Camel Press
PO Box 70515
Seattle, WA 98127
For more information go to: www.Camelpress.com
www.richzahradnik.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Sabrina Sun
Last Words
Copyright © 2014 by Rich Zahradnik
ISBN: 978-1-60381-207-8 (Trade Paper)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-208-5 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014942600
Produced in the United States of America
With love to my wife Sheri, who’s patiently waited the longest for this, and my son Patrick, who’s waited “forever.”
* * *
My second newspaper job was as a freelancer for a newspaper in Westchester County, where I got paid to take obituaries over the phone for $10 a pop. I had a pretty low opinion of the work. That was until Meredith Halpern, a friend and colleague when I worked at CNN, pointed out the real craft of obits when written by the New York Times. Meredith’s interest in obituaries started me musing on a writer’s “what if”: what if a top reporter were demoted to the kind of obituary grind I remembered from the early days of my career? Those were the first thoughts that led to Last Words.
Thanks also go to my agent, Dawn Dowdle of Blue Ridge Literary Agency, who believed in the manuscript and helped me make it better. Catherine Treadgold and Jennifer McCord, my editors at Camel Press, have been wonderful to work with and very understanding of a newbie to the book publishing process (which is nothing like publishing newspapers or magazines). Several people read Last Words in various stages, providing encouragement and helpful comments. Thank you to siblings Bob Zahradnik and Julie Zahradnik, sister-in-law Cathleen Zahradnik, and cousins John Murphy, Kevin Murphy, and Rebecca Schmitz. Friends and fellow writers Nicole Valentine and Jim Banister were also good enough to give it a read, as was local fan Marianne Gilland.
Andrée Lockwood worked on an invaluable line-by-line edit of the manuscript before I went looking for an agent. My appreciation also goes to Jonathan Santlofer, director of The Center for Fiction’s Crime Fiction Academy and bestselling mystery writer, for admitting me to the first class of the academy. It was the perfect moment to workshop the manuscript, and the edits he and my fellow students provided made the story better.
Finally, big thanks go to the reporters and editors of the Colonial Times, the student newspaper of Colonial Elementary School. I’ve been their advisor for the past four years. There are a lot of days when writing a novel doesn’t go very well at all. The energy of those students made a bad writing day go away and gave me the energy to write again the next morning. This book isn’t for kids, but those kids helped make it happen with their own enthusiasm for making a newspaper.