The Job was a nuisance, the Target was a disaster.

Here’s where to find out more about book fourteen in the Operation Quickline series, The Room Where it Happened. The paperback is about 275 pages long and costs $15.99, and the ebook is $3.99. Both are available at the fine retailers below.

Synopsis for The Room Where it Happened

Sid Hackbirn never knew his mother, Sheila. When startling new evidence in Sheila’s murder shows up, Sid isn’t terribly interested until Stella, the aunt who raised him, becomes hellbent on finding out who killed her sister over thirty years before.

As undercover agents in a top-secret organization, Sid and his wife, Lisa Wycherly, have the skills to investigate, but are reluctant to use them. Until they’re assigned to watch a congressman who was one of the main suspects in Sheila’s murder.

With the congressman trying to make Sid into the son he should have had, and Stella recklessly diving into questioning suspects, Sid and Lisa are up to their armpits in a case that stands little chance of putting the demons of the past to rest.

How I wrote it

This book probably would not have happened but for the COVID pandemic. Okay. I’d been noodling around with the idea of Sid solving the murder of his birth mother, but couldn’t figure out how. Even with common forensic techniques, there were a host of other questions, including how to relate the event to the spy biz.

Then in the spring of 2020, the lockdown happened, and librarian Barbara Birnbaum was looking for ways to use Zoom to keep her patrons at the Hyde Park Miriam Matthews branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. She tagged me to lead an online video class in journaling. We lasted a good long time, thanks to Bri Webber, the librarian running the meetings. But the attendance dwindled, as it does, until there were only three of us, including Bennie Thomas and Phoenix Smith. We’re still going.

Then, a year later, one of us came up with the prompt to write a story that started “…And this is the room where it happened.” Holy crow. I wrote it as if Sid, Lisa, and Stella were looking at the room, which had been found by someone renovating what had been the whorehouse where Sheila had worked. I was still in the nose-down, obsessive re-write phase of the Operation Quickline series, which may be why that silly prompt never left me.

I wanted to begin the novel with that line, but couldn’t make it work. I kept the line as the title, and found a way to get Sid and Lisa’s side business mixed up in the cold case with another idea I’d been noodling with, but hadn’t found a way to use. That of the nuisance case.

I’m always slightly amazed when I come to an idea with very little, only to have it blossom into a host of great characters and action. In fact, there’s at least one who has been introduced in this story that I have a feeling will be back. When and how, I don’t know yet, but I’m liking her a lot.