by Rick Gangraw
We are thrilled to welcome novelist Rick Gangraw as our guest.
Rick's new novel of suspense is Secrets in the Ice (White Feather Press, October 2012 trade paperback and ebook formats), which won the 2011 Royal Palm Literary Award for Unpublished Mystery.
Today Rick asks a most provocative question: Should your wife be concerned about your characters' dark sides?
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Several people have recently asked how a calm, peaceful person like me could come up with ideas needed for a murder mystery or a suspense thriller. I've also been asked if my wife should be concerned after reading some of those ideas that I came up with. Just wait until she reads the next one! Only kidding. However, you've probably heard the statement, "It's always the quiet ones you need to worry about."
Photo provided courtesy of
Rick Gangraw
How does anyone not involved with criminal activities write those kinds of grisly plots and illegal schemes? It takes a good imagination, of course, and a desire to tell an interesting story that's never been told before. All throughout my life, people have told me what really scares them, so I've put a few of those circumstances into my stories. Whether it's being trapped under the ice in a frozen lake, buried alive in a casket when everyone believes you're dead, or getting cremated alive, those ideas have a tremendous amount of potential to create a terrifying yet gripping situation for a reader. You can see that a hundred years ago with some of Edgar Allen Poe's unbelievable stories, and those are just as frightening today as anything Stephen King has come up with in our lifetimes.
So once I have the murder scenario in mind that would strike fear into the minds of late night readers, I like to come up with a character that wouldn't necessarily be the typical prime suspect, one that could even be a likeable person in the community but has some kind of dark secret that not everyone is aware of. In my first novel, Secrets in the Ice, I have a collection of possible murderers, but you really don't know until the last few chapters which one it is. In my next book, Deathly Silent (to be released before June), I let the reader know who the murderer is in the first few pages, but I try to slowly reveal why he's doing it as the good guys learn more about this person and his victims.
My novels are certainly not horrors but I do add a few chapters in my first two books that might be considered from that genre. Just a few scenes to set the tone. I do include some romantic aspects between several characters in Secrets in the Ice as they investigate the murders, and I like to explore the dark characters quite a bit more in Deathly Silent. The dark side is something that I've never even considered letting out of myself, but it's a fascinating aspect to study in a person.
For some reason, a lot of people enjoy reading a suspenseful story or watching a scary movie and there are so many opportunities for authors to provide material for those people. I believe it's extremely rare for such an author to be the kind of person who would act out the deeds from the dark characters they create, so my wife can rest easy. All I'm doing is trying to come up with situations that would give her the creeps and keep her awake at night after reading parts of my books, and hopefully providing that kind of interest for other readers.
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Rick Gangraw lives with his wife and children on the East coast of Florida, and wishes he could spend more time at his family's cabin on a lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He has traveled to over twenty-six different countries and has visited almost all fifty states in the US. When he's not dabbling in fiction, he enjoys sports, hiking, kayaking, camping, and researching his family history.
Check out Rick's website RickGangraw.com to learn more about the author and his work. Or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Secrets in the Ice
Rick Gangraw
After 24 years … the Lake still remembers …
A couple on a romantic, winter vacation getaway at a lakeside cabin in Upper Michigan are looked at suspiciously by the local townspeople when a body is found frozen in the lake.
After a second local is found dead in the lake, the couple starts investigating on their own and meets up with a young librarian and her boyfriend, who help them discover more than just a new murder.
While enjoying the winter scenery, they discover a twenty-four year-old unsolved double murder in the lake that had been covered up by local townspeople and somehow appears to be related to the recent deaths.
Some townspeople say it's the ghosts of that double murder who are taking revenge on their murderers, many years later, so the couple try to determine how they are connected.
Paul and Lisa unravel the mystery, surprised at what they are discovering, and everyone seems to be involved.
Watch a trailer for the book, below:
