[music] welcome to between the cover summer series i'm anne boccock mickey browning is joining me she is a former police officer hostage negotiator and fbi national academy graduate and did i mention award-winning author her latest book written as m.e browning is mercy creek welcome thank you so much for joining me thank you anne it's a pleasure all right let's talk about mercy creek for a minute this is the second of your joe wyatt mysteries and we have a missing child small town full of secrets so let's take a step back if you would tell us a little bit about joe wyatt and then give us a glimpse as much as you want to into the story joe is the type of police officer that i hope if i ever need a cop lands on my doorstep you know she's conscientious um but she's not infallible but i think what makes her more endearing is that she owns her mistakes she knows that she doesn't know everything and so she uses each case as an opportunity to learn more in an effort to better serve a community as far as some of the themes that i think come through in this without getting giving anything away it's really family and friends family so much that you know you're born with some you marry into some and others are people that you gather along the way but as far as the story goes as you mentioned it is a missing child case which obviously ratchets up the the tension immediately because as a police officer every cop i know really really makes the effort extra effort when it comes to a case involving a child we all have family and it hits a little bit closer to home but that's pretty much all i'm going to give away good for you good for you i i am i know that we're going to have more of joy because she is just such a fantastic character mickey you were 20-plus years in law enforcement so i'm curious how your fbi training really especially your hostage negotiation experience how does that play into your fiction because you could write it however you want you know that's the beauty of coming across as authentic if you throw in the right buzzwords and and you don't cross the line too much you can make almost anything work in fiction my problem initially was actually putting in too much i spent 22 years in law enforcement and in that time i learned a lot of procedures and by goodness i wanted everybody else to know about them and and that doesn't work in fiction so my biggest obstacle was learning how to dribble it in and what was critical to the story without bogging down the pace and so for me right now my my background informs my writing but it no longer overwhelms my writing and so i finally found that sweet spot that that hits that balance um but you know i do i'm fortunate in that i've got the background where i know what directions i can take it into i still research law enforcement because there's so many aspects of law enforcement that no one person is ever truly an expert that part of joe is absolutely correct there's no one that knows everything and it becomes every investigation is a group group effort i am so impressed you you cannot believe this now also you write a second series the merkavalo books and you write this as mickey browning your character in these books is an autocop she's a marine biologist slash dive master so i got to know where does that come from and i'm going to piggyback on that the underwater scenes are can be pretty intense so tell me a little bit about that well then my work here is done um actually mayor is how i learned to dribble in the law enforcement aspect of a story because my first attempt is not something that ever is going to see the light of day and you'll thank me for that but by by actually focusing on an amateur sleuth i was able to learn how to take my experience as an investigator give it to an amateur and then dribble in what she would learn and so it was i was able to strike a balance the first of the the series adrift was actually nominated for an agatha and um it was based on a true incident where a person suffered an underwater medical emergency and it got my what-if scenario is going because i'm a dia i'm a professional dive master myself and my husband is now an instructor and he was working on the boat the night that it happened on the spiegel grove an actual shipwreck okay that that just made my heart stop a little bit so if we combine mayor cavallo scuba diver and joe wyatt the cop am i going to get mickey browning you'll get a little bit of me yes there's a little bit of every author i think in every character that they write even the bad ones all right this is more this is more of a how-to question because as a police officer you arrive at the scene of a crime this crime has already been committed and you have to to figure it out so when you put your author hat on do you already know where this is going because you know who did it um normally yes but i always start from the perspective of the villain i have to know how the crime was committed so i know where the villain um goofed and and originally i think that was my biggest hurdle before i became a successful writer was my work was more episodic because i wrote from the point of view of the protagonists which most people do in their books that's what you read but i hadn't really given it a lot of thought until i needed something what the villain's point was and there was an epiphany that i had in in fact it was through a course but it was actually earl gardner stanley who of perry mason fame who said that you have to plot from the point of view of the villain and then right from the perspective of your protagonist and so i always know you know how it was done and then the story picks up when the protagonist actually starts investigating it and so there's always missteps there's herrings red herons and you know that's that's how it unfolds which makes your writing so good i want to do a little lightning round with you if we can do that so question number one in college i majored in medieval studies medieval studies two my favorite city in the world gosh probably durham in um in scotland i'm sorry england's pieces something i just love derm england something i wish i'd learned sooner uh how to be brief who would you rather be with the smartest person in the room or the funniest person oh probably funny because they're smart too and the coolest or even the riskiest thing you ever had to do for work oh well i've been shot at um that probably counts i would say that counts pretty much mickey browning this has been a pleasure thank you so much for sharing your time with me well it's been my pleasure thank you so much the latest book is mercy creek it has been a pleasure to have you here i'm ann boccock please join me on the next between the covers and you can listen to our podcast go between the covers get it wherever you get your podcasts [music]