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Jeff Mariotte's latest blog posts
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1:45 PM PDT, May 29, 2007
By the time a writer sits down and starts to work on a novel, a sort of perfect storm of ideas has already occurred. Some combination of ideas, issues, and concerns has converged upon him or her, and he or she has figured out a way to make those various elements congeal into a single narrative. Then it’s a matter of figuring out who populates the story, and molding it all into a compelling story that keeps the reader turning pages well into the night.
For my new supernatural Missing White Girl, these were some of the elements I wanted to write about:
The border. I live a few miles from the U.S./Mexico border, in an area impacted on a large scale by illegal immigration. However one feels about the immigration issue, it can’t be denied that there are far-reaching effects on both sides of the line. Characters in the book hold every opinion—there are border humanitarian groups and border vigilante groups—but there are no easy answers to this issue, and the novel doesn’t pretend otherwise.
The modern media phenomenon of the Missing White Girl (and the corollary of the murdered white girl). As many Americans today probably know the names of Natalee Holloway, JonBenet Ramsay, Laci Peterson and Chandra Levy as John Roberts and Nancy Pelosi and Steven Hadley. It’s easy to make the argument that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House and the National Security Advisor have more impact on our day-to-day lives than the unfortunate women mentioned above, but they’ve received less air-time on 24-hour cable news networks and less face-time in national magazines and tabloids. The tragic cases of these women, and others, generate far more attention than they deserve (beyond, of course, the impact on their families, friends, and communities). At the same time, equally tragic cases crop up all the time that don’t gain such notoriety.
The Cabeza de Vaca expedition. I’ve long been fascinated by the true story of Cabeza de Vaca, one of a small force of Spaniards marooned in the Gulf of Mexico in 1528. De Vaca was found by an indigenous tribe, from whom he either learned magic or to whom he demonstrated magic already inherent within him. Eventually escaping, he was reunited with three others from his fleet, also stranded, and together they crossed over much of what would eventually become the American southwest (the first Europeans (and African—one was a Moorish slave) to do so. They worked their way westward, looking for Mexico, where they would find other Spaniards. Along the way the magical healing powers they demonstrated made them friends among the native tribes—not quite the “worshipped as gods” cliché, but close to it. By the time they found their Spaniard brethren, they were accompanied by more than a thousand natives from a wide array of villages, with whom they got along famously. Ironic, then, that when they did meet up with the Spanish, they were busily enslaving every native they could find…
These elements (and of course, many more) went into Missing White Girl. First and foremost it’s a thriller, one designed to race along at a rocket ship's pace and drag the reader behind it. There are supernatural elements to it, reaching all the way back to Cabeza de Vaca. It’s a regional book, set largely in southeastern Arizona’s rugged high deserts. It’s a mystery involving the kidnapping of a young woman and the murder of her family, and what happens when the rural sheriff’s department has already devoted most of its resources to the high profile, media circus case of a missing white girl.
If you enjoy horror, or thrillers, or mysteries, or even contemporary westerns, I hope you’ll give it a try.
--Jeff
 Missing White Girl
10:05 AM PST, February 14, 2007
I don't write many short stories, but I have one that's just been posted here on Amazon Shorts. It's called Walkaway, and it's about Buck Shelton, the main protagonist of my forthcoming supernatural thriller Missing White Girl.
Like the novel, "Walkaway" is partially based on the sorts of things that really happen here in Arizona's border region. In this case, it's about kids who are sent to a juvenile residential facility because they got in trouble at home, or trouble with the law, but who take off from that facility (the real-life version of which has a place in Elfrida). Since Buck runs the Elfrida sheriff's office in my fictional reality, it makes sense that he would have to deal with walkaways.
But the horror he finds when he looks into the problem is not, one hopes, what the real-life sheriff's officers have to contend with....
The story is only 49¢, and I can't think of a better way to spend less than half a buck.
Since it's not on the page for Missing White Girl yet, here's the back cover copy from the novel:
"Lulu Lavender has been kidnapped. Her family has been brutally murdered. With the sheriff’s office consumed by a high-profile case of a missing white teenager from a prominent family, it falls to Patrol Lieutenant Buck Shelton to investigate Lulu’s abduction.
The trail leads Buck to the Arizona/Mexico border and a dark world of bizarre supernatural forces, desperate power seekers, vigilantes and drug dealers, and ultimately to a bloody showdown between good and evil—with an innocent girl caught in the crossfire…."
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