The Zodiac Killer: Obsession Without Closure
Unsolved mysteries are evergreen. Every spring, true crime podcasts enter a new season. Search interest spikes in stories that defy closure. One name repeatedly rises to the top of curiosity charts, generation after generation. The Zodiac Killer remains one of the most enduring infamous figures in American criminal history. Even more than half a century […]
Dialogue That Kills: Crafting Conversations Full of Suspense
Dialogue is where intention and motivation live. Not in the gunshot.Not in the dark alley.Not even in the twist you’ve been saving for three chapters. Suspense begins long before violence arrives — often in the quiet exchange of words between two people who desperately want to say what they mean, but don’t. Or […]
The Original Monster: How Ed Gein’s Crimes Shaped the Modern Serial Killer
The Man Who Redefined Horror In the winter of 1957, police entered a farmhouse outside Plainfield, Wisconsin, expecting to investigate a missing-persons case. What they discovered instead became one of the most disturbing crime scenes in American history. Inside that home lived Ed Gein, a reclusive, soft-spoken man who, until that moment, seemed merely […]
When Santa Turns Sinister: What the Covina Massacre Reveals About Hidden Rage
The Night Santa Brought Terror Christmas Eve is supposed to be sacred.A night of laughter, wrapping paper, twinkling lights, and the soft rustle of family. But in Covina, California, on December 24, 2008, holiday warmth turned to horror. Just before midnight, a man in a bright red Santa suit knocked on the door […]
Digital Detectives: The Role of Cyber Forensics in Modern Crime Stories
When I was growing up, evidence meant fingerprints, fibers, and blood spatter.Today, we also find enormous amounts of evidence in our digital prints: browser histories, cell phone pings, and metadata buried in a cloud server halfway around the world. Crime scenes have a giant presence online. I’ve spent years learning how investigators read the physical […]
Murder, Mystery, and a Missing Baby: The Real Case Behind What Darkness Does
On the quiet summer evening of June 3, 1997, 19-year-old Rachel Timmerman vanished into the night with her 11-month-old daughter, Shannon. What began as an ordinary evening in Cedar Springs, Michigan, became one of the state’s most haunting true crime cases, a case that would inspire my novel What Darkness Does. Rachel’s story is […]
How to Read Crime Scenes Like a Coroner’s Daughter
I didn’t learn forensics from TV shows. I learned from my dad, the coroner. While most families talked around the dinner table about what they did at school that day, we talked case stories. My father was the county medical examiner, and the work followed him everywhere, into the kitchen, the car, my imagination. […]
“The Coroner’s Daughter Series – NEW BOOK ALERT”
The Coroner’s Daughter Series: NEW BOOK ALERT Book 5 is Coming, Here’s Everything You Need to Know (and Catch Up On!) A young mother’s body is found in Lake Isabella.Her baby has gone missing. And a fiancè long presumed dead just walked back into Emily Hartford’s life. And that’s just page one. […]
Building Tension: How to Keep Readers on the Edge of Their Seat
Why Tension Is Everything in Crime Fiction You know that moment when your heart is pounding, your coffee’s gone cold, and you have to turn just one more page—even though it’s 2:00 a.m.? That’s not just a great story. That’s tension keeping you up til all hours. Whether you’re binge-watching Mare of Easttown, reading Gone […]
Crafting a Relatable Heroine: What Makes For A Great Investigator Protagonist?
Why Protagonists Matter More Than the Mystery Itself A crime story is only as strong as its protagonist. Sure, we all love a good twist, a shocking reveal, or that classic moment when the investigator figures out the clues in order to catch the killer. But what keeps readers coming back—book after book, series after […]
