FREE Giveaway! — A Sneak-Preview of the Prequel to The Dakota Stevens Mystery Series

The sto­ry of how Dako­ta Stevens and Svet­lana Krüsh met and became an inves­tiga­tive team is one that has haunt­ed me for 15 years—ever since I opened a fresh note­book and began the “pre-pro­duc­tion” that became the first nov­el in the series, A Real Piece of Work.

I knew I want­ed Dako­ta and Svetlana’s intro­duc­tion to mir­ror the first meet­ing of Mr. Sher­lock Holmes and Dr. John Wat­son in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s nov­el A Study in Scar­let. Like oth­er afi­ciona­dos of Sher­lock Holmes, I have always loved Stamford’s intro­duc­tion of them to each oth­er in a chem­istry lab, and Holmes’ famous first words to Wat­son: “You have been in Afghanistan, I per­ceive.”

I began writ­ing A Study in Crim­son before I knew how and when Dako­ta and Svet­lana would meet. At the out­set all I knew was, I want­ed the title of the sto­ry to have “crim­son” in it as my homage to A Study in Scar­let. How­ev­er, ear­ly on I decid­ed the word “crim­son” would refer to an inci­den­tal con­nec­tion to Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.

 

Har­vard Square, Cam­bridge, MA. The cen­ter of the action in A STUDY IN CRIMSON.

 

While liv­ing in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts after col­lege, I spent many morn­ings writ­ing at Au Bon Pain café in Har­vard Square, and my after­noons play­ing chess there. “What if,” I said to myself, “Svet­lana were the inter­im coach of the Har­vard chess team, and she spent her free time crush­ing ama­teurs at the café?”

I have sub­ti­tled the nov­el “A Pre­quel to the Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series,” but it would have been equal­ly accu­rate to sub­ti­tle it “The Dako­ta and Svet­lana Ori­gin Sto­ry.”

I’m pleased to announce that A Study in Crim­son, a pre­quel to the Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series, will be avail­able for pre-order this spring, and for down­load this sum­mer.

In the mean­time, if you sub­scribe to my web­site below, you will receive a FREE PDF sneak-pre­view (the first 4 chap­ters) of the nov­el!

In addi­tion to receiv­ing the sneak-pre­view of A Study in Crim­son, sub­scribers will have new blog posts emailed to them, as well as exclu­sive con­tent unavail­able to non-sub­scribers, includ­ing bonus sto­ries, writ­ing tips, and insid­er essays on the world of a writer.

Thank you,

Chris

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By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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