Death Notice

Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania, has never had a murder. At least not as long as Kat Campbell has been police chief. And the first is brutal. George Winnick, a farmer in his sixties, is found in a homemade coffin on the side of the highway with his lips sewn shut and his veins and arteries drained of blood and filled with embalming fluid. Chilling as that is, it becomes even more so when Kat finds that the Perry Hollow Gazette obituary writer, Henry Goll, received a death notice for Winnick before he was killed.Soon after, the task force from the Pennsylvania Bureau of Investigation shows up and everything takes an irreversible turn for the worse. Nick Donnelly, head of the task force, has been chasing the "Betsy Ross Killer", so named because he's handy with a needle and thread, for more than a year. Winnick seems to be his fourth victim. Or is he?Kat has never handled a murder case before, but she's not about to sit by while someone terrorizes her sleepy little town or her own son. But will her efforts be enough to stop a killer and bring calm to Perry Hollow.A portrait of a small town in turmoil, where residents fear for their lives, Todd Ritter's Death Notice is a gripping debut from a terrific new talent in crime fiction.

Inspiration is like lightning. It can appear out of nowhere, bright and unexpected, leaving behind a soft buzz of electricity that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand at attention. But unlike lightning, inspiration has the ability to strike in the same place twice. For me, that was in the newsroom where I spent my nights toiling with ink-stained fingers under humming flourescent lights.

The first flash of inspiration came via a crackle of voices over the police scanner kept nearby to alert reporters of breaking news. It seems a coffin had fallen off a flatbed truck and was sitting on the side of the highway, alarming everyone who drove past it. One unlucky cop had to pull over, open it and see if, God forbid, there was a body inside. It turned out to be empty, thankfully, but I couldn't stop thinking that it would be a pretty cool way to start a mystery. Only in the fictional version, the coffin would be occupied.

The second flash arrived a few days later, when I was proofreading the obituary page -- no doubt the most bizarre aspect of my job. Usually I didn't find too many mistakes. But that night, I discovered a typo. A big one. An obituary mistakenly listed the deceased's date of death as the next day. Again, I started thinking: What if a crazed killer alerted people to his intentions by writing the obituaries of his victims before they died?

With both ideas swirling around in my brain, it occurred to me that I could combine them into an intriguing and suspenseful read. That, my friends, is how DEATH NOTICE was born. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you do find it both intriguing and suspenseful. And I hope that if you're seeking inspiration, you'll find it like I did -- in two loud, blinding strikes too bright to ignore.

All the best,
Todd Ritter