Officer Down Published

My first novel, Officer Down, is now available. I’m pretty excited about it– it looks beautiful and I can finally share this story with everyone. The cover, with an image by Jordan Duca, is beautiful. As a friend who is in film said, “If there’s purple, someone will die!”

You can purchase it directly from the publisher website (the best return for me) here.

If you’d like to purchase multiple copies (it makes a great gift!), please contact me and I can give you a deal and save you some shipping costs. You can also buy it from Amazon.

This book has been in the works since 2013. It is inspired by a true story from central Minnesota. In 2012, a police officer from Cold Spring, where I lived for two years before getting married and moving to nearby St. Joseph, was ambushed in an alley behind a bar. His partner, a part-time police officer who also hung drywall for a living, panicked when the shot was fired and backed out of the alley. The killer got away and in that one moment the slain officer became a hero and the partner was branded a coward. The officer who was killed had a funeral attended by the governor and seemingly every police officer in the state, and had a stretch of highway and the post office named after him. The disgraced partner had to change his phone number, get off social media, and move out of town.

This story stuck with me, as a way to explore concepts of heroism and cowardice in a small town setting. I’d been looking for a story I could write that would celebrate Cold Spring particularly, an exemplary small town in this beautiful part of the country. For a year I worked to get my own story crafted, then I revised and revised. I did my research at the St. Joseph police department, going in repeatedly to ask about the ins and outs of small town policing, officer training, interactions with locals. I got sidetracked, I went down internet rabbit holes, it took me three drafts before I figured out who the killer was. In the end, though, I was super happy with the story, the characters, the way it is infused with the landscape and culture of central Minnesota.

I spent six years trying to find an agent, and when I’d gone through “the list,” I tried to find a publisher, submitting it to contests and more agents as I identified them. I wrote another novel in the meantime, this one set in North Dakota, and started looking for an agent for that book. I published a book of poems with a small publisher. I finally decided this fall to self-publish Officer Down, which seems to neither fit into literary fiction (too much a police procedural) nor in the police procedural genre (too literary). It is a heck of a good story, and you will love these people as much as I do. They’re well worth getting to know. There’s a romance in there, too.

There are also kids who ride their snowmobiles to high school, swimming in the quarry, and baseball under the lights of a stadium that glows at night like the field of dreams. There’s my favorite character, a guy fighting with his father to take over the dairy farm and convert it to organic. There are super sweet children, and there’s some real ugliness in the public shunning. Though the administrator at the St. Joseph police department, Mary Beth Munden, who was my first reader and very helpful, says the real guy had it much worse. My question to her was, “Is it believable?” Her answer: “Oh, yes.”

By the way, at the time I was writing the book, Mary Beth worked for the police department and also waited tables at the El Paso, known for its meat raffles. She was a student at the local community college and, she let me know, on weekends she sorted worms and packaged them for the local bait shop. I had to shake my head. I would have loved to put this in my book but, thanks to Fargo, it would not be believed, or would reduce the “seriousness” of the book. The Coen brothers took a lot– there are no “you betchas” in this book, though I heard more than a few when doing research interviews. Still, the German Catholics have their say.

What pushed me to get this thing done, was the great experience of having people read a short story I recently had accepted for publication. It was so gratifying to have people read the story and respond to it– not just a close circle of friends but a wider set I contacted through email and Facebook. If you want a sense of my writing and the stories of this area, read “The Long Way,” inspired by an event related to the Jacob Wetterling abduction, which took place less than a half mile from our farm, at the Pigeon Review here.

Then, you know, buy the book! It’s a good one!