The Body in the Mound

Back in 1999, I wrote a mystery novel. It's called The Body in the Mound, and it's about a tough guy archaeologist named Jack Gordon. It's set in Renovo, Pennsylvania, a dying little railroad town (at least it was in 1994 when I worked there) that made as big an impression on me as New York or London. With the help of my friends and an agent, I made it into a book that people told me should be publishable. But the big publishers passed. It wasn't what they were looking for, they said. They wanted my detective to have more of a private life and be more personally involved in the story. Like, I suppose, the way Patricia Cornwell's medical examiner is always being pursued by a serial killer and searching for her runaway niece and about to be fired by the governor and what all. But I followed the detective authors I like best, Ross MacDonald and Raymond Chandler, whose detectives are mainly observers of the world's corruption, with almost no lives of their own. Rather than try to rewrite the story in a way the publishers would like, I set it aside and started another very different writing project. (Which I am still writing, slowly.)

Then this year I read about self publishing on Amazon and I thought, why not? So I did it. The Body in the Mound is now available as a Kindle download, for $5.99. It will also soon be available as a print-on-demand paperback from CreateSpace, for $7.99. My blurb:

When archaeologist Jack Gordon starts a dig in the small mountain town of Renovo, Pennsylvania, he is dragged into a murder case somehow connected to an ancient Indian burial mound. As he tries to get on with his work, Gordon is threatened, shot at, and accused of being the murderer himself. To save his career and his reputation, he has to find out himself whether the mound was real, and, if so, who dug it up and what happened to the very valuable artifacts it must have contained. The more questions he asks, though, the angrier the threats against him become, and the greater the danger to his own life.

So there it is, world. Do what you will with it.