First entry

[Mark Troy]

I'm jealous. Vicki Hendricks has this great picture of her in a skydive. I've done skydives (not nearly as many as Vicki and my skydiving days are over) but I don't have a picture of me in freefall. I had a video of my first jump and it was pretty ugly. Nothing to post on a website. So, I settled for the next best thing--a shot of me running. It's ugly too, but how about those Willie Nelson shorts?



Although I don't have any skydive pix, I can claim a chunk of the skydive/murder genre. My short story, Drop Dead Zone, which appreared in the now-defunct Mystery Buff Magazine, was about a murder in a skydive. It was the best representative of the genre until Vicki published Sky Blues.



I just finished a novel, The Law of the Splintered Paddle, a private eye story set in Honolulu where I lived for ten years. The novel features Ava Rome, a former MP, now PI. The Law of the Splintered Paddle of the title was the first law of the Hawaiian Kingdom under the reign of Kamehameha the Great. It said that the defenseless were to be guaranteed protection from harm. That's the mission Ava adopts. The law doesn't require innocence to earn protection and neither does Ava. So when a prostitute who is being harassed by a high-ranking police detective comes to her for help, Ava takes the case. Suddenly she finds herself defenseless and nobody to protect her.



I'm now working on a sequel to it called Canoe about timber laundering. When not at work and not writing, you can find me on the roads around College Station training for the Country Music Marathon in Nashville on April 28. 50 bands and 300 high school cheerleaders! Who could pass it up? If any readers are in the Nashville area, come out and cheer for me.