The Hook

Several friends have asked me what the book’s about, so I thought I’d post this to answer everyone who has wondered since my last post. Talking about the book is good practice for me, and in fact I could use some help with something related to that very thing.

I’ve heard many times that marketing one’s book begins long before publication. An important element of this marketing is having a good ‘hook,’ a concise two or three-sentence description that intrigues the listener as it gives some idea of the type of story you’ve written. With my previous books I have found this very difficult—self-promotion has never been one of my strong points. But I’m determined to develop a good hook for this novel and it’s your lucky day: you get to watch me suffer as I try.

Here it goes:

San Francisco Police Inspector Dan Oberlin finds himself the only suspect in the murder of a professional rival. He must stay one step ahead of his own department as he follows a trail of recent murders, learning along the way that to stop the killer, Dan must uncover his own father’s darkest secrets.

The story is currently 426 pages long, and trying to condense that much story into a couple of sentences is difficult. Finding just the right details to reveal in the hook is something I’ll have to work on. Perhaps the people who help me out by reading the next draft will have some suggestions about what the hook should say.

Since I’m not limited here to three sentences, however, I’ll tell you in a bit more detail about the story.

The main character is a SFPD Inspector (the rest of the world calls them Detectives, but the SFPD calls them Inspectors, for some reason I have yet to discover) who arrives at a crime scene to find a very disturbing murder that reminds him of another case that went unsolved a few months ago. But as he’s trying to do his job, city politics interfere in the form of Frank Jacobs, an important associate of the mayor’s and someone with whom Dan has an unhappy history. There’s an argument, and Jacobs uses his influence with the mayor to get Dan removed from the case. Early the next morning, Frank Jacobs is murdered with Dan’s gun, and Dan is the only suspect. As the story unfolds, he realizes that both murders are related to something his father did when Dan was a child. It’s up to him to figure out what happened and how to stop the series of murders before the growing list of victims includes everyone he cares about.

This is the fourth novel I’ve written. The first was in college and barely deserves mention. The second was a spy thriller involving a super-hacker, a villain based loosely on the idea of what Bill Gate s would be like if he were evil, and a corrupt FBI Assistant Director with his own malevolent plans. My wife still hasn’t forgiven me for killing the hacker, Lyle, a loveable geek who just might have reminded her of me.

My last book was a murder mystery that took place in Lyon and Paris, France, where we lived for nearly two years. That was the first of my novels that got anywhere at all; it attracted an agent in New York who was, alas, unable to sell it. Getting an agent at all was a big boost to my confidence, though. Perhaps in the coming weeks I’ll tell the story of how all that has worked out…

Thanks to those who wanted to know more about the book, the working title of which is The Voice In My Head, by the way. I hope it sounds interesting!