Author J. Mark Bertrand was a teenage detective. “Perhaps ‘apprentice’ is a better word,” he says on his blog. “My duties mainly involved hanging out with a private eye and serving as a willing audience for his many stories. There was some surveillance, too, which was a lot like storytelling, only the stories were told while sitting in a car watching an apparently empty house.” Bertrand evidently took notes as his Roland March mystery series features a homicide detective. In Back on Murder, March is given the chance to redeem his career, and in the just-released sequel Pattern of Wounds, he’s crossing the line. Again.
