All Kinds of Wickedness by Randy Overbeck #coldcase #MurderMystery

WICKED WEDNESDAY

Hey, Readers, I'm honored to have Randy back as our Wicked Wednesday guest blogger. He's a rare kind of author, lending a lesson to his fiction. You'll enjoy today's post. 

“Tolerating evil only leads to more evil. When good people stand by and do nothing while wickedness reigns, their communities will be consumed.”—Bob Riley 

            There are all kinds of wickedness. Without wicked villains, there would be no heroes. Without a worthy antagonist, our story would be without drama and our protagonists would have no one to battle. Like other writers, the tales I create are full of real, wicked villains—corrupt cops, greedy businessmen, even powerful owners who don’t believe the rules apply to them. My narratives—and those of all other writers—would be bland without them. Readers need to hate Count Dracula or Professor Moriarty to cheer for their heroes. They are the ying to the yang.

            But when I “put pen to paper,” I’m striving to do more than create credible, compelling characters readers would recognize as well as love and hate. I wanted my writing to expose examples of much broader wickedness infecting the human race. One the one hand, there are villains who steal the life of one loved person; then there are the truly wicked villains who steal the lives, hopes and dreams of scores, hundreds, even thousands of tortured souls. These are those who embody true wickedness. In my novels, I point my pen—well, okay, my computer—at such as these. 

            In each entry of my Haunted Shores Mysteries series, when my protagonist Darrell Henshaw—teacher, coach and paranormal sensitive—tries to unravel a cold-case whodunit, he finds the murder tied to a far greater crime, one of considerable wickedness.

 
               In the first novel, BLOOD ON THE CHESAPEAKE, Darrell investigates the mysterious death of a black teen and discovers his murder, decades earlier, was the instrument of ugly discrimination and racial injustice, which still festers in the small idyllic town, the wickedness simmering just below the surface. In the

second in the series, CRIMSON AT CAPE MAY, Darrell is haunted by the ghost of a bride who died on her wedding night, a few years earlier. When Darrell digs into the story, he find himself face-to-face with perhaps the most wicked crime of all, human trafficking. He is compelled to solve the mystery of the bride’s death and rescue young girls caught in the web of this ugly network. In the third and

recent release, SCARLET AT CRYSTAL RIVER, Darrell and his new bride Erin travel to the Gulf coast of Florida for a relaxing honeymoon. Instead, he encounters the ghost of two young children who keep urging him to help them find justice. When he finally concedes and follows the clues, they lead to an unspeakable murder and an even more wicked crime. The two were children of migrant families working the produce fields in Florida. In pursuing answers to questions about the children, Darrell and Erin learn firsthand about another wickedness,  the exploitation and abuse of these immigrants. 

            The three entries have much in common. One reviewer described them each as “a cold-case murder mystery wrapped in ghost story, served with a side of romance, set a beautiful resort location.” Readers of my novels will definitely get their fill of good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, more than enough personal wickedness to go around. But, when they close the last page of each installment, I hope readers will be a little more informed, a little more alerted and a little more educated about real human wickedness. And maybe empowered to do something about it.

           

You can check out all three novels at my website http://www.authorrandyoverbeck.com Or reach me at randyoverbeck@authorrandyoverbeck.com or @OverbeckRandy. I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

“All that is necessary for wickedness to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.”—with slight apologies to Edmund Burke