BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--MYSTERY AUTHOR ELAINE VIETS TAKES RESEARCH TO A WHOLE OTHER LEVEL!

Elaine Viets has written 34 books in four mystery series. You may know her light-hearted Dead-End Job mysteries. Lately, she’s been writing darker mysteries, the Angela Richman, Death Investigator series. Elaine trained for the ultimate Dead-End Job when she took the Medicolegal Death Investigators Training Course for forensic professionals. Today she tells us about it. Learn more about Elaine and her books at her website. 

Death Investigator: The Ultimate Dead-End Job

Life Without Parole, my seventh Angela Richman mystery, begins this way: 

Four in the morning. I was wrapped in the arms of my lover, sleeping the sleep of the satisfied, when my work cell phone rang. Damn. Someone was dead, probably murdered. Why couldn’t people die at a decent hour?

 

And Death Investigator Angela Richman is off to work, where she learns Chouteau Forest’s wealthy residents are targeted by the Ghost Burglars, who are killing the rich in their marble mansions. Publishers Weekly says “Life Without Parole’s”  “colorful characters match the crafty plot twists. Viets consistently entertains.”

 

I took a break from my Dead-End Job mysteries to write about a real dead-end job – death investigator. The Angela Richman series is set in mythical Chouteau County, a “ten-square-mile pocket of white privilege” near St. Louis.

 

Death investigators are sort of like forensic paralegals. They are trained, but don't have medical degrees.

 

Angela works for the Chouteau County medical examiner. She investigates all unexpected and unexplained deaths: accidents, murders, suicides. She's responsible for the dead person. The police handle the scene – everything but the body.

 

To make sure Angela had the most accurate forensics, I went back to college and took the Medicolegal Death Investigators Training Course, given by St. Louis University’s School of Medicine. Death investigators started in my hometown of St. Louis, Mo., in 1978 because there was a shortage of forensic pathologists.

 

My two-credit college course was five days, from eight in the morning to five at night. Students came from as far away as Australia. I sat between an Illinois police chief and a working DI from Austin, Texas.

 

Here's one day's agenda for the death investigator course:

In the morning, we learned about gunshot wound fatalities, explosion-related deaths, motor vehicle fatalities and drowning. At lunch we watched a video about teen driving and alcohol that made me want to trade my car for an armored personnel carrier. 

 

Then it was alcohol-related deaths, suicide, blunt-trauma fatalities and more. I was grateful that the airplane crash investigations weren't on the same day I flew home to Florida. 

 

For more than eight hours, the death investigator course listened to lectures by police and pathologists. We studied photos and videos from crime scenes and autopsies. I'm sure if I saw – and smelled – real autopsies, I'd be pea green and upchucking. The photos gave me enough distance that I could tolerate the gruesome illustrations. By the end of the course, I even watched an autopsy video during lunch.

 

The course gave me an appreciation of forensics – and made me a temporary vegetarian. It was months before I could eat pasta with red sauce or cut up a chicken. After all, people are a hundred-plus pounds of raw meat. 

 

One pathologist showed us slides of his tattoo collection. A spider web tattoo can hide the track marks of a drug user.

 

If you see someone with a "Born to Lose" tattoo, look out. That tattoo almost guarantees you'll live up that promise. I lost count of how many times I saw that tattoo in autopsy photos. 

 

The most dramatic was a man with “Born to Lose” in black Gothic letters on his forehead.  

 

Right under the bullet hole.

Life without Parole

An Angela Richman, Death Investigator Mystery, Book 5

Chouteau Forest’s wealthy are being targeted by the Ghost Burglars, who’ve carried out twelve burglaries over two weeks. So far, there’s been no bloodshed . . . until Tom Lockridge is brutally slain inside his marble mansion during the latest raid.

 

Angela Richman, death investigator for Chouteau County, is called to assess the scene and the body by Detective Jace Budewitz. As they investigate, Jace becomes obsessed with proving the Ghost Burglars weren’t involved in the murder.

 

Can the burglars be ruled out so easily? Is there more to Cynthia Lockridge, Tom’s wife, seeking solace in the arms of the ambitious local lawyer Wesley Desloge? What about Tom’s long-suffering daughter, or his loose-lipped housekeeper or office manager? Everyone is keeping secrets, but whose erupted into violence that fateful night?

 

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MYSTERY AUTHOR ELAINE VIETS ON RESEARCHING DEATH INVESTIGATORS

Elaine Viets is the author of the dark Francesca Vierling Newspaper Mysteries; the traditional, humorous Dead-End Job Mysteries; the cozy Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper mysteries; and the dark Angela Richman, Death Investigator Series. Today Elaine joins us to talk about the course she took as research for her latest series. Learn more about her and her books at her website. 

Listening to the Dead: Death Investigators

In my new series, Death Investigator Angela Richman believes the dead talk. They are trying to tell us how they died, if we can get past our own emotions to study their bodies. Hatred, fear, loathing, shock, disgust are some of the emotions that cloud our judgement. Facts shine through those murky, swirling depths. Keeping sight of the facts will help solve the crime and bring the killer to justice.

What are death investigators? 

They are the “paralegals” of the crime world. DIs are not doctors, but they are trained, and they work for the medical examiner. At the crime scene, the DI photographs the body, documents all the wounds, starting at the head and working toward the feet.

The DI protects the victim's hands with paper bags to preserve evidence that might be on them, and notes anything that may be lost when the body is transported: Stray hairs and fibers on the victim's chest will be photographed, then removed with tweezers and bagged.

This new, darker mystery series is set in mythical Chouteau County, a "ten-square-mile pocket of white privilege" near St. Louis, Missouri. Angela works for the Chouteau County medical examiner. She investigates all unexpected and unexplained deaths: accidents, murders, suicides. The DI is responsible for the dead person. The police handle the scene – everything but the body.

To make sure Angela had the most accurate forensics, I took the Medicolegal Death Investigators Training Course, given by St. Louis University's School of Medicine. Death investigators started in my hometown of St. Louis in 1978 because there was a shortage of forensic pathologists.

The two-credit college course was five days, from eight in the morning to five at night. Students came from as far away as Australia. I sat between an Illinois police chief and a working DI from Austin, Texas.

Here's one day's agenda for the death investigator course:

In the morning, we learned about gunshot wound fatalities, explosion-related deaths, motor vehicle fatalities, and drowning. At lunch we watched a video about teen drunken driving that made me want to trade my car for an armored personnel carrier. 

Next we studied alcohol-related deaths, suicide, blunt-trauma fatalities, and more. I was grateful that the airplane crash investigations weren't on the same day I flew home to Florida. Seeing photos of a field of tiny flags marking bits of passengers did not make me eager to board the plane. 

For more than eight hours, we studied photos and videos from crime scenes and autopsies. I'm sure if I saw – and smelled – real autopsies, I'd be pea green and upchucking. The photos gave me enough distance that I could tolerate the gruesome illustrations.

One other thing I learned: Avoid a "Born to Lose" tattoo. It's prophetic. I can't tell you how many times I saw that tattoo in autopsy photos. The most dramatic was a man with "Born to Lose" in black Gothic letters on his forehead.  

Right under the bullet hole.

A Star is Dead

An Angela Richman, Death Investigator Mystery, Book 3

"Ageless" Hollywood diva Jessica Gray is finishing the last leg of her one-woman show in St. Louis, Missouri, and the nearby town of Chouteau Forest is dazzled. During the show, she humiliates three homeless women onstage, fires her entourage - not for the first time - and makes a bitter enemy of the town's powerful patriarch.

After she collapses at an after-show party and is rushed to the hospital, she ignores the advice of her doctors and discharges herself in order to return to LA. On the way to the airport, she suffers a deadly coughing fit. It was poison. When Angela Richman's friend, Mario, is arrested for the murder and faces the death penalty, she is compelled to investigate.

With so many grudges held against the actress and Mario's life on the line, the stakes are higher than ever.

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BOOK CLUB FRIDAY -- GUEST AUTHOR ELAINE VIETS

Mystery author Elaine Viets is our Book Club Friday guest author today. Elaine writes two national bestselling mystery series. Her Dead-End Job series is a satiric look at a serious subject – the minimum-wage world. Her character, Helen Hawthorne, works a different low-paying job each book, from telemarketer to hotel maid. Publishers Weekly called the Dead-End Job mysteries “wry social commentary.”

Elaine’s second series features St. Louis mystery shopper Josie Marcus. The debut book, Dying in Style, tied with Stephen King on the Independent Mystery Booksellers bestseller list. Elaine is also the recipient of  Agatha, Anthony, and Lefty Awards. To learn more about Elaine, visit her at her website -- AP

Helen’s Career Crossroads

“Pumped for Murder” is my tenth Dead-End Job mystery. I’d come to a career crossroads.

What was next for Helen Hawthorne?

She was no longer on the run from her awful ex-husband, but she could not go back to her corporate life in St. Louis. She was a Floridian now, living at the Coronado Tropic Apartments and joining her friends after work for a sunset salute by the pool. She’d married Phil, the love of her life, in “Half-Price Homicide.”

After a romantic honeymoon in Key Largo, Helen and Phil were back home. I faced a terrible temptation: Should I kill Phil?

His murder would give me at least three books: Helen would have to solve her husband’s murder. Then she’d learn to cope as a widow. And maybe she’d meet another man.

But I couldn’t do it. Too many readers wanted Helen happily married. One woman threatened to kill me if anything happened to Phil. I wasn’t sure how serious she was, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

I could also kill off one of Helen’s friends. Maybe her Marlboro-smoking landlady, Margery. After all, she’s seventy-six. But Margery is many readers’ fantasy mother, the wise woman who loves life.

I could bump off Margery’s sweet, ditzy friend, Elsie, who was fond of outrageous outfits. Or Helen’s red-headed friend, who had a habit of dating the wrong men. She’d be a perfect victim.

But I couldn’t. To me, Helen’s friends are real. Losing one would be painful and I write these mysteries for my entertainment as well as yours.

What was I going to do with Helen and Phil? The answer was right next door to me.

Don and I lived in a condo on the beach at Hollywood, Florida. Our next-door neighbor was a Canadian pilot. Every winter, he arrived with his Harley and his Porsche and stayed until Easter, when all the snowbirds went home. Our neighbor was quiet and considerate. He washed his sports car with a bucket of soapy water every week. “You’ve got to remove the salt,” he told me. “It will rust out your car.”

One winter, our Canadian snowbird didn’t arrive. Instead, a dark-haired woman moved into his condo. Our neighbor had been arrested for flying drugs into the US.

We were stunned. We’d never suspected he was anything but a guy with a clean car.

But now I understood why Florida has more private eyes than any state except California. We’re a rootless place. We never know if our neighbors are drug dealers or sun-loving snowbirds.

Also, the warm winters attract many retired police officers who open their own Florida detective agencies. They live on their pensions until their new business succeeds.

My neighbor with the clean car and the bad habit sent my series in a new direction.

Helen and Phil could open their own private eye agency. Phil was a licensed private eye who’d been fired from a big agency when he refused to kidnap the twenty-something daughter of a corporate executive and bring her home. The woman was not in danger. She was dating someone her father didn’t like.

Phil and Helen started Coronado Investigations. Helen was his trainee. She still works those dead-end jobs, but now she’s undercover as a private investigator. In “Pumped for Murder” she works as a receptionist at a gym and investigates the world of extreme bodybuilding. She and Phil also work a cold case from 1986, a suicide that might be murder.

During a sunset salute, Margery says, “I love it that Florida private investigators are licensed by the Department of Agriculture. They regulate vegetables, fruit, milk, pawnbrokers, dance studios, shellfish and pest control.”

“I assume we come under pest control,” Phil said.

“Should be food service, as often as your wife is in the soup,” the landlady said.

Thanks for stopping by today, Elaine. Makes you wonder about our neighbors, doesn't it? -- AP