AUTHOR SARAH BEWLEY'S LOVE AFFAIR WITH POLICE PROCEDURALS

Sarah Bewley writes, climbs rock walls, and takes boxing lessons. She says she was born young, grew old very quickly before entering her second childhood, which she found far more satisfying than her first. She’s worked as a licensed private investigator and now work in utilities security, which is physical protection for critical infrastructure. Learn more about her and her books at her website. 

My Love Affair with Police Procedurals

I have always loved police procedurals—books, movies, television, it didn’t matter. If it was a police procedural, I wanted to read it or see it. Some of this may have been influenced by things such as seeing the movie Bullittwhen I was fifteen. Who wouldn’t love Steve McQueen chasing down the hills of San Francisco? Television had Columbo, The Mod Squad, and Ironside.

 

Best of all mystery novels – Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct series in the 1960s, Tony Hillerman’s Navajo tribal police in the 1970s, Martin Cruz Smith and his Arkady Renko in the 1980s, and Michael Connelly’s Bosch in the 1990s. Police procedurals have gotten into urban fantasy novels in the 2000s with books such as Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series.

 

It’s been pretty much a lifetime love affair between me and this genre, so it probably isn’t a big surprise that when I decided to write a mystery novel, that’s where I went.

 

Burning Eden takes place in a rural North Florida county called Eden. You won’t find it on the map. It’s an amalgamation of several counties in that region. However, it’s based on factual information on how these rural departments are set up, and the fact that North Florida is an entirely different place from the Florida most people picture. It has no tourist attractions, it’s full of rivers and natural springs, it’s forested, and it’s barely populated. The primary jobs are in agriculture, cattle, and forestry. Poverty is rampant.

 

Sheriff Jim Sheppard is a fourth-generation sheriff of Eden County. In 1998 wildfires burned across North and Central Florida causing small towns to be evacuated and destroying forests and farms as it burned from the east to the west coast. This is the year of Burning Eden, and as if the fires weren’t enough for Jim to deal with, a local Pentecostal preacher has been taken from his home in the middle of the night. A few days later a body is found burned beyond recognition in a wildfire next to the local dairy. This body is too large to be the missing minister, and its neck has been broken.

 

This starts Jim on the trail of what appears to be serial murders, and somehow they are all connected to the disappearance of the preacher. Serial killers are not common in rural areas, where the population is .05 individuals per square mile. It’s hard to be anonymous in a place where everyone knows everyone, literally.

 

Jim is assisted by a department that reflects the population of Eden County. From Deputy Bobby Dale who is great at patrolling Highway 27, to Deputy Manny Soto, a former Army Sniper, to Sergeant Dee Jackson, who was Military Police in the Marines and is getting her Masters in Criminal Justice and has her sights set on someday becoming Florida’s first black female Sheriff.

 

Dr. Ryan Edwards is new to Eden County. He’s been brought in as the partner of Doc Markham, the only physician in the county. He rents the apartment above Jim’s garage and quickly becomes a friend and confidant of Jim and his son Michael. His view of Eden is very much like that of anyone who has never been to this region, and he finds himself falling in love with the place and the people who have offered him the opportunity to continue practicing medicine. 

 

Ryan Edwards is also a bit of my view point, as I moved to this area in my teens and fell head over heels in love with the beauty of the area. 

 

My three big loves in life – mysteries, police procedurals, and North Florida have combined into my first novel, Burning Eden.

 

Burning Eden

An Eden County Mystery, Book 1

 

It’s 1998. Wildfires are sweeping through North Florida, burning even the peat in the drought-stricken swamps. Sheriff Jim Sheppard has his deputies covering the county, watching for fires and trying to limit the threats to residents. When a Pentecostal preacher disappears during the night from his home, Jim takes the case himself to prevent stretching his department any further.

 

Dr. Ryan Edwards, formerly a well-respected physician in the George Washington University Hospital’s emergency room, has been hired by the only doctor in Eden County. Suffering from aphasia from an attack in a parking garage in Washington, D.C., he’s no longer able to be an ER physician, but he is able to provide medical care in a rural practice, where his skills are valuable and his halting speech is not an issue.

 

Jim and Ryan continue to work as the fires burn closer, but dangers neither expected threaten them both.

 

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