story remained a driving force in A FLASH OF SHADOW, most of his scenes took place on the other side of the bridge, away from Dogleg Island and its protectors, Aggie and Flash. I ended up bringing back a popular character, gritty investigator Jim Clark from the FDLE, to deal with Jessup while wrestling with his own shadows. I think the juxtaposition of Clark’s relationship with Jessup and Flash’s struggle with the definition of right and wrong worked out beautifully to highlight the theme.      

 I’ll admit, I was a little nervous about putting Buck Lawson and Trish Miller from the Blood River series in the same room with Ryan Grady and Jim Clark from Dogleg Island.  While I worked hard to try to ensure that readers of one series could follow the backstory of the other (I hope I did okay!), I worried about maintaining Buck’s and Trish’s voice when they were confronted with law officers of equal stature.  Even more challenging, a major plot line from UNDEFEATABLE remained to be resolved in A FLASH OF SHADOW, so it was important that all the characters act and react with authenticity.  As it turns out, the whole thing wasn’t as awkward as I imagined, and I think I managed to craft an ending that was both believable and inevitable. Or at least I hope so! And while Cisco the golden retriever and Flash the border collie never did actually meet, I'm ready to call the experiment a success.

   Crossing over characters from DEAD MAN’S TRAIL, UNDEFEATABLE, and A FLASH OF SHADOW made The Saga of the Hunter a true labor of love—a celebration of each of the mystery series and the flawed, determined, and sometimes unlikely heroes at their center. I hope readers feel the same excitement I did in bringing these worlds together, and I’m incredibly grateful for the support and enthusiasm of everyone who has followed these characters to their new, shared adventure.

If you'd like to read more about each of the books in the Saga of The Hunter trilogy, you can do so here.