NOTE: I’ll be at Left Coast Crime when this publishes, so my response to comments will be slow today. Bear with me!

When I finished the draft for The Witless Protection Program, I wrote to my agent, “This is a screenplay masquerading as a book.”

I’m a very visual person. I don’t know if it’s because of my years writing theatre and TV but I always see my books play out on a screen in my head as I’m writing them. And that was never truer than with The Witless Protection Program. By the time I finished the book, I felt like I’d written a murder mystery rom com.

I knew Witless would be the last Catering Hall Mystery, which gave me a chance to give all my characters fun send-offs. I began by calling back favorite supporting characters from previous books in the series and hooking them up – literally in a couple of cases! – with the series regulars. (This led to footnotes explaining in which books the supporting characters originally appeared, which has actually sent some readers back to check out the earlier books in the series.)

I also knew readers were clamoring to finally meet Mia’s cheating, grifter of a husband, Adam Grosso. Bring him in on the heels of her getting engaged to another man? Perfect timing! And I always like to run a B-story I can eventually connect to the A-story. This jived with my goal of adding unexpected characteristics to some characters that might seem slightly out there but were still believable. In this case, it turned out Mia’s nonna Elisabetta has been doing a little day trading on the side. Seniors often have way more skill with computers than we give them credit for and given Elisabetta’s street-smarts, her ability to play the markets wasn’t inconceivable. She uses her well-gotten gains to buy the two-family house across the street from her as a wedding gift for Mia and Shane. The house belonged to a recluse who’s died – and turns out to be the legendary cartoonist Dan Fee, creator of an iconic superhero named Circusman. A house covered with Circusman murals inside and filled with memorabilia, a fan base that tries to have Dan Fee’s home declared an historic landmark… You see? More visuals.

I open the book by slightly breaking one of the golden rules of screenwriting: every scene either advances the action or the emotional world of the characters. In the first few pages, Mia is having dinner at New York’s Tavern on the Green with her boyfriend Shane. Professional and driven businesswoman that she is, she’s still on tenterhooks about whether Shane will ever propose. In my head, I saw a scene where I flipped proposal tropes on their ear. Champagne comes. Something is floating in Mia’s. Could it be… a ring? It’s not. A gorgeous box made entirely out of chocolate ends the meal. Could the ring be inside? It is… not. Once outside, Shane suddenly drops to one knee. Is this finally the moment???? It…is… Not. If you’re wondering how this breaks the rule, it’s because we get what’s going on right away. I don’t need to keep going. But allow me to present another rule that applies here: the comedy rule of threes. There are different definitions to this “rule,” but honestly, there’s just something funnier in an undefinable way about a bit happening in three beats.

I end the book with a chapter that goes past the murder resolutions to wind up the characters’ personal lives. And that, my friends, is where I really went balls-out, screenplay-style. It felt like I was transcribing the scenes directly from the screen. I had soooo much fun writing this chapter I can’t even tell you.

I’ll share one last, incredibly stupid thing I did relating to this book. I had to send Mia and Shane to Miami to investigate at one point mid-plot. It suddenly occurred to me that you can fly from New York to Miami, Miami to Los Angeles, and the L.A. back to N.Y.C. in twenty-four hours. Mind blown!! Excited author! Flying from city to city – visual!!! I was so pumped by this revelation that I wrote up an entire character post about it for Dru’s Book Musings from Shane’s perspective… which published last year when I was supposed to be promoting the previous book, Four Parties and a Funeral. Yup. I totally effed up. And didn’t realize it until the post was out. Thank the universe Dru is a goddess and forgave me. But if you’d like to read it, here’s the link.

Okay, enough blathering from me! If you get the chance to read the book, here’s a buy link. And if you know anyone who’d like to produce a murder mystery rom com…

Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions!