ALL GOOD DEEDS was chosen as the January Book of the Month for the Goodreads group Psychological Thrillers. It’s a large group, and the members loved Lucy Kendall so much they bought the second book and started a new thread for that. Talk about being humbled! Seeing readers discuss my work and being invited to chime in has been absolutely amazing and very gratifying.

Since the Lucy Kendall Series deals with some dark topics, one of the constant themes of the discussion has been whether or not readers agree with Lucy’s belief that killing child molesters is right. Now, those who know Lucy probably realize her problems go far beyond this vigilante agenda. Killing these horrible people might just be a vehicle for something far more sinister. But you’ll have to read the series to find out.

Like many authors, bits and pieces of my own personality have wormed their way into my characters. To be honest, Lucy is more like me than any other character I’ve created. I promise you I’ve never killed anyone, but her intolerance for child molesters mirrors my own. Our system is broken, and these people are released into the streets way too often. I have no problem with a one strike law for them. Do I agree with Lucy’s choice to kill them? From a mother’s perspective, yes. If it were my child, I don’t know what I would be capable of, and if someone like Lucy took the bastard who hurt my kid out, I’d probably throw a party. From a realistic perspective, I’m not sure. Taking the law into her own hands makes Lucy just as bad as anyone else, even if she’s ridding society of the scum of the earth. But were I to meet Lucy in real life and find out what she’s been doing, I think I’d turn the other cheek and walk away.

What would you do? Would you allow someone to keep taking the law into their own hands if it meant your children were safe? Or would you step up and report them?

Newsflash! DEAD WRONG, book 2 in the Cage Foster series, hits the e-shelves today. Keep an eye out for it!

Lucy is a vigilante killer of pedophiles, and her preferred method is cyanide. In the first few pages of ALL GOOD DEEDS, it’s mentioned that she’s taken this idea from Richard Kuklinksi, also known as The Iceman.

Kuklinski, according to the undercover detective who spent 18 months building a case against him, liked to carry a nasal spray bottle filled with cyanide and give his victims a spritz. When I first starting researching for ALL GOOD DEEDS, I had my doubts about this method, so I contacted the writer’s go-to forensic guy, Dr. DP Lyle. He confirmed that cyanide absorbed through the skin would definitely kill in a matter of minutes, and that many times it’s missed at autopsy unless it’s being specifically looked for. So Kuklinksi’s method worked, but his cyanide trick was just one of many. He administered it by injection, putting it on food, by aerosol spray, or with the Lucy Kendall method: spilling it on the person’s skin.

Enjoying his notoriety after his arrest and subsequent conviction, Kuklinksi appeared in two HBO documentaries. He also met with a number of writers, psychiatrists and criminologists. He liked to list his methods of killing: firearms; ice picks; hand grenades; crossbows; chainsaws; and a bomb attached to a  remote control car. The Iceman nickname appeared after his claim that he froze corpses to disguise time of death.

As a contract killer for Newark’s DeCavalacante crime family and NYC’s Five Families of the America Mafia, Kuklinkski claimed to have murdered between 100 and 250 men. The crime families dispute his role in any contract killings.

Kuklinksi told police he dismembered his victims, as well as burying them, placing the body in the trunk of a car and having it crushed at a junkyard, leaving bodies on park benches, and placing them in a 55 gallon drum.

Although Kuklinksi had a flair for the dramatic and claimed to have a role in killing Jimmy Hoffa–a claim with zero evidence–the undercover investigation into his activities resulted in enough evidence for him to be convicted of five murders in 1988. He received consecutive life sentences for these murders.

Kuklinksi died in March 2006 in the prison wing of St. Francis Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey. He was 70 years old.

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