In each of the Daniel Turner thrillers, Homicide Detective Daniel Turner plays an important secondary role. He is the common element in others’ lives and deaths, getting caught in the spirals of crime that he investigates. These are North Florida city, swamp, and island thrillers – set far from the well-traveled crime fiction of Miami Beach, Disney World, and the Everglades – and the people who star in them are city, swamp, and island characters.
In writing about them, I dig into the psychologies and motives of heroes and antiheroes, persecutors and victims, criminals and seekers of justice (legal or vigilante), the beautiful and the ugly. Daniel Turner is a character in their stories. He is their brother, their childhood friend, their enemy, and their protector, and they love him or hate him – or sometimes think barely at all about him – as we do the people in our lives who hurt us and save us.
Emerging from others’ shadows, Turner is the man who, at the end, wears a badge showing his right to use deadly force and to order the world. When the dust settles, if it settles, he embodies the law – shaky, just or unjust, sometimes arbitrary but generally necessary.