Shortly after I graduated college and before I returned east to begin my career as a thriller writer, I worked for a time at a private detective agency, Weiss Investigations. When after many years I decided to write about some of my experiences at the Agency, I found I could do it best in the form of a novel, sticking as close to the facts as I could but dramatizing incidents from various people’s points of view. I included myself as a first-person narrator only in those rare moments when my actions had any bearing on events or my speculations served to deepen the reader’s understanding of why I’d depicted one character or another as I had. The result was a book I called Dynamite Road. For all it was presented as fiction, I believe it to be the first full account of the facts behind what the media later dubbed the North Wilderness Assault.
In any case, my publisher seemed to feel it was interesting enough to merit a sequel, so here it is. This second book takes place shortly after the first, but it’s concerned with a completely different investigation, a story in itself. Still, obviously, something as explosive as the business at North Wilderness doesn’t leave people untouched. Life went on and the work of the Agency went on, but Weiss’s fascination with Julie Wyant, the mystery of the murderous Ben Fry, the overhanging threat of the Shadowman—these continued to weigh on all of us to varying degrees all through that summer after the assault took place. Whenever these matters come up in this book, I take pains to supply the reader with the information he needs to understand what they’re all about—a sort of “in our last exciting episode” kind of reminder. But if you missed it, feel free to go out and buy a copy of Dynamite Road to get the full backstory. It might inspire you to know that I’m the sole support of an absolutely adorable wife and two heart-wrenchingly lovable children.
Finally, viewers of those sensationalistic true crime shows that seem to saturate cable television schedules will probably be pretty quick to guess the real identity of the woman I’ve called here Beverly “Honey” Graham. They’ll also notice that there are plenty of details of her story that the cable shows missed and that a lot of those details are—to use the vernacular of the genre—“shocking” and “scandalous” and “include strong sexual and violent content.” You may wish, for curiosity’s sake, that I hadn’t chosen to fictionalize Beverly’s actions and had just laid out the facts about her involvement with the malicious gang of killers I’ve renamed the Outriders. And I don’t blame you. It’s very juicy stuff, and you’ll naturally want to know which parts are real and which I made up.
Nonetheless, I decided to write this second book using the same novelistic techniques I employed in the first and for the same basic reason. American audiences, I’m always being told, want their protagonists to be “likable”: i.e., mildly flawed but basically righteous, the way most of us see ourselves. As the people in this story are real people, however, and as I’ve attempted to portray them honestly, they may from time to time be seen to let their righteousness slip a little. Their behavior may occasionally strike the reader as wrongheaded or selfish, angry, confused, small, even vicious. In short, they may appear less like the way we see ourselves than the way we actually are. By using a fiction writer’s methods to climb inside the minds of hard men like Weiss and Bishop or a neurotic like Sissy or even a lost soul like Beverly herself, I’m hoping to “argue their case” before the public, to convince readers to accept them as I accepted them when I knew them way back when: in the full flesh of their humanity, the way you and I might hope to be accepted in our own hours of need or judgment.
But having said that, I maintain, as I did with Dynamite Road, that this is the way things happened. Beverly, Cobra, the Outriders, the sex, the violence, the shattering and bloody outcome—all of it—it’s all real.