Rough Draft
“James Hall’s writing is astringent, penetrating, and unfailingly gripping long after you read the last page.”
— Dean Koontz
Searching for her parents’ killer, a young novelist and her six-year-old son become entangled in a bitter feud, a burning vendetta, and a trap designed to catch one of the world’s deadliest assassins.
Overview
When her parents were murdered, Hannah Keller was 3,000 miles away, on leave from her job with the Miami Police Department. Her family’s only survivor on that deadly day was Hannah’s six-year-old son Randall. While fishing on the dock behind his grandparents’ house, the boy glimpsed the killers, and later discovered his grandparents’ bullet-riddled bodies.
Five years later the trauma of that day still haunts the boy. He lives in terror that the killers will return for him. Hannah is no longer a cop but now works full time as a novelist, and is trying to do whatever she can to heal her son’s wounds. But when she receives a coded message apparently from her parents’ killers, the entire episode explodes again.
Praise
“James Hall’s writing is astringent, penetrating, and unfailingly gripping long after you read the last page.” — Dean Koontz
“Hall is a master at duping the reader into believing something that inevitably proves to be jaw-droppingly false. A surprising book that should be on all public library shelves.” — Library Journal
“An expert creator of grotesque villains and fast action, former poet Hall raises the crossbar with his sensitive insights into the human condition.” — Publishers Weekly
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Magic markers of different colors noted passages on almost every page…
The book suddenly felt radioactive in my hands…
James on Writing Rough Draft
Once when I was in The Strand, a famous used bookstore in Manhattan, I did what all writers do whenever they enter a bookstore. I drifted back to my section to see what books of mine they had on the shelves. I found a nice looking copy of Bones of Coral, and since I only had one hardback copy of my own left, I decided to buy it.
I was standing at the checkout line when I opened the book and found it was littered with strange writing. Lots of magic markers of different colors had been used to note passages on almost every page. Other scrawled notes filled the margins. This was far more than the kinds of notations you might expect to find in a book marked up for an English class. This was way way out there.
Why a person would’ve taken so much time to scribble all over my novel and then take it to a secondhand store puzzled me no end. The book suddenly felt radioactive in my hands and I put it down and left the store.
I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, however, and spent a long while trying to figure out a way to use that image as a starting place for a novel. Finally, I put aside the book I was working on at the time (and wouldn’t get back to until Forests of the Night) and I started sketching out a story about a writer who was faced with a similar circumstance as I experienced at The Strand.
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