The Cold Kiss: The book that almost wasn't

This week marks the release of THE COLD KISS, a fantastic book from John Rector. He stopped by DSD HQ to talk about it.

By John Rector

This week, on July 6, The Cold Kiss will officially be released in the US and Canada.

For those of you who haven’t experienced it, seeing your first published novel on the shelves of your local bookstore is a surreal and wonderful experience. The stars have aligned in your favor, and the result is right in front of you. When it comes to the writing life, it’s the best feeling you can have. But in my case, that feeling comes with a long sigh of relief.

You see, I almost didn’t write the book.

Seventy pages into The Cold Kiss, I turned my back on it. I didn’t like the setting, too claustrophobic, the characters too dark, and the ending I had in mind seemed far too grim and depressing. I’d just spent several months being beaten up by NY publishers over the first book I’d written, The Grove, and I thought if I came at them with another dark, dread-filled novel, they’d send me packing yet again. So, I closed the file on The Cold Kiss, saved it in a dingy corner of my hard drive, and moved on.

If it hadn’t been for my wife reading a printed version of those first seventy pages and telling me she wanted to know the rest of the story, The Cold Kiss never would’ve seen the light of day.

As it turned out, she liked the claustrophobic setting and those dark, forgotten characters lost in all that snow. She convinced me to give it another try, so I picked it up again, and it didn’t take long to realize she was right.

There was something there.

I went back to work and finished the first draft of The Cold Kiss in sixteen weeks. Along the way, a new and much better ending presented itself, and for the first time I saw how all the pieces of the book would fall into place. That moment when everything comes together and you see your novel, complete and whole, for the very first time has always been my favorite part of being a writer.

At least until this week.

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All Nate and Sara want is a new life in a new town, away from the crime and poverty of their past. So, after being approached at a roadside diner by a man offering $500 for a ride to Omaha, they wonder if their luck might be changing.

At first it seems like easy money, but within a few hours the man is dead.

Now, forced off the road by a blizzard and trapped in a run-down motel on the side of a deserted highway, Nate and Sara begin to uncover the man's secrets. Who he was, how he died, and most importantly, why he was carrying two million dollars in his suitcase.

Before they know it, Nate and Sara are fighting for their lives, and in the end, each has to decide just how far they are willing to go to survive.

The Cold Kiss is an everyman psychological thriller that pits a young couple against moral corruption, greed, betrayal, and love. More simply, for two characters who may have used up all their chances, it's the classic final trip down the dark tunnel that might lead to heaven, but drags them through hell. This is A Simple Plan meets The Getaway, with a pulse-pounding plot and a twist ending. John Rector is name that all thriller fans will come to know and love for years to come.

For a solid review of THE COLD KISS, check out what Spinetingler thought here.

Order THE COLD KISS right here from the B&N people.

Independence Day

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Happy Independence Day to everyone in the USA!

Independence Day was always one of my favorite holidays as a kid. More than all the other holidays, I always got the sense that this was a day we celebrated as a community. The town got together for a parade, a huge festival at the golf course and, of course, fireworks when the sun went down. Our neighborhood backed the golf course where the fireworks were set off. Every 4th, we snuck through a hole in the fence, dodged the golf course rangers and watched the fireworks from the closest green possible. I should point out that our parents did this with us. In the finest tradition of our founding fathers, we were rebels.

Everyone always likes to talk about the founding fathers with a sense of reverence. As if they were blessed with a sense of what the future would hold when they put pen to paper and told King George to take his taxes and shove them where only a proctologist would find them. I’m paraphrasing just a tad here, but you get the point. These men had no sense of what the future would hold. I’m guessing that five of signers of the Declaration of Independence who were captured and tortured as traitors might not have been so keen to sign their name had they known what was coming. But sign they did. 56 men made a choice that had huge repercussions for them individually, for their families, their friends, their community and their country.

The best crime fiction (yeah – it’s a writing blog, so I had to circle back) is often created from those kind of choices. A character makes a choice they believe is right hoping they know what the outcome will be. Only they don’t. That choice sets into motion a series of events that they couldn’t have dreamed of leaving us on the edge of our seat while we take the ride with them. In the case of our founding fathers, their choices led to war. Some lost their homes. Some lost their families. Others lost their own lives. Their story contains all the elements from which great fiction is made. Only their story is true.

Happy 4th of July everyone! Be safe.

Re-reading books: Why?

by
Scott D. Parker

I'm an NPR geek. When America's birthday rolls around, the hosts and reporters of NPR team up to read the Declaration of Independence. As a historian, I get as big a thrill by Independence Day as I do about few other things. Each year, I enjoy marveling at our great experiment, how it's evolved, and how, despite flaws, we keep tinkering the machinery, fine tuning the engine that makes us all free.

When I hear the Declaration read aloud (or when I re-read it silently), a swirl of emotions run through me: pride, happiness, awe, wonderment, solemnity. I've gotten to the point where I stopped reading the Declaration at any time during the year, reserving for the first week of July the special feelings I get when I read the document.

I got to thinking about re-reading books in recent days. I'm in a science fiction book club (four members) and we each take turns picking a book for the month. Starting in July, we've all agreed to select a favorite book* and re-read it (or, in the case of a book picked by someone else, read it for the first time). When we agreed, I didn't realize that I would happen upon a roadblock: I don't want to re-read most books I read.

Pondering this, I started to list out reasons why. The most obvious reason is that I don't have enough time in this life to read all the books I want. When I die, the TBR stack will not be empty. Thus, why waste time re-reading something when there's another volume waiting to be opened for the first time? That's a huge driving force for me and one that usually wins any argument.

But there's a different part that also wins arguments. Surely I am not alone in investing in a book a certain level of emotionality (is that a word?) on books. (And this is a big reason why ebooks, for all the convenience, will never, truly kill the printed word.) For books that really strike a chord with me, I can remember all the details of my life that were then current when I read said book. Most of the time, those memories are a time capsule and I don't want to disturb them. Believe me, I've cracked a time capsule open before and the results usually don't measure up to the original reading. Thus, the entire experience is, for me, tainted.

In a few, rare times, when I re-read a book, the second go-round is purely for craft. I did this most recently (i.e., 2002) with Dennis Lehane's "Mystic River." But, this happens infrequently.

Oh, and most of this discussion applies to fiction books. I re-read non-fiction whenever necessary.

Do you re-read books? If so, why? Am I the only one who attaches a certainly level of emotion to a book? And, if so, does the second reading stand up to the first?



*Since I'm restricted--obviously--to SF for this book club, the last SF book that truly blew me away was Dan Simmons's Hyperion. I just read it last year and don't feel the need to re-read it. I'm more interested in its sequel. Thus, I'll likely pick a favorite book that, ironically, I never finished reading back in 1995: Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Then again, I might just pick a Star Wars book. Who the heck knows. If it were open to mystery fiction, the choices would be much, much easier: Dawn Patrol, Money Shot, Gabriel Hunt at the Well of Eternity, The Shadow of the Wind.