Parker's Choice by Mike Nemeth

  Parker's Choice

by Mike Nemeth 

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GENRE:   Romantic Mystery 

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BLURB: 

Framed by cops and chased by crooks, After serving time for a crime he didn’t commit a white ex-con and a rebellious black woman became fugitives. They didn’t plan to fall in love.

it, Parker and his wife, Paula, hide from an old enemy in an Atlanta suburb. Their fresh start is disrupted when his new boss demands his involvement in a fraudulent scheme that will replace thousands of white-collar American workers with artificial intelligence and offshore labour. Parker unfortunately suspects his secret and elusive birth father is mixed up in the fraud. Then a body is pulled from the Chattahoochee River and Parker believes Paula has murdered his enemy, but the police think Parker did it. He and his brilliant colleague, Sabrina, a woman who can trace her roots to Virginia slaves, steal the “smoking gun” that will expose the fraud and go on the run, pursued by cops and crooks. After a violent showdown in a frightening New Orleans cemetery, they connect the dots between a murder, fraud, and a man from his mother’s past. Parker’s loyalties are torn, but he must choose.  

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EXCERPT 

The terror Parker felt was what an antelope feels when it is about to be eaten alive by a pride of hungry lions. He took shallow breaths through his nose to mask the sound of his breathing as he listened to the blood coursing through his carotid artery—whoosh, whoosh. Where the hell is my backup? 

In the crepuscular light, Parker saw her then. She emerged from her hiding place in the boathouse and assumed the shooter’s stance she’d been taught at the gun range. She gave the hunter no warning, just fired her compact Beretta once, and the man crumpled onto the Cool Crete surface with a thud and a rush of expelled air. That hadn’t been the plan. She was only supposed to balance the threat Parker suspected Meredith had posed. She wasn’t supposed to shoot anyone. It’s so easy to get these things wrong. 

A scan of the house’s back windows revealed no sign of Meredith. Parker put a finger to his lips—don’t talk—and motioned for the woman to hurry into the shadows. The wounded man moaned softly, and Parker’s quick check confirmed that he was semi-conscious and neither moving nor watching. Parker took the woman’s pistol and shoved her toward the neighbour’s property. The snowbirds who owned the place were away enjoying the mild Canadian summer during the Florida off-season. 

“Run,” he whispered. 

She loped into the darkness. He counted to twenty—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi—then dialled 9-1-1. 

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Who’s Story Is It?

By

Mike Nemeth 

“Show, don’t tell” is probably the most common piece of advice authors hear from mentors and the most frequently-taught lesson by instructors. And yet, as I worked my way through the National Book Award finalists, I found that these award-winning novelists appeared to break the rule by narrating their stories as though they were sitting beside me at a campfire. In lyrical prose that would make any high school English teacher blush with pride, they shared their stories with few lines of dialog or bursts of evocative action intruding upon their dense narratives.

So which is it—show or tell?

The answer may be that if the densely-packed words are coming from the minds of characters, the characters are showing and the author isn’t telling. But if the words are coming directly from the author, narrating the action like a voice-over in a movie, the author is telling. I think the allure of their poetic sentences and their linguistic acrobatics sometimes allows good writers to get away with violating the rule by telling the reader the story.

I’ve never been nominated for a National Book Award but I have adopted a technique, or perhaps it’s a mindset, that helps me avoid telling a story I should be showing—I make the characters tell the story through their dialog, actions, and thoughts because it is indeed their story and not mine. I am merely a conduit, a pathway for words to reach paper. I set the scene, describe the location and the characters, and let the characters do the rest. Once you adopt this mindset, that the story belongs to the characters and it is theirs to tell, you will show without telling.

I can’t take any credit for this approach—I stole it from the movies. Although some movies do feature voice-over narration, the narrator is generally a character in the movie who is sharing thoughts and not telling the story. Most movies rely entirely upon visual scene-setting, dialogue, and action to tell the story. Call it the cinematic approach to storytelling.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links: 

Mike Nemeth, a Vietnam veteran and former high-tech executive, writes love stories tucked inside murder mysteries highlighting America’s social issues. THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY won the Beverly Hills Book Award for Southern Fiction and the Frank Yerby Prize at the Augusta Literary Festival. The novel inspired singer/songwriter Mark Currey to compose the song Who I Am. PARKER’S CHOICE won a Firebird Award for thrillers and an American Fiction Award for Diverse and Multicultural Mystery/Suspense, and for  Romantic Mystery/Suspense. Other credits include The New York Times, Georgia Magazine, Augusta Magazine, Southern Writers’ Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. In 2018, I was named Atlanta’s Best Local Author by Creative Loafing magazine. Mike lives in Villa Rica with his wife, Angie, and their rescue dog, Scout. 

Social Media Links:

www.mikenemethauthor.com

Facebook/mikenemethauthor

X (Twitter): http://twitter.com/nemosnovels

Instagram: http://instagram.com/nemosnovels

 

Buy Link (PARKER’S CHOICE):

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Parkers-Choice-Mike-Nemeth-ebook/dp/B0BW4XQRB2/  

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE: 

Mike Nemeth will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway