WHICH COMES FIRST THE TITLE OR THE STORY? by Paty Jager
I have to say, the title for my current release, Artful
Murder, came before I started writing or had the story completely
figured out. The only thing I knew about book 10 in the Shandra
Higheagle Mystery series was where Shandra would be and
what she would be doing.
In the previous book, Haunting Corpse, Shandra
had visited Warner High School snooping on a teacher and potential suspect for
that book. Her reason for being at the school was to see about volunteering in
their art department. I took that little
tidbit that at the time of writing book 9 I didn’t realize would be the
catalyst for book 10. However, when I finished and needed a story for book 10,
I thought, Shandra needs to go volunteer.
1) It
would get her out of Huckleberry where there had been quite a few murders for a
small community.
2) It
gave me a new pool of characters to focus on.
3) She
would be in an environment new to her.
With all of this in mind, I thought someone at the
school has to be killed. And to make matters worse it will be towards the end
of the quarter and Shandra will have a limited amount of time to remain at the
school.
The next stage of coming up with the story has to do
with going back to my days in high school and thinking about teachers that were
liked and ones that were not liked. I chose one that few students liked. He
would give a girl A’s in the class if she wore a dress and sat in the front
row. He was on the creepy side. I made
my victim ten times creepier than that teacher and gave the principal a
misguided reason for not reporting the art teacher’s harassment to the school
board and getting him fired.
Because the story was being set in the art
department and the victim was one of the art teachers, I thought the title
Artful Murder went well with the story line. When you read the book, you’ll
also understand how it was orchestrated which also made it artful.
Blurb:
ARTFUL MURDER
Book ten in the Shandra Higheagle Mystery Series
Secrets… Scandal… Murder…
An autistic boy and his brother need
potter Shandra Higheagle’s help when a teacher’s body is found after a
confrontation with the older brother. Shandra knows the boy is innocent.
Digging into the teacher’s life, she and Ryan turn up scandal.
Detective Ryan Greer has believed in Shandra’s
dreams in the past, but she can’t always be right. When his investigation
uncovers a principal on the take, females being harassed, and parents kept in
the dark, he discovers more suspects than the brothers. Shandra’s time at the
school is coming to an end, and the killer has struck again.
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