The Flexible Truth of Saving Grace: Guest Post by Simon Wood

USA TODAY bestselling author, Simon Wood is a California transplant from England. He's a former competitive racecar driver, a licensed pilot, an endurance cyclist, an animal rescuer, and an occasional PI. He shares his world with his American wife, Julie. Their lives are dominated by a longhaired dachshund and six cats. He's the Anthony Award winning author of Accidents Waiting to Happen, Paying the Piper, Terminated, Deceptive Practices and the Aidy Westlake series. His thriller THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY is in development to be a movie. His latest book is SAVING GRACE. Curious people can learn more at http://www.simonwood.net.

SIMON WOOD:
THE FLEXIBLE TRUTH OF SAVING GRACE 

I hadn't intended to put my heroes, Scott Fleetwood and Tom Sheils, through the fictional wringer for a second time but something cropped up.

When I start a book, I don’t build it around a character or plotline. I’m premise driven. More often than not, that premise is a real world one. TERMINATED was built around the issue of workplace violence. ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN explored corruption in the life insurance industry. It was survivor guilt for THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY. And for my latest book, SAVING GRACE, it was the manipulation of the free press.

Now before you go rolling your eyes, it’s not what you think. This has nothing to do with the current fake news claims. I’ve been looking into this issue for a quite some time. The tough thing about writing a book is it takes a long time from concept to final product. Who knew an election cycle would muck things up for me?

My interest dates back ten years when there was a kidnapping of a child in Portugal. Planted stories and media manipulation marred the investigation, which hasn’t been solved even today. The more insidious side to this story was that people profited monetarily from the incident. My writer’s radar became attuned to the issue and I came across more instances of abuse from within and outside the media. I’m sure you’re aware of some instances.

The subject was too enticing to ignore. If I was going to turn to the world of media and evil shenanigans, there were two characters I could turn to—reporter Scott Fleetwood and special agent Tom Sheils of the FBI. They were protagonists of a fan favorite, PAYING THE PIPER. I’d put these guys through hell in PIPER, and it’s that notoriety that gets exploited in SAVING GRACE.

No longer a reporter, Scott Fleetwood is still recovering from the aftermath of tangling with the notorious kidnapper, the Piper, when a new foe emerges from the shadows. The Shepherd announces to the San Francisco Independent that he has snatched a young girl from a vacationing family. The Shepherd has two demands for the safe return of the girl—a cash ransom and for Scott to act as his intermediary between the family and himself. The kidnapping brings in Special Agent Tom Sheils and his team to work the case and watch over Scott. The Shepherd promises the girl’s safety as long as Scott follows the rules of his game. Forced to trail the kidnapper’s twisting lead—and haunted by a previous victim he failed to save—Scott is desperate to keep the past from making a brutal comeback.

Each of the Shepherd’s demands are played out on the world’s stage for everyone to see with Scott as the star of a perverse reality show. As the stakes get upped, Scott realizes he’s a pawn of a much larger scheme.

I won't say how the media is being manipulated in SAVING GRACE. For that you’ll have to read the book. And when you have, come talk to me and I’ll tell you about the facts behind some of the lies. You can learn more about the book here: http://simonwood.net/book/saving-grace/

Making of a Monster: Guest Post by Simon Wood

Today I welcome back one of my favorite friends and writers, Simon Wood. Simon Wood is a California transplant from England. He's a former competitive racecar driver, a licensed pilot, an endurance cyclist and an occasional PI. He shares his world with his American wife, Julie. Their lives are dominated by a longhaired dachshund and four cats. He's the Anthony Award winning author of Working Stiffs, Accidents Waiting to Happen, Paying the Piper, Terminated, Asking For Trouble, We All Fall Down and the Aidy Westlake series. His latest thriller is THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY that came out on March '15. He also writes horror under the pen name of Simon Janus. Curious people can learn more at http://www.simonwood.net. 

SIMON WOOD: Making of a Monster

Marshal Beck is the villain is THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY. He's a monster—he abducts and kills women—but he's not a traditional monster. He's not a rampaging nutcase. He's thoughtful and lives by a manifesto—that just happens to involve murder.

For me that’s the crux of a villain or a monster. They can’t be megalomaniacs or indiscriminate psychopaths. There has to be something more to them than that. Moustache twirling villains just don’t do it. They need to have an added dimension not only to be interesting but in order to be scary. So I put a lot of thought into an antagonist.

So how was Marshall Beck made?

I have to be careful about what I say here, as he's inspired by a couple of acquaintances. While neither of these two people have ever met, they both have a tendency to view the world in black and white terms which lead to them to make sweeping and harsh judgments that would likely result in some form of capital punishment for large sections of society for failing to live up to their ideals if they were in charge. I should mention that the guilty have ranged from terrorists to jaywalkers. It’s kind of amusing because it’s nothing more than hyperbole.

But what if it wasn’t? What if they were serious? What if they thought the laws in place failed to punish people for certain crimes, so they personally exacted the punishment society chose to ignore? It’s an exaggeration, but one I wanted to explore.

To add more flavor to the character, I turned to an urban legend from my childhood. As a child of the 70’s, things that happened within the family home stayed within the family home whereas today child services would have been called in to investigate. I grew up around a couple of brothers that I can’t say I particularly liked. They were always mean, but they were their father’s sons. Their father was mean-spirited. The rumor was that when the sons stepped out of line, the father beat them with a switch made from a thorned blackberry vine that grew all around their house. Whether it was true or not, just the idea of a barbed switch is scary. It’s been something that’s stayed with me, so when it came to the weapon Marshall Beck would use on his victims, I took that switch and made it bigger and badder.

Marshall Beck is a man who deals out punishments. Marshall Beck isn't hidden from the reader. You get to see the world as he sees it through his distortion. To him, what he's doing is just and not out of bounds. He doesn’t see the distortion, even if we do. The reason for this is simple. No one sees themselves as the villain. They're the heroes of their stories. It may be a conscious or unconscious delusion. Delusion or not, they don’t see themselves as the bad guy.

So that’s Marshall Beck—part exaggeration, part bogeyman and part manifesto. I hope you'll read THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY and ride his dark highway until he selects the wrong woman and it all comes to an end.