The excitement builds to a fever pitch as Edgar Award winner Burl Barer teams up with Frank C. Girardot, award-winning journalist,and senior editor for the Los Angeles News Group, which includes the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Whittier Daily News.. The two literary luminaries are crafting a killer full-length true crime thriller for Wild Blue Press. 
There are still ways of killing devoid of guns, knives, bombs, strangulation or hammers. In fact, there is a method of homicide that was so popular in the 19th Century, that people were bumping off each other right and left – friends, family, parents, husbands, wives, children, and even strangers – because there was no way to get caught. Some did it for the perverse thrill of taking human life, others did it as an act of revenge for a slight or humiliation, real or imagined, but most did it because they believed that killing another human being, even their own flesh and blood, would bring them some sort of increased wealth or advancement in social status.
“And the great thing about this method,” I tell Frank at Starbucks, “is that it can look exactly like natural causes – the #1 killer of Vegans in America.”
“Really?”
“Sure. All things considered, Vegans die of natural causes. They drop dead in the aisles of health food stores while listening to NPR.”
The woman behind us, overhearing our conversation, almost chokes on her Red Velvet Cupcake. Frank knows the Heimlich maneuver. I don’t, but I did learn the Conversation Step when I took ballroom dancing.
What does this have to do with cold blooded murder and the horrific case that takes up the rest of this book? Plenty.
You are going to read about a nice guy found dead on his bedroom floor by his beloved bride… He wasn’t shot, stabbed, strangled, or bombed. And even though he wasn’t a Vegan, it looked as if natural causes – except it wasn’t. It was the cold cruel murder of a kind loving man who treasured his wife and step-daughter with all his heart.
Frank Girardot, Jr. and I selected this story because it is a myriad of stories in one – a multi-generational drama of love, loss, perversity, greed, madness and murder. Ultimately, there is an allegation of another homicide, years earlier, that is so shocking in its implications that we ask you, once you have finished the book, to write us a note and tell us whether or not you believe the allegation.
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