Frankenstein's monster--How to Love your Villain

For my first suspense novel, HUSH, I created a seriously creepy villain. A hero is only as strong as his adversary, so I wanted to give my story a villain so diabolical, he was a match for two heroes!

Meet Sam Carbone. Sam is, like Adolf Hitler, a frustrated artist. A superb draftsman, his reproductions of old master works are nearly impossible to tell from the originals. But that's just the trouble. Sam is incapable of being original himself.

Except in the experimental medium of murder. When it comes to the delicate art of the engineered accident, Sam is Picasso, Rembrandt and Monet all rolled into one. He's inventive, meticulous, and utterly without pity.

In the opening of HUSH, Sam's is the first head the story unfolds in. Like Alfred Hitchcock, who sometimes forces his audience into the killer's POV, I wanted my readers to know Sam from the beginning. You see, in Sam's own story, he is the tortured hero. He is motivated by his goal just as strongly as any protagonist. Unfortunately, his goal of being recognized as a serious artist is not going to be realized. Especially since the models for his work are all dead, dead, dead.

If only the New England Institute of Art had recognized his talent . . . The world might have had one more mediocre artist, but it would also have had one less serial killer.

For a peek inside the mind of a psychopathic assassin, visit http://www.dgholt.com/ . Sam will be glad to see you.

HUSH . . . My first Middlesex Mystery

I'm a multi-published author in another genre under a different pen name, but HUSH is my first suspense. The craft of writing is the same, where ever the final product might be shelved in a bookstore, but writing suspense poses some unique challenges. How much to hold back, what clues to hide in plain sight, how much blood is too much . . . the trick is always to make a path in the prose, a series of literary bread crumbs that keep the reader turning pages and guessing what comes next along with the sleuth.

My sleuth in HUSH faces some unique challenges. For one thing, she's only got 60% of normal hearing with two hearing aids. Without them, her hearing is classified as profound loss. And she's only 26. Meningitis in her sophomore year of college nearly killed Megan Kelley, but she won't let her impairment stop her from achieving. She graduated from Boston College with honors. The only real casualty was her marriage to her high school sweetheart.

I first became interested in the challenges of the Deaf and hearing-impaired as a child. One of my friends had Deaf grandparents. My friend taught me to finger-spell. Then later as an adult, one of my close friends was an interpreter. I tried to learn some ASL, but was less successful with that than finger-spelling. ASL is a language all its own, not just English by hand.

My heroine Megan straddles two worlds--the hearing one she was born to and the Deaf one she still feels uncomfortable with. The tension between the two is a difficult tightrope to walk. Add in accidentally speechreading a murder-for-hire contract, and she's got a terrific balancing act.

Visit my website at http://www.dgholt.com/ to read more.