The Lyons' Den is undergoing a reformatting, to put it kindly. I'm getting rid of all the parenthetical comments and they're just Ace speaking. And I did go overboard on the ellipses, so a lot of those are coming out, too. In the 8 years since this version was published, I've changed my formatting so much, I can't re-release this book in that same old shit.
It's still a solid story with a lot of character development, for Daniel...which makes sense, it being his story. He's got a massive amount of detail building up in his history. A crazy mother who joins with his junky sister to get him committed so they can get access to the family fortune. His good times with his ex-lover, Tad, pushing him to want to reconnect with the man. His lack of self-confidence despite having six books published and doing well-enough. And how he met Ace ...as detailed below:
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It took doctors maybe seventy-two minutes to figure out he was fine, considering, but seventy-two hours to convince that fucking judge. By that point, dear mother’s lawyer had broken open the trust fund, she and sister had split the cash, then both had gone the vanishing route, leaving said lawyer and judge to answer for their stupidity.
It was while Daniel was being evaluated that I popped into the picture. He was screaming at everyone and no one, “I’m not crazy; I just need a new reality!”
Which I felt was a fairly interesting way to describe the situation. And never mind his own low-key psychosis, which wasn’t so much schizophrenia as just wanting friends around that he could talk to any time of day or night. In secret, of course. Sometimes a touch of insanity is all that keeps you sane.
Anyway, that’s what gave me a way to ... oh, let’s just say introduce myself and ask if I could tell him a story.
To which he responded, “Anything to get my mind off this crap.”
“Okay, Dan-O,” I smiled ... and the name came from him. He’d watched an old episode of Hawaii Five-O the day before that had a big butch actor holding a young, slim, attractive soldier hostage during a stand-off with Jack Lord and company, and Dan-O’d had an, oh, let’s just call it a nice dream, that night, with him as the soldier and the butch actor as a savior instead of a bad guy and ... well, ‘nuff said about that.
So I told him about this guy who’s about to be executed for matricide. Got his total focus, with that. But three days before the needle goes in, a girl he knows talks me into investigating the murder. It takes me no time to learn the DA’s office withheld evidence from the defense. Seems the murder weapon was found stuck in a Jell-O mold that was otherwise smooth and untouched and sitting in the fridge. CSI had taken the knife out, and it had his fingerprints and some of her blood on it, so that’s all they’d cared about.
Problem was they never mentioned the Jell-O was made just minutes before she was killed; she’d called a friend to ask how long it needed to be in the mold before she could remove it, so it hadn’t had time to set. Meaning it was plopped on a plate and the knife was placed in it at least four hours later. While her son was in another part of the city dealing with a traffic cop. And he didn’t get home till after her body and the knife were found. So there’s no way he could have done it.
Of course the DA’s office fought reopening the case, and two judges agreed with them, but just hours before the needle went in, I figured out it was the District Attorney who killed her. They’d been screwing around, and she’d wanted him to leave his wife. So after arguing, she’d wound up dead, then he’d used his office to frame the son. Why put the bloody knife in the blue Jell-O? He figured it’d make the kid look crazy, so anything he said would be suspect. Then they’d pushed for the death penalty, just to be consistent.
Of course, the killer suffered a supremely spectacular death when he tried to escape; his car ran a light and got broadsided by a truck carrying ... and let us have a drum roll please ... jelly donuts! Who wouldn’t chuckle at that?
I had a pretty good idea Daniel’d know how to keep it fun and frisky by adding a layer of insanity to it that I couldn’t. And I really think working on the characters and motivations was the only reason he kept from slipping into cloud-cuckoo-land before that judge accepted the doctors’ recommendations.
Meaning, yes, he maintained a grip on reality by working in a fantasy world. Gotta love the dichotomy.
So that’s how Red Knife in Blue Jell-O sprang into being, and he’s the one who gave me my voice – sharp, cool and snarky. Then as all the legal issues were being satisfied, which wound up getting that judge removed from the bench, we wrote it and it was accepted by the first publisher he submitted to – Gregory Taylor’s house. He loved the slick mixture of sex, suspense and slapstick.
We’ve been a hot team ever since.
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