This week’s featured author on the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance is my friend, James Scott Bell. I have the good fortune of being able to discuss a wide range of topics with Jim, including politics, theology, movies (especially classics), and Apple computers. He’s both intelligent and funny. One of the many attorneys who have become novelists, Jim is a terrific writer whose books just keep getting better and better. In addition, he wrote one of my most often recommended how-to books about writing, Plot and Structure.
ABOUT JIM:
James Scott Bell is a former trial lawyer who now writes full time. He
is also the fiction columnist for Writers Digest magazine and adjunct
professor of writing at Pepperdine University. His book on writing, Plot and Structure
is one of the most popular writing books available today.
The national
bestselling author of several novels of suspense, he grew up and still
lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on his next Buchanan thriller.
ABOUT TRY DYING:
On a wet Tuesday morning in December, Ernesto Bonilla, twenty-eight,
shot his twenty-three-year-old wife, Alejandra, in the backyard of
their West 45th Street home in South Los Angeles. As Alejandra lay
bleeding to death, Ernesto drove their Ford Explorer to the westbound
Century Freeway connector where it crossed over the Harbor Freeway and
pulled to a stop on the shoulder.
Bonilla stepped around the
back of the SUV, ignoring the rain and the afternoon drivers on their
way to LAX and the west side, placed the barrel of his .38 caliber
pistol into his mouth, and fired.
His body fell over the
shoulder and plunged one hundred feet, hitting the roof of a Toyota
Camry heading northbound on the harbor Freeway. The impact crushed the
roof of the Camry. The driver, Jacqueline Dwyer, twenty-seven, an
elementary schoolteacher from Reseda, died at the scene.
This
would have been simply another dark and strange coincidence, the sort
of thing that shows up for a two-minute report on the local news–with
live remote from the scene–and maybe gets a follow-up the next day.
Eventually the story would go away, fading from the city’s collective
memory.
But this story did not go away. Not for me. Because Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman I was going to marry.
In Try Dying,
this fast-paced thriller, lawyer Ty Buchanan must enter a world of evil
to uncover the cause of his fiancee’s death–even if hie has to kill
for the truth.
"Bell is one of the best writers out there…he creates characters readers care about…a story worth telling."
~Library Review~
