Arts
I love a good whydunnit! Greg Hickey's novel, Parabellum, is structured differently from the average mystery novel. This book starts with a horrific, terrifying event and then jumps back in time by a year. It follows four individuals, the ex-athlete, the programmer, the veteran, and the student, and examines their lives and what may have cause any one of them to take their pain out on the group of innocent people from the event at the start of the book. After Greg reads Chapter 1 of the book to us, I ask him about this structure and what inspired him to write the book this way. We also talk about the themes in the book, including the responsibility of society to take care of its members. Also in our interview, Greg mentions the free novella available at his website called The Theory of Anything. You can learn more about the book and get your free copy here. Today's show is supported by my patrons at Patreon. Thank you! When you become a patron for as little as $1 a month you receive a short mystery story each and every month. And the rewards for those who love mystery stories go up from there! Learn more and become a part of my community of readers at www.Patreon.com/alexandraamor This week's mystery author Greg Hickey is a former international professional baseball player and current forensic scientist, endurance athlete and author. He is the author of three novels, including the recently published crime novel Parabellum. His debut novel, Our Dried Voices, was a finalist for Foreword Reviews' INDIES Science Fiction Book of the Year Award. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Lindsay. Learn more about Greg and all his books at GregHickeyWrites.com Press play (above) to listen to the show, or read the transcript below. Remember you can also subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts. And listen on Stitcher, Android, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, and Spotify. Excerpt from Parabellum The ex-college athlete remembered her first concussion the way she remembered her first so-called memory of getting stuck in the unsodded mud patch between her family’s new home and the neighbor’s when she was one and a half. It was not a truly a memory, she knew, so much as an amalgamation of other memory fragments and the accounts of others and conjured imaginings all wrapped around a kernel of true recollection, like how your cells begin to die the minute you are born and are constantly shed away or eaten by your own macrophages and replaced by others, so that in the course of a lifetime you are a completely different physical entity from the one you were at the start. Except for your brain. Neurons don’t get replaced. They hang on as long as they can, and when enough of them die, so do you. So that’s you, in the you-est sense. Your brain and its memories are the canvas of you-ness upon which you shellac fresh coats of cells and ideas to maintain an appearance of life and identity. She was nine, playing in the fifth soccer game of her life and tracking the ball as it arced through the crisp blue autumn sky, one of the miraculous times a stubby little leg had lifted the ball more than a foot off the ground. She was chasing the ball, and a girl on the opposing team was running to meet it. When she woke up, she was staring again into the clear sky, and her father later told her she had bumped heads with the other young girl and had been knocked unconscious. Her parents took her to the hospital for routine tests. After the doctor told her she had only suffered a mild concussion and, aside from a slight headache and some sleepiness that could last a few days, she would be fine, her mother handed her a silver chain with a star-shaped pendant. Years later, after the most recent in her long line of head traumas, her mother had fingered the star as it rested below her collar bones and said, “Remember, no matter what happens, you won’t always be a soccer player, but you can always be a star.”