REBECCA YOUNT trained from childhood as a concert pianist, is a published poet, and worked in education reform, but she always nurtured a passion for storytelling which she has indulged only late in life.  Coming from a family of writers, it wasn’t hard for her to put pen to paper, but it took an actual unsolved murder to give her the idea for her first novel.  On a home exchange in England—something she and her husband regularly do—a villager told her about a local murder that remained unsolved, even by New Scotland Yard. Sitting under a tree in a fallow field one day, Rebecca began to imagine what might have happened. The result is A DEATH IN C MINOR.

In 2010, Rebecca underwent open heart surgery, which left her unable to write for two years. After this hiatus, she returned to writing, deciding to put the entire Mick Chandra series out herself as e-books. She is retired and lives in Virginia with her husband, writer David Yount.

Rebecca Yount is available for talks and presentations, and she is happy to meet with book clubs.

To schedule an appearance or to learn more about Rebecca Yount and her books, please visit www.rebeccayount.com.

THE ONGOING STORY
How A One-Off Crime Novel Became A Series

I had originally planned to write a one-off crime novel based on the protagonist of my series, Detective Inspector Mick Chandra. But as I launched into terra incognita with A Death in C Minor, I realized that the story had become more expansive than originally conceived. In fact, the book had vastly outgrown its own author. By the time I had completed the first draft of the book, I realized that the process had become something like a new life form growing in a laboratory petri dish.

As I wove the plot and developed my four main characters — Mick; his American love interest, Jess; his partner, Elizabeth; and Jamie, his undercover agent — the story was no longer under my control. Like wading into a rushing river, I had to go with the current even as I risked drowning.

At the outset I had constructed the storyline around Jess, who stumbled upon a murder in the English village where she had taken refuge from her troubled life. As she became increasingly caught up in the murder of Peter Chandler, a neighbor, I planned to have her travel to Cambridge to meet with a professor of forensic science. That plot never materialized.

Instead, I introduced Mick in chapter two, sitting in his office in New Scotland Yard, attempting to master a trick from Blackwell’s Book of Magic and Illusion. This transition in the story surprised me. Even today I am not certain where I got the confidence to roll with it.

There was a real-life “Mick,” whom my husband and I had met during a home exchange on the English Channel. He was a forensic specialist on leave from Scotland Yard, attempting to recover from burnout. David and I soon became fast friends with our friendly neighbor. Still, after we returned home, Mick did not suggest himself as a character until I began writing the opening chapters of the book. Strange how our memories come back to haunt us.

So instead of a novel centered solely on Jess, I introduced the Mick character, establishing a scenario that promised a conflicted and passionate love story, as well as a complex murder investigation.

I found I had traversed Mount Olympus, where the ancient gods guided my hand over the page and I had no dominion over the text, inflated as that may sound. It was the most incredible rush!

For weeks I wrote like the proverbial bat out of hell, laboring for at least four hours in the afternoon, going to bed around 10 PM, then getting up at 3 AM to write until 5:30 AM. This brutal schedule continued until I had completed the first draft of A Death in C Minor.

After putting the book away for a short period of time, I rescued it from my desk drawer, then started all over again on rewrites, keeping the same punishing schedule. Finally, after four years, I had trimmed the book from 52 to 37 chapters. Since then there have been multiple rewrites.

My Mick Chandra series now consists of seven books. The second in the series, The Erlking, is due for publication as an e-book in early fall of 2012.

Rebecca Yount’s debut crime novel, A Death in C Minor: A Mick Chandra Mystery, will be published in e-book format on June 26 and available at Amazon.com; Apple iBookstore for iPad; Barnes and Noble for Nook; Sony Reader Store; Kobo; Copia; Baker and Taylor; eBookPie.

ABOUT THE BOOK

(June 26, 2012, Knoxville, TN) We are pleased to announce the publication of Rebecca Yount’s debut novel, A DEATH IN C MINOR: A Mick Chandra Mystery. This is the first title in a seven book series. The other six novels, which are already written, also will be published as e-books, with the second title in the series, THE ERLKING, scheduled for release in fall 2012.

A DEATH IN C MINOR follows young American concert pianist Jessica Beaumont.  Determined to rebuild her life following the death of her young son, a bitter divorce and a suicide attempt, Jessica retreats to a 17th century cottage in rural England. But she soon learns that life in the village of Kenwick isn’t the idyll she imagined. A year earlier, Peter Chandler, a mysterious newcomer to the village, had been hacked to death in his manor house with his own kitchen cleaver. The case remains unsolved until it’s reopened by Detective Inspector Mick Chandra of New Scotland Yard.

Like Jess, Mick Chandra harbors a few ghosts of his own—a childhood spent on the mean streets of industrial Liverpool and a father murdered in a robbery. Welsh on his mother’s side and Kerala Indian on his father’s, Mick attributes his keen instincts as an investigator to his grandmother, who was a seer in her village in India. He has succeeded as an investigator despite the racial tensions that still divide England’s most elite police force.

As Mick begins to question the villagers, his list of suspects grows to include an adulterous vicar; an unscrupulous Cambridge don; a neglected, love-starved wife; a retired octogenarian army colonel; a loss-stricken daughter; and Adam Marr, a devastatingly handsome wealthy landowner with whom Jess had a brief affair when she first arrived in Kenwick.

Against the backdrop of Chandler’s violent murder, and though deeply wounded from failed marriages, Mick and Jess find themselves falling in love. Consequently Jess stirs the hostility of the villagers.

Under pressure from his superiors to close the case, Mick must find Peter Chandler’s murderer and bring him to justice. But who is the murderer: the local laird, the cheating vicar, or perhaps the wealthy commodities trader? Or does it take a village to commit a murder?

A DEATH IN C MINOR takes the reader on a journey fraught with danger, love, and intrigue, where the unexpected becomes the norm. The surprise ending will astonish even the most jaded readers of mystery fiction.

THANKS TO AUTHOR, REBECCA YOUNT AND CAITLIN, FROM
CAITLIN HAMILTON MARKETING AND PUBLICITY, I HAVE
ONE (1) EBOOK EDITION TO GIVE AWAY. OPEN TO ALL.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
THE GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

DISCLAIMER
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.

JUNE 30th to JULY 14th, 2012

A DEATH IN C MINOR
by REBECCA YOUNT

*GIVEAWAY ENDS JULY 14th AT 6PM EST*

DISCLAIMER / RULES

CHAPTER THREE

There was no one waiting outside bay fifteen. No special crew. No one at all. The corridor was entirely empty, too, both ways, as far as the eye could see. I guessed everyone else was already where they wanted to be. Twelve o’clock meetings were in full swing.

Bay fifteen’s door was open. I knocked on it once, as a courtesy, as an announcement, as a warning, and then I stepped inside. Originally most of the Pentagon’s office space was open plan, boxed off by file cabinets and furniture into bays, hence the name, but over the years walls had gone up and private spaces had been created. Frazer’s billet in 3C315 was pretty typical. It was a small square space with a window without a view, with a metal DoD desk, and a chair with arms and two without, and a credenza and a double-wide storage unit.

And it was a small square space entirely empty of people, apart from Frazer himself in the chair behind the desk. He looked up at me and smiled and said, “Hello, Reacher.”

I looked left and right. No one there. No one at all. There was no private bathroom. No large closet. No other door of any kind. The corridor behind me was empty. The giant building was quiet.

Frazer said, “Sit down, if you like.”

I sat down.

Frazer said, “You’re late.”

“I apologize,” I said. “I got hung up.”

Frazer nodded. “This place is a nightmare at twelve o’clock. Lunch breaks, shift changes, you name it. It’s a zoo. I never plan to go anywhere at twelve o’clock. I just hunker down in here.” He was about five-ten, maybe two hundred pounds, wide in the shoulders, solid through the chest, red-faced, black-haired, in his middle forties. Plenty of old Scottish blood in his veins. He had been in Vietnam as a teenager and the Gulf as an older man. He had combat pips all over him like a rash. He was an old-fashioned warrior, but unfortunately for him he could talk and smile as well as he could fight, so he had been posted to Senate Liaison, because the guys with the purse strings were the real enemy.

He said, “So what have you got for me?”

I said nothing. I had nothing to say. I hadn’t expected to get that far.

He said, “Good news, I hope.”

“No news,” I said.

“Nothing?”

I nodded. “Nothing.”

“You told me you had the name. That’s what your message said.”

“I don’t have the name.”

“Then why say so? Why ask to see me?”

I paused a beat.

“It was a shortcut,” I said.

“In what way?”

“I put it around that I had the name. I wondered who might crawl out from under a rock, to shut me up.”

“And no one has?”

“Not so far. But ten minutes ago I thought it was a different story. There were four spare men in the lobby. In DPS uniforms. They followed me. I thought they were an arrest team.”

“Followed you where?”

“Around the E ring to the D. Then I lost them on the stairs.”

Frazer smiled again.

“You’re paranoid,” he said. “You didn’t lose them. I told you, there are shift changes at twelve o’clock. They come in on the Metro like everyone else, they shoot the shit for a minute or two, and then they head for their squad room. It’s on the B ring. They weren’t following you.”

I said nothing.

He said, “There are always groups of them hanging around. There are always groups of everyone hanging around. We’re seriously overmanned. Something is going to have to be done. It’s inevitable. That’s all I hear about, all day, every day. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. We should all bear that in mind. People like you, especially.”

“Like me?” I said.

“There are lots of majors in this man’s army. Too many, probably.”

“Lots of colonels too,” I said.

“Fewer colonels than majors.”

I said nothing.

He asked, “Was I on your list of things that might crawl out from under a rock?”

You were the list, I thought.

He said, “Was I?”

“No,” I lied.

He smiled again. “Good answer. If I had a beef with you, I’d have you killed down there in Mississippi. Maybe I’d come on down and take care of it myself.”

I said nothing. He looked at me for a moment, and then a smile started on his face, and the smile turned into a laugh, which he tried very hard to suppress, but he couldn’t. It came out like a bark, like a sneeze, and he had to lean back and look up at the ceiling.

I said, “What?”

His gaze came back level. He was still smiling. He said, “I was thinking about that phrase people use. You know, they say, that guy? He couldn’t even get arrested.”

I said nothing.

He said, “You look terrible. There are barbershops here, you know. You should go use one.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m supposed to look like this.”
#

Eight days earlier my hair had been eight days shorter, but apparently still long enough to attract attention. Leon Garber, who at that point was once again my commanding officer, summoned me to his office, and because his message read in part without repeat without attending to any matters of personal grooming I figured he wanted to strike while the iron was hot and dress me down right then, while the evidence was still incontrovertibly in existence, right there on my head. And that was exactly how the meeting started out. He asked me, “Which army regulation covers a soldier’s personal appearance?”

Which I thought was a pretty rich question, coming from him. Garber was without a doubt the scruffiest officer I had ever seen. He could take a brand new Class A coat from the quartermaster’s stores and an hour later it would look like he had fought two wars in it, then slept in it, then survived three bar fights in it.

I said, “I can’t remember which regulation covers a soldier’s personal appearance.”

He said, “Neither can I. But I seem to recall that whichever, the hair and the fingernail standards and the grooming policies are in chapter one, section eight. I can picture it all quite clearly, right there on the page. Can you remember what it says?”

I said, “No.”

“It tells us that hair grooming standards are necessary to maintain uniformity within a military population.”

“Understood.”

“It mandates those standards. Do you know what they are?”

“I’ve been very busy,” I said. “I just got back from Korea.”

“I heard Japan.”

“That was just a stopover on the way.”

“How long?”

“Twelve hours.”

“Do they have barbers in Japan?”

“I’m sure they do.”

“Do Japanese barbers take more than twelve hours to cut a man’s hair?”

“I’m sure they don’t.”

“Chapter one, section eight, paragraph two, says the hair on the top of the head must be neatly groomed, and that the length and the bulk of the hair may not be excessive or present a ragged, unkempt, or extreme appearance. It says that instead, the hair must present a tapered appearance.”

I said, “I’m not sure what that means.”

“It says a tapered appearance is one where the outline of the soldier’s hair conforms to the shape of his head, curving inward to a natural termination point at the base of his neck.”

I said, “I’ll get it taken care of.”

“These are mandates, you understand. Not suggestions.”

“OK,” I said.

“Section two says that when the hair is combed, it will not fall over the ears or the eyebrows, and it will not touch the collar.”

“OK,” I said again.

“Would you not describe your current hairstyle as ragged, unkempt, or extreme?”

“Compared to what?”

“And how are you doing in relation to the thing with the comb and the ears and the eyebrows and the collar?”

“I’ll get it taken care of,” I said again.

Then Garber smiled, and the tone of the meeting changed completely.

He asked, “How fast does your hair grow, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A normal kind of speed, I suppose. Same as anyone else, probably. Why?”

“We have a problem,” he said. “Down in Mississippi.”

© Lee Child